Thinner From Trees

While there is such thing as a turpentine or terebinth tree (Pistacia terebinthus, a relative of the pistachio), most turpentine in this country is collected from southern pines, often the longleaf (Pinus palustris) and loblolly (P. taeda) pines, and western species like ponderosa (P. ponderosa) and Jeffrey (P. jeffreyi) pines. Specialized turps with shorter lists of organic molecules are derived from other species.

Pure gum spirits

The word “turpentine” is ultimately derived from the Greek terebinthine. The tree is native to the entire Mediterranean basin and has been a source of turpentine since the era of the Old Testament, where it is mentioned. The entire plant, which is a large shrub or small tree, gives off a pungent, medicinal odor.

Historically the oleoresin of pines was harvested by stripping the bark off several feet of the trunks and then cutting into the sapwood with a series of chevrons. The exuded liquid is collected in a V-shaped trough attached parallel to the freshest incision. It drains on an angle into a bucket.

The oleoresin is added to a distiller and the turpentine is drawn from the portion that is boiled off and collected by the condenser.

Harvesting oleoresin from pines.

A more modern and mass-intensive method for turpentine production involves destructive distillation or “cracking.” In this process the wood is heated to over 400°F, which drives off the volatile organics, also breaking them down into smaller molecules (pyrolysis). The non-volatile carbon molecules become charcoal, activated charcoal or methanol. During the production of turpentine the solid substance left behind is called rosin.

The turpentine, rosin and other derivatives produced from living trees are referred to as “gum naval stores.” Those derived from the pulping of the wood and destructive distillation are called “sulfate or wood naval stores.”

Most people are probably familiar with turpentine for its use as a oil paint or varnish thinner. It is also used to clean up equipment, brushes and your hands after working with paint or varnish. In actuality, most turpentine that is manufactured is turned into a source of other products. Pine oil—which gives Pinesol and other similar cleaning products their “pine smell”—is one such product. Other fragrance or flavor products include camphor and menthol.

Turpentine making

The starting molecules in the tree itself are terpenes, a type of aromatic hydrocarbon (molecules with alternating double and single bonds in rings). Different terpenes are found in various plants. They are constituents of the “essential oils” associated with these species, which are the source of many fragrances and flavors. The aroma of hops (and beer) is caused by a terpene.

Turpentine is toxic to drink or even inhale in large quantities, but turpentine oil in small quantities are used in alternative medical treatments. Turpentine oil is applied to the skin for joint pain, muscle pain, nerve pain, and toothaches. People sometimes breathe in (inhale) the vapors of turpentine oil to reduce the chest congestion that goes along with some lung diseases. Even small quantities should never been taken orally.

According to Jeanne Rose, a Yahoo Network contributor: “Turpentine is also used as a treatment for lice in some cases, if applied externally on the affected area. Although turpentine is toxic to ingest, there is no direct harm if applied to certain areas of the skin. We do not commonly use turpentine as a treatment for lice today but it still is effective and might be an ingredient in some lice treatment medications you use. Turpentine was often used in the ancient times as a remedy for just about anything, but since it can be harmful if ingested we have limited the medicinal uses of turpentine.”

Although the advent of paint thinner may have diminished the use of turpentine as a paint and varnish solvent, it has been used for a wide variety of purposes for decades. Witness the list of Warren C. Ward of the U.S. Agriculture Forest Service who found 50 uses for it in 1930.

Et in Arcadia ego

First edition

“Arcadia” is prefecture on the Peloponnesian peninsula in Greece. “Arcadia” has connoted the picture of a pastoral paradise since at least Roman times. “Arcadia” was the name given to Atlantic North America by Giovanni da Verrazanno, which by the 17th century had lost an ‘r’ and become “Acadia” and was applied to French colonies of maritime Canada. Arcadia is a play by Tom Stoppard, written in 1993 and revived last year.

In Stoppard’s play the landscape of Sidley Park, a country estate in Derbyshire, is a topic of conversation and its re-design in the early 19th century is an important element in the plot and also a symbolic dimension for the play’s discussion of reason and emotion, and the relationship between time and history. The action of the play is split in alternating scenes between 1809 and 1989. In 1809 landscape architect Richard Noakes attempts to convince Lady Croom to abandon the order of Classicism for the pastoral disorder of Romanticism. Lord Byron, who would eventually be regarded as a major Romantic poet, is a guest at the estate, there to visit his school chum Septimus Hodge, who is the tutor to Lady Croom’s brilliant daughter, Thomasina Coverly.

Production without landscape

In 1989 landscape historian Hannah Jarvis attempts to uncover the identity of the “hermit of Sidley Park,” who dwelt in a picturesque feature that was part of Noakes’ new design. Bernard Nightingale is a scholar looking to uncover the truth about a veiled period of Byron’s life. Much has changed in the intervening 180 years and yet many things are the same. Noakes landscape design is still there and so are the Coverlys. The mathematical genius of Thomasina Coverly—she is in the process of explaining chaos dynamics to her tutor when she dies at age 17—is inherited and passed down to Valentine Coverly, a mathematical biologist. Gus and Augustus Coverly are played by the same actor in the play, which dramatizes the continuity created by one family living in the same place for over two centuries.

It is telling that Thomasina is the one member of the Coverly family who approves of Noakes ideas for the landscape. She is the embodiment of progress, understanding concepts of physics decades before they were explicated and making lateral connections effortlessly between academic fields. Her understanding the inevitability of change through time, for all thing to decay and pass away, leads her to reject the geometric Classicism of Sidley Park’s Georgian landscape and Newtonian physics, neither of which acknowledges the arrow of time and its consequences. Stoppard is asking us to pay attention to what changes and what stays the same through time. Individual characters in the play die, but their essence lives on either genealogically in the case of the Coverly clan, or dynamically as the characters of 1989 act out human struggles that parallel those of the characters in 1809. Hodge is in hot water with poet Ezra Chater for writing a scathing review of his latest poem. Nightingale is on Jarvis’s bad side for penning a similarly negative review of her last book. But while Chater challenges Hodge to a duel, Jarvis actually agrees to cooperate with Nightingale (to a degree) in their overlapping scholarly pursuits.

Norfolk folly at Bawburgh Hall

The hermitage of Sidley Park, which comes under the general description of “a folly” in the picturesque landscape designs of the early 19th century, was meant to be a fake, like all the false Roman ruins that littered these Romantic works. One of the most affecting notes of the play is that Hodge, the resolute Classicist by training and Romantic by inclination and association, ends his life as a real hermit in the hermitage, vainly trying to apply the rules of Classical mathematics to the completion of the unfinished chaos equations left behind by Thomasina Coverly.

Let’s Get Stoned

The world of funerary decoration ranges from the cultural to the personal, essentially following the evolution of society’s view of the individual life. Eighteenth century gravestones reveal very little about the individual life of the dead person commemorated by the stone over their body. The Romantic movement is acknowledged to have begun in 1798 with the publication of Coleridge and Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads.

Willow and urn at Pioneer Cemetery

It takes a while for cultural trends to trickle down to the “common man,” the kind of person whose grave you encounter in a country burial ground. The Romantic influence was certainly nowhere in evidence in the Goodwin Jones Pioneer Cemetery on Gorge Road in Ulysses, New York. The graveyard has the appearance of a place that has been abandoned for a long, long time and then recently rediscovered, recently reaffirmed.

In the Pioneer Cemetery the dominant motif is the weeping willow.

”The first half of the 19th century was quite interested in the Greeks and Romans because they were republics and we were a new democracy. There was a great interest in Greek architecture during that time as well, up till around middle of that century. So naturally, gravestones reflected this. The urn and willow, as you probably know, was very popular. The urn was used by Greeks to keep the ashes of the cremated, but why the willow? Well, it was a symbol of the Underworld goddesses, mostly notably Persephone. Also, Orpheus, when he went to the Underworld, brought along a willow branch. This apparently helped him get his gift of speech because, as you might know, Orpheus was a famous poet.” Graveaddiction.com

Central New York was settled by veterans of the Revolutionary War after 1792. Which is to say, they started dying in the early 19^th century. Their gravestones routinely incorporate the traditional weeping willow imagery. In the Pioneer Cemetery it is quite obvious that the same stone carver made each of the willow engravings in the stone; they are almost exactly the same.

“The cypress was long considered as the appropriate ornament of the cemetery; but its gloomy shade among the tombs, and its thick, heavy foliage of the darkest green, inspire only depressing thoughts, and present death under its most appalling image, whilst the weeping willow, on the contrary, rather conveys a picture of the grief felt for the loss of the departed than of the darkness of the grave. Its light and elegant foliage flows like the disheveled hair and graceful drapery of a sculptured mourner over a sepulchral urn, and conveys those soothing, though melancholy reflections that made the poet write, ‘Tis better to have lov’d and lost, Than never to have lov’d at all.’” 20/20 Site

Trilliums on the grave of Dr. Biggs (d. 1923)

As the Romantic movement reached downward from the likes of the poets and into the middle class, personal botanical preferences began to appear on gravestones.  By the early 20^th century even physicians were incorporating their favorite plants into their tombstones. Hermann Michael Biggs was born in Trumansburg, New York in 1859—the Victorian Era—and passed away in 1923, the early Modern period.

Biggs attended Cornell University in the 1870s, pursuing a degree in medicine, and he studied abroad in France with Pasteur and in Germany with Koch, absorbing the then new germ theory. Biggs brought the germ theory back to the U.S. and became a prominent public health official, first as general medical officer for the city of New York and later as the commissioner of health for the state. He introduced the idea of quarantine to American public heath, for which he is both vilified (for its breach of civil rights) and lionized (for its recognition of the communicable nature of disease).

Close-up of trillium on Biggs gravestone

He had a summer retreat in the Adirondacks that he called “Camp Trillium,” and when he died and was buried in Grove Cemetery in Trumansburg, his tombstone was adorned with carved trillium flowers. Unlike the weeping willow, which has a general cultural connotation of grief, the trillium was a purely personal attachment of Hermann Biggs. This is a clear evocation of the Modernist sensibility that was prevalent in the last twenty-five years of his life. Modernism favored individual expression over faithful evocation of cultural convention. His wife was buried beside him and her tombstone is also adorned with carved trillium.

A Gentle Mentor on the Road

Edwin Way Teale

When I was a teenager I would go to the local public library and browse the shelves labeled “Nature,” looking for books that would teach me more about natural history and do it in a narrative fashion rather than in the form of a lecture. One of the authors I discovered back then was Edwin Way Teale. His A Naturalist Buys an Old Farm came out in 1974, when I was a freshman in high school. He was in his sixth decade of writing.

Teale was a writer for Popular Science magazine from 1929 to 1942, when he quit to become a free-lance nature writer. In 1945 his son David was killed in action in Germany. In part to deal with their grief, Teale and his wife Nellie began to travel thousands of miles cross-country in a Buick station wagon. In February 1947 they drove to Florida from their home on Long Island, and then turned around and followed spring northward through the eastern states. North With the Spring was published in 1951

“The seasons,” Teale wrote, “like the greater tides, ebb and flow across the continents. Spring advances up the United States at the average rate of fifteen miles a day. It ascends mountainsides at the rate of about a hundred feet a day. It sweeps ahead like a flood of water, racing down the long valleys, creeping up hillsides in a rising tide.”

The Teales recorded the behavior and habitats of animals and plants, described the landscape and the ecosystems, worried over environmental degradation, and occasionally digressed into descriptions of the local vernacular culture. Teale’s authorial voice was avuncular, unhurried, reasonable, and funny in a tweedy kind of way. He conveyed an enormous amount of information without ever wearying the reader with extraneous detail.

North With the Spring (1951)

Although Teale was trained as a journalist he did not absent himself from the narrative like John McPhee does (or used to do). While McPhee lets the experts that he visits do all the talking, Teale himself is the dominant voice in his books. He and Nellie will frequently encounter friends of theirs or nature professionals as they travel, people that they have set up meetings with to learn more about a local phenomenon.

At Orange Lake near Gainesville, Florida, they engage naturalist Don McKay to bring them out among the “floating islands.” These mats of vegetation, torn loose from the shores, support living plants and bird populations as they are pushed around the lake by the winds. Teale describes the Orange Lake islands and then presents a short abstract of the evidence for floating islands through world history.

By April 1947 the Teales reached North Carolina. Descriptions of plants had been brief up till this point. They have been mentioned in passing as part of the landscape. At Pearson’s Falls near Tryon, North Carolina they encountered their first profusion of spring wildflowers. Typical of Teale’s powers of description is his sentence on the foam flower: “The tip of each floret seemed dipped in the wax of a delicate apricot hue.” This line is an anapestic hexameter with a supple rhythm but enough irregularity to keep it from being singsong.

Teale is the master of giving you a number and then a striking fact to make it stick in your mind:

“So powerful are the perfume oils of flowers that 1/120,00^th of a grain of the oil of rose is all that is required to affect our sense of smell. That sense, incidentally, can be cultivated. After World War I a number of blinded French veterans were trained by Paris perfumers and became experts at analyzing scents by nose alone.”

Nellie Teal (left) in a photo by her husband.

Reading books like this as a teenager caused me to consider all knowledge to be connected. In Teale’s narratives everything led to everything else. He would jump from biology to chemistry to history to personal reminiscence and then circle back to biology again. He presented every piece of information in the context of its natural habitat in the ecosystem of knowledge.

After North With the Spring was published in 1951 to acclaim, the Teales drove across the continent chasing the fall and published Autumn Across America in 1956. The following year they encountered summer across the continent and issued Journey Into Summer in 1960. In 1961 they began at San Diego, watching gray whales and drove 20,000 miles through winter before ending their travels north of Caribou, Maine on the Canadian border and completed the seasonal cycle with Wandering Through Winter in 1965, eighteen years after their first journey began.

The Eidetic Landscape

It’s quite possible that Planting Fields in Oyster Bay on Long Island was my first Olmsted landscape. My mother used to take us to the arboretum in the mid- to late 1960s when we lived in nearby Glen Cove. The North Shore of Long Island was called the “Gold Coast” in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Famous evocations of this time and place include F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and the movie Sabrina, which was filmed in Glen Cove. (The classic with Humphrey Bogart and Audrey Hepburn is, of course, better than the Harrison Ford and Julia Ormond remake). Planting Fields is on the estate of the Coe family, who moved there in 1912. It was the Coes who had the Olmsted firm lay out the pastoral landscape.

The Long Island portion of my childhood (1962-1970) is filled with distinct memories of designed, vernacular and natural landscapes. Most people seem to think of Long Island has an endless maze of post-war subdivisions and strip malls sprawled across a flat landscape. In strict per-square-mile terms, this does describe a large part of Nassau and some of Suffolk counties, but the North Shore was settled in the 17^th century by the Dutch, who were soon succeeded by the English, and the villages and towns have maritime and agricultural pasts.

The Planting Fields Web site (it has been a state historic park since 1971) includes a great deal of historical background about the site, noting that it received its name because the Matinecock tribe farmed the land extensively owing to its rich soil. Long Island is part of the terminal moraine left behind by the last (Wisconsinan) glaciation.

The ice sheet reached its greatest extent 21,000 years before present (BP). The portion of the ice sheet that covered the northeastern two-thirds of North American is called the Laurentide Ice Sheet. Its center was over northern Hudson Bay, where, as long as the snow that fell each winter failed to melt the following summer, the ice accumulated and pushed outward. When the Laurentide Ice Sheet reached its southernmost extent it stopped advancing because it was melting as quickly as snow was accumulating at its center.

The jumbled, hilly landscape of northern Long Island, which gives it its bucolic charm was created as boulders, rocks, sand and silt melted out of the enormous face of the ice sheet. The debris was picked up by the moving ice sheet from points north and extruded from its terminus. The Ronkonkoma moraine runs through the center of the island (paralleling the Long Island Expressway) and forms the southern fork that ends with Montauk Point. The North Shore topography is formed by the Harbor Hill moraine, which extends out to Orient Point, the end of the north fork of Long Island.

The Harbor Hill moraine extends westward into Queens, and another Olmsted design, Prospect Park is built on it in Brooklyn. Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, who had designed Central Park in Manhattan in the 1850s, completed Prospect Park in 1867. The terminal moraine extends further west across Staten Island to New Jersey. Olmsted had actually been a farmer on Staten Island in the late 1940s. In 1850 he went to England as a journalist, traveling on foot extensively and visiting many natural and designed landscapes. The landscape of England is, of course, largely shaped by the last glaciation as well.

The entire idea of the pastoral landscape, as conceived on the English model in the United States, is largely derived from adaptations to a glaciated terrain, which rolls more gently and includes more confused drainages than unglaciated terrains. The pastoral idylls of Greek, Italian and French landscapes portrayed in thousands of landscape paintings of the 18^th and 19^th centuries are much more dramatic, steep-sided and angular than those of England and the American northeastern states.

Olmsted Sr. passed on his aesthetic sense to his sons Frederick Jr. and John, who inherited his landscape architecture firm from him in 1895 and would have been the principals that accepted the commission from the Coe family in 1918. According to the Planting Fields Web site, James Frederick Dawson was the chief designer of the grounds around Coe Hall. Dawson became a full partner in the Olmsted Brothers firm in 1922.

My own memories of Planting Fields are not distinct and are likely largely based on family photographs. But I remember that even at the age of seven or eight, that I though it was a beautiful place, and I think it must have become my standard for designed landscapes.

The Olmsted transformation of the glacial terrain into a sculpted stage for a series of outdoor spaces bounded by copses, thickets and banks of flowering shrubs is a respectful alteration of the native state. An Olmsted landscape amounts to a four-dimensional palimpsest, where you can see the natural state beneath the designer’s carefully ordered vegetation-bounded “rooms” and vistas.

Now, whenever I set foot in an Olmsted (or Olmsted-inspired) landscape, I experience a rush of sentiment, a sense of rightness, a feeling of having detected the Golden Mean in the arrangement of slope, tree, meadow and a clearing in the distance. I feel home.

Subtle Sign of Spring

In the south of England the snowdrops normally bloom in January. Not this year. “Everything has been buried under snow but the biggest problem is the fact everything there have been such heavy frosts,” said Richard Todd, the head gardener, at Anglesey Abbey, a National Trust property in Lode, Cambridgeshire. “It was like having four inches on concrete around all the bulbs. The ground was frozen rock solid and nothing could move in that.”

Galanthus in snow

This winter (2009-10) northwestern Europe and northeastern United States are experiencing what a clear negative index of the North Atlantic Oscillation, an atmospheric pressure gradient between the Azores and Iceland. In a negative index pattern, both cells—the Azores is a high-pressure cell and the Iceland is a low—are weak, making the gradient between them small. In this case few storms track northeastward across the gradient, leaving northwestern Europe (and the Atlantic coast of the U.S.) relatively dry and exposed to Arctic outbreaks. The colder temperatures, however, usually result in greater amounts of snow to these two regions. And the later the snowdrops blossom.

Snowdrops are among the first plants to flower in the spring. Perhaps only winter aconite precedes them. In both northern Europe and the northeastern U.S., where they are widely planted as ornamentals, they often flower amid patches of leftover snow. They tend to naturalize readily and spread into adjacent wooded areas, presenting little islands of green against the matted brown leaves of the forest floor.

At the Winsbere estate, England

The genus Galanthus has 19 natural species and over 500 varietals. Theplantexpert.com testily claims that they are all white and isn’t that boring, which is not quite true. Several of the varieties are patterned with green or yellow, some rather heavily. Some of the varieties are “doubled,” having multiple whorls of petals, which gives them the appearance of tiny carnations.

Galanthus nivalis or the “garden snowdrop” is the most widely planted wild type. It is native to continental Europe and Turkey and was introduced to England in (perhaps) the 16^th century. The Linnean genus name, gala = milk and anthus = flower, is descriptive enough, and the trivial name means “of the snows.”

The plants are 3 to 4 inches high (some varietals are taller) with three narrow basal leaves and an unbranched stem that holds the drooping flower. The flower itself consists of six tepals (not petals), three of which are larger and flare outward, while three are shorter, more tightly held, and often bear a green chevron or other mark.

Snowdrops inspire affection for at least two reasons. One is the relatively narrow range of color and flower form demonstrated by the varietals; this is a flower for people who prefer tasteful restraint in a blossom. The other reason is its early blooming time; after a long winter colored primarily in grays, the snowdrops offer a respite that does not shock: the leaves are a grayish-green in the wild species and many varieties and the flowers are subtly more white than the remaining crusty patches of snow faded with sidewalk ashes and tree duff. Snowdrops announce that spring is nigh with a murmur not a shout.

Handful of Snowdrops – back in the day

A Handful of Snowdrops was a shoegazer band that formed in Quebec City in 1984, released three albums and called it quits in 1993. The shoegazer bands were so-called because they played with banks of effects pedals on the floor in front of them, and consequently they spent most of their shows staring at the floor, rather than engaging with their audience. The songs were lyrically precursors to those of the “emo” bands of the last 15 years, dwelling on the miserable aftermath of relationships or, at best, the doubts that haunt one about the purpose of life. In other words, in their quiet inward perspective and undemonstrative, muted affect, the band chose their name well.

A Directional Rose

A compass rose with direction names, not wind names

The “rose of the winds” or “wind rose” is the older name of the compass rose. In a time when boats and ships were moved by wind,  the wind from a specific direction was given its own name. Some of these—Mistral, Sirocco—are still common parlance in modern Mediterranean culture because of their importance to agriculture (grape-growing, in particular) and because their distinct character has allowed them to remain personified entities, much as the Santa Ana winds of southern California do.

But when these winds represented the motor force that drove freight across the Mediterranean they were one of the ruling principles of commerce. Their seasonal occurrence influenced the flow of trade among southern European, northern African and Middle Eastern ports. In the 14^th century a graphic representation of 32 wind directions (and their names) began appearing on navigational charts. The ornate radiating polygons of color evoked the appearance of petals on rose.

Wind rose on portolan map by Jorge Aguiar

The compass roses began appearing on portolan maps as points with 32 straight lines radiating outward. The portolan maps showed the details of coastlines, including all ports, harbors and coves that could possibly be of interest or use to a vessel traveling long distances. They were devised by combining the written accounts of landmarks and distances preserved in pilot books (peripluses) with graphic depictions of the world (called orbis terrae or O-T maps) in the latest 13^th century in Pisa. Through the following century the decorative aspects of the rose of the winds became progressively more elaborate.

Wind rose with initials of named winds (and cross for Levanter).

There were eight named winds. Counterclockwise around the wind rose from the north they are the Tramontana, Gregale (NE), Levanter (E), Sirocco (SE), Ostro (S), Libeccio (SW), Poniente (W), and Mistral (NW). These were then divided further into eight more half-winds and sixteen quarter-winds. All of the named winds had predecessors in Greek and Latin cultures where they were personified as part of folklore, occasionally figuring in minor roles alongside the gods of Olympus. (Zeus, for example, could be counted on to dispatch Zephyrus (the west wind) to blow a fleet off course to influence the outcome a battle in which he had some petty stake.) The names above are those of the western Mediterranean. They are by no means standard throughout the region and were certainly different in the North, Baltic and Black seas. One feature that transcended region was the frequent placing of a fleur-de-lis at the north or Tramontana position.

The Chinese invented the compass in the 11^th century during the Song Dynasty. It took the form of a magnetic needle floating in a bowl of water. How the technology made its way to the Mediterranean (and apparently nearly simultaneously to the North Sea) is not precisely know. However it got there, whether directly from the Chinese to the Europeans, via the Arabs or even by independent invention in Europe as some hold, the compass became part of European navigation eventually the “wind rose” was transformed into the “compass rose,” usually labeled with north, south east and west instead of the names of the winds.

With traditional colors and fleur-de-lis

The “dry” mariners compass was invented in Europe in 1300. It consisted of a magnetized needle suspended under a glass cover and over a wind rose diagram. On a ship the whole apparatus was suspended within a gimbal to keep it level as the vessel heeled, pitched and rolled. Credit for the invention is generally given to Flavio Gioja, a pilot from Amalfi on coast south of Naples.

The colors of the wind rose design were initially not purely aesthetic, but practical, as this was a graphic that would have to be read in all weather and at all times of the day and night (by flickering oil lamp) on the deck of a moving ship. The eight primary directions (which were entirely equated with the wind that blew from them) were presented in black to be clearly visible. The half-winds were generally in blues and greens and the quarters-winds in reds.

Harvest’s End

Halloween is a contraction of “All Hallows’ Eve,” a Christian descendant of the Celtic feast day Samhain (pronounced, in that mysterious way of Gaelic, “SOW-in”). Samhain marked the end of the harvest season and the beginning of the “dark half” of the Celtic calendar.

Square in a circle

The pagan Celtic year was divided into quarters and these Bronze Age people apparently thought of their spiritual dimension as a circle in a square, with the world of the living being the square and the spirit world the circle around it. At the corners of the square the distance between the realms of the living and the dead were “thinnest.”

Each of these corners was exactly half way between a solstice and an equinox. The winter and summer solstices are, respectively the shortest and longest days of the year, something a Bronze Age person could observe and measure directly. Likewise the equinoxes are 24-hour periods during which day and night are of equal length, also something that can be measured by people with clocks.

Bronze Age farmers in northern Europe paid close attention to this solar cycle and the attendant warmth that defined their growing season. Most of the Bronze age (after 2700 BCE) was marked by a climate warmer than the present day—grapes were grown in the British Isles and Scandinavia—making farming relatively easy and causing the population to rise to higher densities than during the Stone Age. The climate deteriorated after 850 BCE and declined further after 650 BCE.

Feast days included rituals to propitiate gods that ostensibly had some say over how the harvest season would go. Earlier Europeans noticed that the seasonal warmth lagged the solar cycle significantly. Even most modern people are aware that although the summer solstice is on June 21, the warmest days of the summer do not arrive until August. It is perhaps this fact that caused the pagan Celts to place their feast days exactly half way between the solstices and equinoxes. And because these days represents crests, troughs and turning points in the seasons they decided that the spirits must be closer and occasionally even in our realm.

“The Corn Harvest” (Bruegel the Elder)

Lughnasa, which was (and, less essentially, is) celebrated during the first few days of August, marks the start of the harvest season, and Samhain, bridging the last days of October and first few days of November, marks the end. Of course, the present (more or less Gregorian) calendar did not assume its present form until sometime in the Middle Ages. The Romans after the first century BCE used a Julian calendar with 12 months. This was adopted by the Celts (although the names of the months were changed), but before that time, the feast days had not likely been thought of as being associated with months per se. Rather, they were simply part of the growing season.

Beltane, the beginning of the “light half” of the year, has come down to us as “May Day.” It is associated with the yearly inception of fertility upon the land and among the people. The May pole is fertility rite. Secular humanists copied the time-honored Christian tradition of co-opting pagan holidays for their own purposes when they established “labor day” on May Day through out Europe (although the tradition surprisingly began in Australia in 1856) by 1886.

Haymarket riot

A workers’ riot at Haymarket in Chicago in 1886 caused the United States to move its Labor Day to the first weekend in September, which, while it is the beginning of the school year in the northern United States, was several weeks into the school year when the South was predominantly agrarian, because the harvest season comes earlier and ends earlier there. Kids could therefore return to school in August, as they were no longer needed on the farm to bring in the crops.

Perhaps the most unsung Celtic feast day is Imbolc, which arrives in early February, the proverbial “dead” of winter. The end of the harvest at Samhain is a fond memory and the beginning of the growing season at Beltane is a light at the end of a dark tunnel. The shortest day of the year, December 21, the winter solstice, is pretty darned short in the British Isles and Scandinavia. So by early February the days have been getting longer for almost six weeks, but it is still pretty dark and cold.

St. Brigid’s Cross at Candlemas

Hence the tradition of “Groundhog Day.” The earliest reference in the United States is from 1841 in Pennsylvania where it is associated with Candlemas (which celebrates an event in the infancy of Jesus recorded in the Gospel of Luke). Marmota monax, is a New World animal, so if the North American tradition of evaluating the behavior of a small, groggy furred animal emerging from a burrow has any Old World roots, it would have to be a different mammal. A badger? A stoat? In any case, if the beast sees his shadow, then we’ll have six more weeks of winter. In other words, Beltane won’t come early.

On Halloween people dress in costume, pretending to be “not themselves” with the more traditional costumes having supernatural overtones as per the Celtic idea of the closeness of the spirit realm on this day. But the vestiges of the harvest holiday survive in odd artifacts like carved pumpkins, candy corn and candied apples.

Plant Classification Before Darwin

The urge to classify the natural world is an old one and apparently an essential human characteristic. In a famous instance of the primeval nature of this impulse, during his field work in New Guinea in the 1940s ornithologist Ernst Mayr discovered the tribal people had identified the 137 species of birds in detail that equaled and in at least one instance exceeded that of modern science. The sexual dimorphism among birds of Paradise is striking, but the hunters and gatherers almost unfailingly were able to pair dissimilar looking birds under one name.

Theophrastus

The Greeks, the Romans and most Europeans until the Renaissance, assumed that species were static. I.e., one did not evolve from another to produce “family trees.” Rather, the similarities among taxa were thought to be due to variations in the proverbial molds for the creation of “types” in the divine forge. Beginning in the early Hellenic period in Greece (300 B.C.) plants were divided up into taxa based on their habit or life form, grouping vines, shrubs, trees and herbaceous species.

Theophrastus, a student of Aristotle, is often designated as the “father of botany.” He recognized determinate versus indeterminate growth patterns. Determinate growth refers to a plant that attains a particular size and gets no larger, but produces flowers and fruit before dying. Indeterminate growth refers to the habit of growing continually until killed by frost or other means. Theophrastus also grouped plants together according to shared traits, including the fusion of various elements of the flower (and other parts of the plant).

Dioscorides

Pedanius Dioscorides (40-90 A.D.) was a Greek pharmacologist and botanist from Asia Minor (modern Turkey, who practiced in Rome at the time of Nero. He assembled a directory of ~600 plants with medicinal uses into the Materia Medica. The reference was used continually throughout Europe until the 17th century. Dioscorides preserved the names of plants in the Dacian language of southeastern Europe. The true identification of all the plants he listed is not settled unambiguously.

Pliny the Elder

Pliny the Elder was a better-known, older (23-79 A.D.) Roman contemporary of Discorides. His Naturalis Historia is a compendium of the entire natural world, as it was known in his time. Although regarded as generally accurate, it makes no consistent distinction between real and fantastic phenomena. Pliny drew upon the work of Theophrastus for his chapter on botany.

Otto Brunfels

After the Middle Ages, herbalists like Otto Brunfels (~1488-1534) began to publish botanical works that were based almost entirely on personal observation rather than hearsay, which was the primary source of information for the naturalists of the Greek and Roman periods. The herbalist texts included illustrations that reach a new level of accuracy and the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in 1439 assured the wider distribution of accurate botanical information. Multiple schemes of classification persisted throughout the Renaissance and into the Age of Enlightenment.

Joseph Pitton de Tournefort

Andrea Caesalpino (1519-1603), a Tuscan physician and botanist, grouped plants together based on the morphology and arrangement of their fruits and seeds. The herbalists had usually ordered plants in their texts alphabetically and grouped them by medicinal properties. Caesalpino became the director of the botanical garden in Pisa in 1555. In the 16th century period these grounds for growing, displaying and doing research on plants began to be built, first in the wealthy Italian peninsular states and then through the rest of western Europe.

Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1656-1708) invented the concept of “genus” as a way of organizing plant species. He assembled over 7000 taxa into 700 genera. His criteria were the shared features among flowers. The post-medieval trend toward field work expanded in the 17th century; de Tounefort traveled and collected extensively in the Pyrennes, throughout the islands of the Mediterranean and much of western Europe.

The work of de Tournefort paved the way for Carl Linné (Carolus Linnaeus) to develop the system of binomial nomenclature. His Species Plantarum (1753) is the basis for much of modern systematics and for the rules of priority. The earliest genus name applied to a plant will generally stay with it forever, unless it can be shown that the plant should be more properly assigned to another genus.

Dead Flowers

Take me down little Susie, take me down
I know you think you’re the Queen of the Underground
And you can send me dead flowers every morning
Send me dead flowers by the mail
Send me dead flowers to my wedding
And I won’t forget to put roses on your grave

Sticky Fingers cover

This song from the Rolling Stones‘ 1971 album Sticky Fingers has a sinister appeal. The initial image conjured by lyrics is of actual dead flowers being delivered through the mail and a withered bouquet arriving at a wedding. But the narrator is entreating “little Suzie” to “take him down,” and he is sardonically observing that this bourgeois woman (in the first verse she is referred to as sitting in a “silk upholstered chair”) thinks of herself as a rough customer (i.e., “the Queen of the Underground”).

It would seem that the narrator is in fact referring to a woman with whom he in the past he regularly enjoyed heroin, and now while he has succumbed to the habit, she has moved on.

Well, you’re sitting back
In your pink Cadillac
Making bets on Kentucky Derby Day
I’ll be in my basement room
With a needle and a spoon
And another girl can take my pain away

The song is the track after “Sister Morphine” on Sticky Fingers, which is in a certain sense a less chilling song because it is so explicitly about sinking down, while “Dead Flowers” has a jaunty swagger to it that belies the delusion represented by the lyrics and the euphemistic name given to the drug.

Undead flowers

Heroin is, after all, made from ground-up dead poppy flowers. Morphine, from which heroin (diacetylmorphine) is derived, is processed from “poppy straw,” the dried seed pods and stems of the opium poppy (Papaver somniferum).

Opium has been collected from the latex of unripe seed pods and used medicinal since the Neolithic Period, but morphine was not isolated from the plant until 1803 in Germany. It did not become widely used in medicine until 1853, when the hypodermic needle was invented.

Heroin was synthesized from morphine in 1874 in a London hospital, but was rediscovered independently in 1897 in the laboratories of the Bayer pharmaceutical company in Germany.

Bayer marketed it as a non-addictive cough suppressant and pain killer until 1910, when it was realized that heroin quickly metabolized into morphine, and was therefore essentially a quicker acting version of morphine and one-and-a-half to two times as powerful. (Not to mention very addictive.)

Latex from scored pod

The opium poppies that enter the heroin trade are historically from Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Golden Triangle region of Burma, Thailand and southern China, and the Sinaloa province of Mexico. The ascension of the Taliban in Afghanistan famously suppressed the production of opium poppies in that country. Production had increased during the Soviet-Afghan war of the 1980s, when the US-backed mujaheddin entered the trade in order to raise money for their cause.

The sternly fundamentalist Taliban initially encouraged poppy production because they believed that its products were consumed by Westerners, but not Muslims. In 2000 they reversed their policy and nearly eliminated poppy production within a year. After the 2001 expulsion of the Taliban by the US and Northern Alliance forces, poppy production resumed and Afghanistan once again is the source of the vast majority of the world’s opium supply.

While back in the 1970s, when the Rolling Stones were glamorizing (in their backhanded way of glorifying debasement) heroin use, the purity of the drug was less than it is today. Therefore most users took it intravenously to get the full effect. More recently greater purities are available, making possible significant effects via snorting the drug. Recreational users who believe they might avoid the dangers of the drug in this way, find they are sadly mistaken.

Send me dead flowers by the US mail
Say it with dead flowers at my wedding
And I won’t forget to put roses on your grave
No, I won’t forget to put roses on your grave”