BOOKS Herbal Essays

wand herbals or roam the woods looking at flowers and tree stumps is what Katherine White refers to as that “idea which we have come to call nature.” Her book, Onwardand Upward in the Garden, a collection of 12 years of garden columns for The New Yorker, expresses at every turn the seriousness and imagination she brings to this complex idea.

Her columns were printed between 1958 and 1970 and cover such subjects as seed catalogues, lily ponds, wildflower manuals, flower arranging, garden writers, lawns, nurserymen. The writing is clean and specific, shying away from lady’s garden club talk, but marked by an enthusiasm, even delight, that could result only from a lifetime devotion to gardening and language alike. In a piece given largely to the subject of shrubbery, she includes this story of her childhood exploits:

“My sister and I and our friends had a game we played with the shrubbery. It was called Millinery. All the little girls in the neighborhood would bring to our lawn their broad-brimmed straw school hats, which, because they were Boston girls’ hats, had only plain ribbon bands for decoration. Then each of us would trim her straw with blossoms from the shrubs . . . . When our flowery concoctions were completed, we put them on our heads and proudly paraded into the house to show them off to our elders . . . . By dusk the trimmings were dead, and the next day we could start all over again.”

Much of what attracts White to the flowering world seems reflected in this charming story. If her upbringing was strict, plain, honest, “Boston,” there is still a richness, even voluptuousness in the flowering shrubs, the pageants they create, and the chance for starting over so obvious in the quick play of plant life – White seems always eager to invest in renewal.

Scattered throughout these rambling essays are bits of poems, small biographies of horticultural heroes and (mostly) heroines, black and white drawings, book reviews, miscellaneous information (“the lawnmow-er was not invented until 1830”), and, perhaps most inviting of all, yearly evaluations of seed catalogues and their offerings. To White, the catalogues are not advertising, but a sub-genre of literature written by distinct personalities exercising a great deal of influence over gardeners throughout the country. From her spirited discussions of catalogues, it is clear that she is mostly a traditionalist about flowers and vegetables as well as life, hates the promotion of large, showy blossoms and strains, dislikes huck-sterism in nurserymen, and distrusts change for its own sake: “The Burpee people go for ruffles in anything. To me a ruffled petunia is occasionally a delight but a ruffled snapdragon is an abomination. The snapdragon is a very complicated flower form to start with, and it has style. Fuss it up and it becomes overdressed . . . .”

Having written off for most of the catalogues discussed that are still produced, I can testify to the accuracy of White’s descriptions, the soundness of her judgments, and the unparalleled delight the catalogues provide as an escape from the dreariness of winter into a “green thought in a green shade.”

Katherine White died before she could write the essay she wanted to on the gardens of her childhood. It is her husband, E.B. White, who brought these pieces together in a book and wrote the moving introduction to it. To all of us who value the “idea which we have come to call nature,” this is a fine and lasting gift.



The Illustrated Herbal. Wilfrid Blunt. Thames and Hudson in Association with the Metropolitan Museum of Art. ,1979. $24.95.

An herbal is a book about | plants that were used as food or medicine. One of the earliest surviving herbals was written by Theophrastus, a student of Aristotle, as a kind of botanical text; herbals continued to be produced until the beginning of the 19th century, by which time botany was clearly established as an independent science. Besides recording the first systematic classifications of the plant kingdom, herbals contained compendia of medical practices, random observations of the natural world, records of folkways, and drawings, both simple and elaborate, of plant life.

Wilfrid Blunt is an authority on botanical illustration and attempts, in The Illustrated Herbal, to provide a quick history of herb-als along with reproductions of the most in-teresting illustrations, primarily from manuscripts. Consequently, most of the reproductions are from the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

In 185 pages of text, there are 159 plates, many of which are full-page color illustrations. The pages from manuscript herbals are the most interesting and awesome – Latin and Greek script adorned with gracefully twining berries and thorned vines, or ominous views of men being bitten by dogs. A wonderful two-page illustration is taken from the Herbarium of Apuleius Platoni-cus, Germany, c. 1200. On the left, men are gathering herbs in a stylized field of arcs against a green tree that looks like it’s burning; on the right, a physician is measuring out drugs, calmly, and receiving advice from a sage. There are also reproductions of botanical paintings and woodcuts, with which we are already more familiar.

In his desire to create a book that is coffee-table pretty, yet substantial, Blunt has imposed a very tough task upon himself. He misses in two ways: The prose is too stodgy and the paper too glossy. And yet, although 1 own no coffee table, I find it easy to keep this book out and around, and difficult to put it down.



The Meaning of Flowers: A Garland of Plant Lore and Symbolism from Popular Custom and Literature. Claire Powell. Shambhala. 1979. $5.95, paper.

The illustrations in this simple, beautiful book are woodcuts taken from 16th-and 17th-century herbals. They impress not only with their grace, but with the possibilities they hold for revealing the meaning of the “dumb” world. The Victorians especially shared this interest in the meanings of flowers. Although their involvement in the “language of the flowers” was essentially a sentimental cult for the enhancement of love-and-romance, the meanings attached to plants have not always been so restrictive. As Powell points out in her introduction, Greeks and Druids and messianic Jews all sought supernatural significance and even guidance in the interpretation of plant life.

Powell gives us an embroidered alphabet of flowers, starting with acacia and ending with yew. She tells us their common meanings, then weaves in bits and pieces of lore, stories, poems. For instance, under mandrake: “The mandrake root that you were challenged to beget a child on was a forked man-shaped root that was believed to grow under the gallows of murderers and when torn up to utter piercing shrieks that brought death to all who heard them.”

Part of the pleasure of this volume is reading about plants and flowers we’ve never heard of or seen. Many were cultivated in Victorian gardens, and although they would be difficult to find, Powell claims that they all still exist. There are dittany, lint, love-in-a-mist, ox-eye, ragged robin, and whin to become acquainted with. If, by chance, you find a ranunculus and a jonquil On your doorstep one morning, it is certain that you have an admirer. He is telling you that he is dazzled by your charms and that he desires the return of affection.



Botanical Illustration. Ronald King. Clarkson Potter. 1978. $6.95, paper.

This is a beautifully printed large-format paperback with 40 full-page color illustrations. The plates are mostly reprints of works in the Library of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, England, and range from the 16th to the 20th century. Because so many books concentrate on early illustration, King’s emphasis is welcome. He begins the volume with a straightforward summary of the history of botanical illustrations. The tradition he sketches includes Flemish miniaturist paintings at the end of the 14th-century, Italian and German woodcuts from 16th-century herbals, 17th-century French flower embroideries, and the 19th-century British periodical Botanical Magazine, which is still published. This seems to be a tradition that combines the interests of the gentleman-scientist and the aesthete, and one that is still very much alive.

The plates demonstrate considerable variety within their stylized framework. Each is accompanied by a caption that identifies and discusses the work briefly. Plate 15, for instance, is a reproduction of a paper mosaic rose (rose gallica) done by an upper-crust Englishwoman who took up the pastime at the age of 72. It is quite lovely.

A more typical illustration is James Sow-erby’s “hand-coloured engraving . . . showing a tulip variety named Peregrinus Apostolicus . . . .” The reproductions, all in good, clear color, bordered in white, would be fine for framing and hanging.



The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Wildflowers. Two volumes: western region, eastern region. Knopf. 1979. $9.95 each.

These two volumes are sprightly contemporary versions of classic field guides. They have soft plastic covers, fit nicely into a pocket, and are lushly illustrated. The writing and design seem equally informed by a highly serious amateurism that 1 thought, sadly, had passed from the face of the earth.

Texas is included in the eastern region. The illustrations are brilliantly colored photographs, and the flowers are divided into large “color” families, then subdivided by flower shape. So, if you were in a field looking at a yellow flower with, say, five petals arranged in a circle, you could quite easily locate it in the seven pages given to such flowers. Each photograph is numbered to connect with the descriptive writing in the second half of the book. There is about a half page of detailed description given for each flower, as well as seasonal information, habitat, range, and comments. In some cases, line drawings accompany the descriptions. These volumes make it possible for anyone with an interest to learn practical botany. Some beautiful wild flowers you may want to look for: rough-fruited cinquefoil (found in the yellow, simple-shaped flowers section), steepledbush (found in the pink, elongated clusters section), and Jack-in-the-pulpit (found in the red seeds and fruit section).



Janet Marsh’s Nature Diary. Janet Marsh. William Morrow. 1979. $24.95.

In the tradition of genteel British naturalists, Janet Marsh records her observations of the natural world as she walks around a small village in Hampshire, England. The village is in a river valley, and the river, It-chen, is what she calls “probably the last, untouched, chalk stream in Western Europe.” She accompanies her diary entries with watercolor sketches of great charm and variety. Her eye is geared to the microcosm: Details of moss, fungi, caterpillars are rendered painstakingly, but softly.

My favorite illustration is a two-page spread of subtly colored weeds for February (“riverside vegetation”) that look much like the wonderful dried plants along Texas roadsides in winter. The illustrations increase in color and animation as the diary heads toward summer, so that with the descriptions, they promote a sense of the year’s movement. One might say that in softening nature, Marsh renders it harmless and banal, but it strikes me rather as approachable: bounded, but energetic still. Here is her entry for April 15:

“Squelching about in one of the many man-made waterways, I found a tiny island, an almost perfect square foot of texture, line and colour. Red shoots, little blue-green thistle plants and the beginnings of early marsh orchids encircled a tiny skeleton that had been left by some unknown predator …. The whole of nature seemed to be summed up on that earth intricately threaded with both new life and death.”