I will definitely keep you posted on any interesting medieval orchid-lore I come across. Please do let me know if you are coming to New York. I’d be very happy to show you around the Gardens, and you could get a good look at the Orchis mascula in The Unicorn in Captivity.

Most of my “specialist” experience comes from my failures, the knowledge they afford me, and my overt attempts to try try again. I’m probably the same type of horticultural generalist as you are, but I do love to see the occassional victory that nature offers me in compensation for my attempts. With you, I will hope for the possiblity of Orchis mascula at The Cloisters someday… and even better… the possibility of me being able to visit and see it. Thanks so much for the interesting conversation and I look forward to seeing you there one day too.

Jeannie

Reading your remarks on orchid cultivation is a humbling experience for a horticultural generalist like me. I don’t think I’ll be taking on the Orchidaceae until a specialist like yourself has made it easy, but I do hope that it may be possible to have Orchis mascula at The Cloisters someday.

Thank you so much for the tip on the articles in the English journal “Herbs” by Professor Henry Oakeley of the Royal College of Physicians’ Physic Garden. My interest in medicinal plants is quite intense, but I’m not planning a trip abroad for quite some time, so this is definitely a website that I plan to peruse. Also, the Celia Fisher book for the British Library is a definite must for my library, along with the Flora Britannica by Mabry. You are just a wealth of information and I appreciate you being so forthcoming with it.

The truth is that orchids are not really that specialized though, as much as they are temperamental to their surroundings and the grower must get the surroundings in absolute perfect tempo with the needs of the orchid or success will be severly limited. Most of them enjoy cool, moist environments with very little in the way of substructure around the roots, with regular, balanced fertilization that is quite diluted. A lot of them can grow a majority of the time with exposed aerial roots as they often enjoy just catching their nutrition and moisture from the air and being the epiphytes that they are, with no medium on the roots at all. Growing them is the easy part… making sure they are content is the difficult part.

The species’ in your pasture are probably doing so well because they are wild and are already in sync with their surroundings from the point of germination. To take them out of their natural surroundings and place them into a manufactured state and to expect them to reproduce would probably end up being a most futile project anyway. Better to leave them in the field and visit them on their own turf than to try any sort of intervention at this point in their growth. Enjoy a visit to the field and consider yourself lucky to have these most important orchids at the tips of your feet, rather than in a sterile test tube in the greenhouse. Besides, if you were to take them out of the field, then you would miss the whole unicorn-orchid union altogether and what kind of fun is that? Thanks again for spreading around your valuable medicinal plant information.

Thank you for the information regarding the history of the medievil orchid, Orchis mascula. As an orchid grower, I am most familiar with more of the generic growing conditions of orchids and general importation and cultivation history, rather than the herbal attachments that peoples of the past have added to them in the name of health. In retrospect, and after reading your blog, I can now see how they associated these meanings to orchids and used them to help with sexuality and fertility. It is interesting to know that they mixed several different types of fertility remedies together to make one uber aphrodisiac. Thank you, again for the bounty of this historical information.

Yes, I understand now why the USDA wouldn’t give permission to transport plants with soil clinging to the roots. I can definitely see how this would make it easier to transport insects and plant disease, among other things. Such a shame that this particular alliance may not be grown at The Cloisters for quite some time. From aseptic seed germination to polyploid breeding and even meristem propogation, new advances in Orchidaceae are found all the time. Let’s just hope that someone, somewhere can now find a way to cultivate this species so that we may all be able to enjoy the beauty of it one day. I’ll keep hoping anyway. Thank you again!

Jeannie

It does seem likely that the RCP is taking their story from Grieve, and that Mrs. Grieve had it from Fernie. I am disappointed, because I had hoped for some historical detail. I suppose that henbane roots could have been mistaken for chicory roots, as they are both taproots, but since Hyoscyamus niger and Cichorium intybus bear no other resemblance to one another it is difficult to imagine the circumstances under which the confusion could have occurred. (Anderson cites Sturtevant’s Edible Plants of the World and maintains that the wild forms of Cichorium intybus and C. endivia were eaten in ancient and medieval times, and that the cultivated form is not recorded until 1616.)

Thank you for the colchicum story, which demonstrates yet again the necessity for botanical Latin nomenclature and a modicum of fact-checking!

It would be interesting to know whether the RCP obtained their monkish story directly from Grieve where it appears on page 399 (Grieve M “A Modern Herbal” Cape 1931) or whether The RCP and Grieve versions have a common origin.

What makes it particularly fascinating is that whilst Mrs G normally copied out great chunks of Fernie unaltered and unattributed, and did so in her chapter on Henbane, the paragraph describing the monastic supper differs significantly so Fernie writes
“An instance is narrated where the roots of Henbane were cooked by mistake at a monastery for the supper of the inmates, and produced most strange results. One monk would insist on ringing the large bell at midnight, to the alarm of the neighbourhood; whilst of those who came to prayers at the summons, several could not read at all, and others read anything but what was contained in their breviaries” ( page 255 Fernie, W.T. “Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure” Wright, Bristol 1897). No mention of chicory in his version.
Were there really two communities each so dumb as to have Henbane for dinner?, - after all we are always told that monks were the herbal experts of history – or are Grieve and Fernie describing the same incident?
Where Fernie got his ideas from, I have no idea and wish someone would tell me. Through Mrs Grieve, he still has considerable influence, but remains a shadowy figure even beyond the reaches of “google” He was Irish, wrote at the beginning of the twentieth century and that’s about it.

The suggestion by the one-time “celebrity” chef that henbane would be a good way to enliven a salad certainly got the nation’s media jumping up and down. However as the original remark appeared in an obscure “life-style” magazine with a circulation of 40,000, his comment later reported in “The Times” “I was thinking of a wild plant with a similar name, not this herb, but of course I’ve ended up killing half the nation instead” seems somewhat hubristic to say the least.

This of course is not without precedent. A television gardening “personality” more at home amongst the patio slabs than garden history, misquoted Gerard a few years ago in suggesting that Colchicums being a source of saffron, would be a useful and unusual asset in the kitchen garden. Apparently just three people rang the TV company to complain, giving rise to the question “Do people avoid watching celebrity presenters or are they indifferent to any food that doesn’t come in a plastic bag?”
Anthony

Thank you for the link to the website for the Royal College of Physicians medicinal garden. There is more emphasis on the 16th and 17th centuries than on the Middle Ages in the Green Pharmacy online exhibition, but I did come across an interesting anecdote about a monastery where henbane roots were mistakenly eaten for supper by the whole community, having been confused with chicory root. The monks were delirious for that night and all of the following day. I’ll contact the RCP and ask for the source of the story. Did you see the piece in the London Times a few weeks ago, about the celebrity chef who recommended henbane to his readers as a salad green? He meant to say Fat Hen.

As to the orchids, I have seen many species growing wild in Crete, but never in the U.K. Your meadow sounds delightful. My impression is that it is difficult to distinguish between orchid species mentioned in medieval herbals, but Orchis mascula was great and famous even in antiquity for its venereal qualities. I too very much enjoy both Mabey’s Flora Brittanica and Celia Fisher’s books. In The Medieval Flower Book, she includes an image from the Belluno Herbal, a 15th century Venetian production which contains many very naturalistic plant portraits. However, I’m not convinced that her identification of the orchid labeled Satureion in that manuscript is correct. Although Orchis mascula was known by that name, the orchid so labeled does not have the strap-like leaves of O. mascula, nor does it have the characteristic dark spotting on the leaves. Geoffrey Grigson has a wonderful discussion of Orchis mascula in The Englishman’s Flora, one of my favorite sources for plant lore, as it is very well-documented. He also discusses the other venereal plants that appear in close conjunction with the body of the unicorn in The Unicorn in Captivity tapestry here at The Cloisters.

Sorry can’t help, it’s an international convention that all plants crossing frontiers have to have their roots washed clean of all soil particles, so I hate to think what USDA would make of a parcel of soil particles without plants. The English journal “Herbs” has recently had articles on orchids by Professor Henry Oakeley who may be able to assist. He is in charge of the Royal College of Physicians’ Physic Garden, (www.rcplondon.ac.uk/garden/) claimed to be the most comprehensive collection of medicinal plants put together for several centuries and definitely worth a visit on-line even if you can’t make it across the Atlantic.
. Brodin identifies the “Saturion maior” in “Agnus Castus” as either Orchis maculata or Platanthera bifolia and Celia Fisher in her new book for the British Library suggests those in the Bourdichon borders as Early Purple, The Pyramid and a bee orchid. We have three sorts flourishing in our field but I have to admit that the whole business of orchids is so specialised that I leave it to the experts. My favourite source of information is Mabey’s “Flora Britannica” which has a lavishly illustrated chapter on orchids and a lot of informative text, - worth getting to see if you can match it up with the plant by the unicorn. Presumably juxtaposing the symbol of chastity with that of sex has an iconographic significance, but shouldn’t the beast be trampling the naughty flower?
Anthony

The orchid in the tapestry is the Early Purple Orchid (Orchis mascula.) The plant is found in woodlands and open pastures across Europe and Britain. As an orchid expert, you are probably aware that our word orchid is derived from the ancient Greek word ‘orchis,’ which means testicle. The plant has two tubers at the base of the flowering stem—a large, firm one in which food is stored for the coming growing season, and a smaller, slacker one off which the plants feeds in the current growing season. The orchid’s suggestive form was associated with sexuality and fertility in the Middle Ages, as it was in antiquity, when it was believed to be the food of satyrs. Tubers boiled in the milk of a goat, a highly sexed animal, were said to be aphrodisiac. A nourishing food called salep was made from the boiled tubers, and was thought to aid in conception. It was also believed that if a man ate of the larger tuber, a male child would be engendered; if a woman ate of the smaller tuber, a girl would be produced. I very much doubt that this orchid was cultivated in the Middle Ages, as it is still extremely difficult to grow under garden conditions. As you point out, the orchid has a symbiotic relationship with a fungus growing in its native earth, and the only way to grow it would be to transplant an orchid complete with soil. Although The Cloisters has a plant importation permit, and I have long had access to seed for Orchis mascula through European botanic gardens, the USDA does not permit the importation of plants with soil clinging to ther roots. Perhaps some day this particular fungus will be available in powdered form!