Strange Science: Plants

Overhead and underfoot, plants are often overlooked, or written off as simple compared with animals. But plants have posed plenty of puzzles of their own. Classical scholars made some progress in understanding plant life, but much of this was lost, especially after the destruction of the library at Alexandria. During the Middle Ages, Muslim scholars preserved and added to the knowledge of the ancient Greeks, although Islam forbade making realistic images. With the Renaissance came a reawakening of botany in Europe, along with new discoveries. With a century, explorers and traders brought home 20 times as many new plants as Europe had seen in the last 2,000 years.

Mandrake roots Year: Between 1406 and 1430
Originally appeared in: Manuscript made in Constantinople
Now appears in: The Naming of Names by Anna Pavord
Feared for its deadly shriek when pulled from the ground, the mandrake was thought to take male or female form. According to an 11th-century Anglo-Saxon manuscript, the mandrake also shined at night like a lamp, and would flee from "an unclean man."

Mandrake uprooted by dog Year: c. 1450
Originally appeared in: Tacuinum Sanitatis
Now appears in: Tacuinum Sanitatis: An Early Renaissance Guide to Health by Alixe Bovey
It's better to sacrifice your dog's hearing than your own. That might have been the advice imparted by this miniature produced in the mid-15th century. The man has tied a mandrake root to his dog and is already in retreat and covering one ear as the mandrake peeks out of the ground. Like other miniatures in Tacuinum Sanitatis, this picture uses an interesting convention: The scene appears at the edge of a crumbling cliff. Another scene from the same book shows a rice shop, also at the edge of a precipice.

Plants Year: 1478
Scientist: Conrad von Megenberg
Publisher: Hans Bamler of Augsburg
Originally published in: Buch der Natur
Now appears in: The Naming of Names by Anna Pavord
After Gutenberg invented the first working movable type in Europe, scholars had the opportunity to marry woodcuts and new text to expand understanding of plants. In the words of science writer Anna Pavord, "It didn't happen." In this stylized illustration, the plants bore little resemblance to anything in the real world, and the text, written in the 14th century, was already more than a century out of date when it finally appeared in print. Although woodcuts were often used to great effect, they were crude tools compared with an artist's brush.

Goose barnacle Year: 1597
Scientist/artist: John Gerard
Originally published in: Herball
Now appears in: The Eye of the Lynx by David Freedberg and The Naming of Names by Anna Pavord
Barnacles are actually crustaceans, but at the beginning of the 17th century, the goose barnacle was believed to spring from froth produced by old pieces of wood. Next, it became a fungus, then it became a shell, which would spit out a bird, feet first. According to Gerard, the bird was "a foule, bigger than a Mallard, and lesser than a goose." In fact, some of Gerard's contemporaries found his Herball to be "full of errors" before it was even published. In his defense, Gerard was a gardener more than a scholar, and however riddled with mistakes his work may have been, his love of plants was genuine.

Goose barnacle Year: 1581
Scientist/artist: Mathias de L'Obel
Originally published in: Plantarum, Seu Stirpium Icones
Now appears in: The Jewel House by Deborah Harkness
While prestigious printers were publishing Gerard's Herball, they fielded a complaint that he had appropriated the work of fellow plant lover Mathias de L'Obel — and done a sloppy job at that. L'Obel was briefly retained to tidy up Gerard's book, but didn't fix up the whole thing. Before Gerard published his version of the barnacle goose, L'Obel published his own. The creature was said to come from a tree in northern Scotland that sprouted barnacles instead of fruit.

Lolipop water lilies Year: c. 1481
Publisher: Johannes Philippus de Lignamine
Originally published in: Apuleius Platonicus
Now appears in: The Naming of Names by Anna Pavord
Though water lilies were exotic plants, naturalists with an interest in them generally knew what they looked like by the late 15th century. The maker of this woodcut, evidently, did not. To the woodcut maker, a water lily looked like a modern lollipop.

Pasque flower Year: 1530-1536
Scientist: Otto Brunfels
Artist: Hans Weiditz
Originally published in: Herbarum Vivae Eicones
Now appears in: The Naming of Names by Anna Pavord
By the 16th century, at least some woodcuts had improved — immensely. Brunfels didn't want to include this illustration of the pasque flower in his herbal since it had no known use to apothecaries. Useful or not, the plant's inclusion meant the incorporation of an exceptionally accurate illustration by Weiditz, a student of the talented and rigorous Albrecht Dürer.

Plantago and scorpion Year: 1485
Originally published in: Gart der Gesundheit
Now appears in: The Science of Describing by Brian W. Ogilvie
Another example of a plant depiction ruined by convention is this illustration of Plantago. Although woodcuts limited what artists could accurately illustrate, Ogilvie has speculated that the same artist may have designed, at about the same time, an accurate depiction of a rose in a different publication. The convention of representing a simplified plant — complete with decorative scorpion — rendered this picture nearly useless.

Plantago Year: 1542
Scientist: Leonhart Fuchs
Originally published in: De Historia Stirpium
Now appears in: The Science of Describing by Brian W. Ogilvie
Dropping the scorpion and the stylized depiction, Fuchs produced a much more accurate picture of Plantago decades later.

Hyacinth Year: 1636
Scientist/artist: John Gerard
Originally published in: Herball
Now appears in: Amazing Rare Things by Attenborough, Owens, Clayton and Alexandratos
More plausible than the goose barnacle was Gerard's hyacinth. This image, although nicely colored, results from a woodcut. Woodcuts varied in quality, and although many of them were better than illustrations that had occurred before, they were crude compared to engravings.

Year: 1613
Scientist/artist: Basilius Besler
Originally published in: Hortus Eystettensis
Now appears in: Amazing Rare Things by Attenborough, Owens, Clayton and Alexandratos
While some authors still relied on woodcuts, others had moved on to more expensive but detailed engravings. Several different printmakers engraved the Hortus Eystettensis, rendering plants such as the hyacinth in remarkable detail, a considerable improvement over what had come before and even what continued to be published for some time afterwards.

Nuphar lutea Year: 1585
Scientist/artist: Pierandrea Mattioli
Originally published in: Herbal
Now appears in: The Eye of the Lynx by David Freedberg
This dainty illustration shows a lovely plant, just not with much accuracy. In the 16th century, only a small number of botanists and artists produced truly accurate illustrations. Most woodcuts were decorative rather than informative.

Trees Year: 1844
Scientist: August Goldfuss
Artist: Christian Hohe
Originally published in: Fossils of Germany
Now appears in: Scenes from Deep Time: Early Pictorial Representations of the Prehistoric World by Martin J.S. Rudwick
As if plants still living weren't tricky enough, fossil plants posed a whole new set of challenges. What's impressive about this picture is how it works around a common problem. Plants shed parts throughout their lives: seeds, branches, cones, and a whole set of leaves each season. As a result, fossil plant parts can be hard to piece together into a single species — many times, different parts of the same plant have been identified as separate species. To avoid almost certain error in reassembling fossil plants, Goldfuss had his artist collaborator cut off the tops of the trees and show only leaf litter on the ground. Which leaves went with which trunks was anybody's guess. This depiction of "the Coal Period" also shows marine invertebrates — not in their natural habitat, but instead assembled neatly on shore, waiting patiently to fossilize.

Siegesbeckia orientalis Year: 1738
Scientist: Linnaeus
Artist: Jan Wandelaar
Originally published in: Hortus Cliffortianus
Now appears in: Linnaeus by Wilfrid Blunt
This isn't an error. In fact, plant is represented quite accurately. It does, however, represent a practice that probably wouldn't be allowed today. When Linnaeus announced his discovery that plants reproduce sexually, some of his contemporaries responded with shock and awe. And contempt. One of them, Johann Siegesbeck, and academic living in St. Petersburg, wondered, "Who would have thought that bluebells, lilies and onions could be up to such immorality?" Linnaeus got even, namely by naming this weed Siegesbeckia orientalis. Using the Linnaean system to insult rivals by naming unpleasant species after them is now frowned upon. On the bright side, some herbalists have credited this weed with erasing stretch marks, a fact that Siegesbeck might (or might not) have found flattering.

Onica tree Year: 1497
Originally appeared in: Hortus Sanitatis
Now appears in: The Birth and Development of the Geological Sciences by Frank Dawson Adams
People not only believed the Onica tree wept, they also believed than when it did, it made onyx.

Cucumber Year: 1551
Scientist/artist: William Turner
Originally published in: A New Herball
Now appears in: Eating Right in the Renaissance by Ken Albala
This was a pretty accurate depiction of the cucumber, though when it was published, Europeans held what we would likely consider an irrational fear of consuming cucumbers. One reason for this was that, before the process of digestion was well understood, people feared that fruits and vegetables might spoil inside the body just as they did outside the body. The spoiled foods then carried trouble to every last part of the poor person who had eaten them.

Apple Bark Face Year: 1668
Scientist/artist: Ulisse Aldrovandi
Originally published in: Dendrologia
Now appears in: The Eye of the Lynx by David Freedberg
Aldrovandi's posthumously published book showed this piece of apple bark with an uncanny resemblance to a human face. A little too uncanny, in fact. In the 16th and 17th centuries, savants were still trying to figure out the details how life forms reproduced and what made fossils. One common idea was of a "plastick virtue" — a creative force that fashioned all kinds of weird objects. Such a force might make a human-looking face in apple bark. Or an artist simply might draw it.

Scorpion-root plant Year: 1591
Scientist/artist: Giambattista Della Porta
Originally published in: Phytognomonica
Now appears in: The Birth and Development of the Geological Sciences by Frank Dawson Adams
Popularized by the Renaissance polymath Paracelsus (but dating all the way back to Antiquity) the doctrine of signatures held that plants offered clues to their usefulness by resembling the body parts they could heal or problems they could fix. Della Porta, a believer in signatures, published several examples in his Phytognomonica. In this case, the aconite plant, with roots resembling scorpions, could heal the nasty creature's sting.

		Year: Between 1406 and 1430 Originally appeared in: Manuscript made in Constantinople Now appears in: The Naming of Names by Anna Pavord Feared for its deadly shriek when pulled from the ground, the mandrake was thought to take male or female form. According to an 11th-century Anglo-Saxon manuscript, the mandrake also shined at night like a lamp, and would flee from "an unclean man."

		Year: c. 1450 Originally appeared in: Tacuinum Sanitatis Now appears in: Tacuinum Sanitatis: An Early Renaissance Guide to Health by Alixe Bovey It's better to sacrifice your dog's hearing than your own. That might have been the advice imparted by this miniature produced in the mid-15th century. The man has tied a mandrake root to his dog and is already in retreat and covering one ear as the mandrake peeks out of the ground. Like other miniatures in Tacuinum Sanitatis, this picture uses an interesting convention: The scene appears at the edge of a crumbling cliff. Another scene from the same book shows a rice shop, also at the edge of a precipice.

		Year: 1478 Scientist: Conrad von Megenberg Publisher: Hans Bamler of Augsburg Originally published in: Buch der Natur Now appears in: The Naming of Names by Anna Pavord After Gutenberg invented the first working movable type in Europe, scholars had the opportunity to marry woodcuts and new text to expand understanding of plants. In the words of science writer Anna Pavord, "It didn't happen." In this stylized illustration, the plants bore little resemblance to anything in the real world, and the text, written in the 14th century, was already more than a century out of date when it finally appeared in print. Although woodcuts were often used to great effect, they were crude tools compared with an artist's brush.

		Year: 1597 Scientist/artist: John Gerard Originally published in: Herball Now appears in: The Eye of the Lynx by David Freedberg and The Naming of Names by Anna Pavord Barnacles are actually crustaceans, but at the beginning of the 17th century, the goose barnacle was believed to spring from froth produced by old pieces of wood. Next, it became a fungus, then it became a shell, which would spit out a bird, feet first. According to Gerard, the bird was "a foule, bigger than a Mallard, and lesser than a goose." In fact, some of Gerard's contemporaries found his Herball to be "full of errors" before it was even published. In his defense, Gerard was a gardener more than a scholar, and however riddled with mistakes his work may have been, his love of plants was genuine.

		Year: 1581 Scientist/artist: Mathias de L'Obel Originally published in: Plantarum, Seu Stirpium Icones Now appears in: The Jewel House by Deborah Harkness While prestigious printers were publishing Gerard's Herball, they fielded a complaint that he had appropriated the work of fellow plant lover Mathias de L'Obel — and done a sloppy job at that. L'Obel was briefly retained to tidy up Gerard's book, but didn't fix up the whole thing. Before Gerard published his version of the barnacle goose, L'Obel published his own. The creature was said to come from a tree in northern Scotland that sprouted barnacles instead of fruit.

		Year: c. 1481 Publisher: Johannes Philippus de Lignamine Originally published in: Apuleius Platonicus Now appears in: The Naming of Names by Anna Pavord Though water lilies were exotic plants, naturalists with an interest in them generally knew what they looked like by the late 15th century. The maker of this woodcut, evidently, did not. To the woodcut maker, a water lily looked like a modern lollipop.

		Year: 1530-1536 Scientist: Otto Brunfels Artist: Hans Weiditz Originally published in: Herbarum Vivae Eicones Now appears in: The Naming of Names by Anna Pavord By the 16th century, at least some woodcuts had improved — immensely. Brunfels didn't want to include this illustration of the pasque flower in his herbal since it had no known use to apothecaries. Useful or not, the plant's inclusion meant the incorporation of an exceptionally accurate illustration by Weiditz, a student of the talented and rigorous Albrecht Dürer.

		Year: 1485 Originally published in: Gart der Gesundheit Now appears in: The Science of Describing by Brian W. Ogilvie Another example of a plant depiction ruined by convention is this illustration of Plantago. Although woodcuts limited what artists could accurately illustrate, Ogilvie has speculated that the same artist may have designed, at about the same time, an accurate depiction of a rose in a different publication. The convention of representing a simplified plant — complete with decorative scorpion — rendered this picture nearly useless.

		Year: 1542 Scientist: Leonhart Fuchs Originally published in: De Historia Stirpium Now appears in: The Science of Describing by Brian W. Ogilvie Dropping the scorpion and the stylized depiction, Fuchs produced a much more accurate picture of Plantago decades later.

		Year: 1636 Scientist/artist: John Gerard Originally published in: Herball Now appears in: Amazing Rare Things by Attenborough, Owens, Clayton and Alexandratos More plausible than the goose barnacle was Gerard's hyacinth. This image, although nicely colored, results from a woodcut. Woodcuts varied in quality, and although many of them were better than illustrations that had occurred before, they were crude compared to engravings.

		Year: 1613 Scientist/artist: Basilius Besler Originally published in: Hortus Eystettensis Now appears in: Amazing Rare Things by Attenborough, Owens, Clayton and Alexandratos While some authors still relied on woodcuts, others had moved on to more expensive but detailed engravings. Several different printmakers engraved the Hortus Eystettensis, rendering plants such as the hyacinth in remarkable detail, a considerable improvement over what had come before and even what continued to be published for some time afterwards.

		Year: 1585 Scientist/artist: Pierandrea Mattioli Originally published in: Herbal Now appears in: The Eye of the Lynx by David Freedberg This dainty illustration shows a lovely plant, just not with much accuracy. In the 16th century, only a small number of botanists and artists produced truly accurate illustrations. Most woodcuts were decorative rather than informative.

		Year: 1844 Scientist: August Goldfuss Artist: Christian Hohe Originally published in: Fossils of Germany Now appears in: Scenes from Deep Time: Early Pictorial Representations of the Prehistoric World by Martin J.S. Rudwick As if plants still living weren't tricky enough, fossil plants posed a whole new set of challenges. What's impressive about this picture is how it works around a common problem. Plants shed parts throughout their lives: seeds, branches, cones, and a whole set of leaves each season. As a result, fossil plant parts can be hard to piece together into a single species — many times, different parts of the same plant have been identified as separate species. To avoid almost certain error in reassembling fossil plants, Goldfuss had his artist collaborator cut off the tops of the trees and show only leaf litter on the ground. Which leaves went with which trunks was anybody's guess. This depiction of "the Coal Period" also shows marine invertebrates — not in their natural habitat, but instead assembled neatly on shore, waiting patiently to fossilize.

		Year: 1738 Scientist: Linnaeus Artist: Jan Wandelaar Originally published in: Hortus Cliffortianus Now appears in: Linnaeus by Wilfrid Blunt This isn't an error. In fact, plant is represented quite accurately. It does, however, represent a practice that probably wouldn't be allowed today. When Linnaeus announced his discovery that plants reproduce sexually, some of his contemporaries responded with shock and awe. And contempt. One of them, Johann Siegesbeck, and academic living in St. Petersburg, wondered, "Who would have thought that bluebells, lilies and onions could be up to such immorality?" Linnaeus got even, namely by naming this weed Siegesbeckia orientalis. Using the Linnaean system to insult rivals by naming unpleasant species after them is now frowned upon. On the bright side, some herbalists have credited this weed with erasing stretch marks, a fact that Siegesbeck might (or might not) have found flattering.

		Year: 1497 Originally appeared in: Hortus Sanitatis Now appears in: The Birth and Development of the Geological Sciences by Frank Dawson Adams People not only believed the Onica tree wept, they also believed than when it did, it made onyx.

		Year: 1551 Scientist/artist: William Turner Originally published in: A New Herball Now appears in: Eating Right in the Renaissance by Ken Albala This was a pretty accurate depiction of the cucumber, though when it was published, Europeans held what we would likely consider an irrational fear of consuming cucumbers. One reason for this was that, before the process of digestion was well understood, people feared that fruits and vegetables might spoil inside the body just as they did outside the body. The spoiled foods then carried trouble to every last part of the poor person who had eaten them.

		Year: 1668 Scientist/artist: Ulisse Aldrovandi Originally published in: Dendrologia Now appears in: The Eye of the Lynx by David Freedberg Aldrovandi's posthumously published book showed this piece of apple bark with an uncanny resemblance to a human face. A little too uncanny, in fact. In the 16th and 17th centuries, savants were still trying to figure out the details how life forms reproduced and what made fossils. One common idea was of a "plastick virtue" — a creative force that fashioned all kinds of weird objects. Such a force might make a human-looking face in apple bark. Or an artist simply might draw it.

		Year: 1591 Scientist/artist: Giambattista Della Porta Originally published in: Phytognomonica Now appears in: The Birth and Development of the Geological Sciences by Frank Dawson Adams Popularized by the Renaissance polymath Paracelsus (but dating all the way back to Antiquity) the doctrine of signatures held that plants offered clues to their usefulness by resembling the body parts they could heal or problems they could fix. Della Porta, a believer in signatures, published several examples in his Phytognomonica. In this case, the aconite plant, with roots resembling scorpions, could heal the nasty creature's sting.