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Intro Mary Garden
The Discovery of Old Religious Plant Symbolism
The symbolism for many of the flowers named of old for the
Blessed Virgin Mary - as recorded from oral traditions in plant
dictionaries and botanists' floras (field research reports) - is
immediately evident from the flower colors and forms or liturgical
times of bloom, such as those for Mary's Gold, Our Lady's Mantle
and Assumption Lily.
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Where the physical basis for a symbolical name from the
research is not immediately apparent, clues are sometimes to be
found in books on plant lore; but it is well to corroborate these
through actual inspection of the plants.
Thus, several books give the basis for the name of Our Lady's
Seal, or Solomon's Seal - still the common name for this plant
today - as coming from the supposed resemblance of the
cross-section of the root stock protruding at the ground level,
after the leaves and stems wither and die, to the seals used
to impress embossed designs on the wax used to close letters in
former eras.
Accepting this explanation at first, we gave it little further
thought - until Fall came and we had difficulty even in finding the
roots of this plant, by then entirely underground. Finding them,
we were unable to make the association on inspection. We therefore
gave preference to another name for this plant, from the research,
of Our Lady's Belfry, obviously based on the arching branches with
rows of tiny pendant bell-like blooms. It was only a number of
years later that it occurred to us to look at the pendant blooms
from below, upon which it was immediately apparent that, when thus
viewed, they resembled the double equilateral triangle of the
religious Solomon's Seal six-pointed star symbol.
Interestingly, we did find in the literature that the digging
up of plant roots for inspection is not in vain, in that a European
wild orchid was known as Our Lady's Hand from the palm-with-fingers
shape of the dug-up white roots.
. Others also required a
little time. In first
examining the columbine, we
were puzzled as to the basis
for the name - Our Lady's
Shoes - until we discovered
that, when the spent blooms
began to fall apart, the
separated spurs resembled
slippers when they fell onto
the leaves or the ground at
the base of the plants.
It took us some years to
appreciate that the name
Lady-Lords, still given today
to the wild Arum in England,
evidently came from the resemblance of the spadix and spathe of
each bloom of this plant to the Romanesque frontal sculptures of
the Virgin and Child - Our Lady and Our Lord.
While it was evident why the pendant blooms of fuchsia would
have been seen as Our Lady's Eardrops, it was not apparent to us at
first why the blooms of garden balsam were known as Our Lady
Earrings - until we realized that it was the ring-like curved stems
of the flowers which were the basis for the name. (Several of the
balsams are also known, from the bursting open of their seed pods
when touched, as Touch-me-not - from the words of the Risen Christ
to Mary Magdalene. We also wondered why these or any flowers would
be named Our Lady's Eardrops or Earrings - until on reflection we
realized that this was a popular folk way of paying tribute to Mary
who, through her ears, "heard the word of God, and kept it".
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Another interesting naming is that of
Virgin's Pink, and of garden pinks in
general. We at first assumed this was some
sort of association simply from the color,
but we then learned that the name pink
came from the bloom of several of the
flowers of this genus in Europe at the end
of May, at Pentecost time, or Whit Sunday,
known in Holland as Pinkster. Presumably
the serrated edges of the flower petals
were seen as delicate tongues of flame of
the Holy Spirit descending at Pentecost on
Mary, Mother of the Church and Mediatrix
of grace to the Apostles. These same
pointed petals are also said to be the
basis for the naming of the pinking, and
pinking shears, of garment making.
It was only after we learned of the name (in translation from
the German) of Our Lady's Little Ladle for the hardy cyclamen, that
we noticed the blooms of this flower always face upwards, so that
for the lower, pendant blooms, the resultingly curved stems give
the flower-stem combination the appearance of cooking ladles.
Other names have been enriched by legends. The flower, Star
of Bethlehem, according to imaginative legend, had its origins when
the actual star, after leading the Wise Men to the nativity manger
in Bethlehem, exploded into a myriad of parts which fell to the
ground surrounding the manger, rooting themselves as flowers. A
similar legend relates that the star, after leading the Wise Men to
Bethlehem, indicated the actual location of the Infant Savior by
rooting itself as a glorious golden chrysanthemum at the entrance
to the manger - from which we designate the chrysanthemum as
Epipheny Flower. Another Nativity legend is that of the Christmas
Rose, reputed to have been created when an angel swept the ground
with its wings so that a young girl adorer would have a gift for
the Christ Child, to give along with those of the Shepherds and
Wise Men.
Other legends provide a rich theological basis for plant
names, such as the legend of the origin of the name, Mary-loves,
for the red and white English daisies. According to this legend,
Mary's knowlege from scriptural prophecy that the Infant Savior
under her care was to undergo torture and death for the redemption
of the world was given a startling reality at their Nazareth home
one day when the child Jesus, after cutting his hand, first shed
some drops of his precious blood on the ground, turning some of
these originally all-white plants to red. This change of color was
perceived as symbolizing the interior immolation of Mary's motherly
love, in initial fulfillment of the prophecy of Simeon to her at
the Presentation of the Child Jesus at the Temple that her own soul
a sword would pierce, joining her interior immolation of heart and
soul with Jesus' immolation of the Passion and Cross - "that the
thoughts of many hearts will be revealed" - in their compassionate
conversion for the salvation of the world.
These, then, are some of the joys of Mary-Gardening: the
discovery, of and reflection on, the symbolical forms of the
Flowers of Our Lady on which their love-names of the research are
based - quickening our love for Mary as we work and reflect in the
garden.
One author likens the quest for the origins of some of the
more elusive of these names to the gathering of petals blown from
flowers in an attempt to find the plants from which they came. As
another author has said, when we do rediscover a symbolism that
has been lost, it is like coming upon an old elixir whose savour
has been enhanced by its hidden mellowing through the silence of
the centuries - such as the piety of the medieval Age of Faith, so
longed for today.
Finally, it should be appreciated that the old names of plants
from the popular oral traditions of the countrysides - recorded by
botanists and folklorists - are, like legends, testimony to the
popular faith of the illiterate people of the medieval rural
countrysides that otherwise would have been lost.
In the Random House Encyclopedia, Professor Christopher Hill
of Oxford, writes, in "History and Culture":
"In our century of the common man we have become
embarrassingly aware of how little we know about the lives
of ordinary people until relatively recently. About
women and children - three-quarters of the human race -
we are even more ignorant. We can know a few members of
the ruling class as individuals in classical Greece or
Rome, in Chaucer's or Shakespeare's England. It is
virtually impossible to achieve such knowledge about the
bottom 80 to 90 percent of the population until we
approach very modern times."
From this he conjectures that
"The reason why we think of the Middle Ages in Western
Europe as "an age of faith" may be only that only those
who knew how to write were almost exclusively
ecclesiastics."
Happily we have the old symbolical religious names of plants,
and the living forms of these plants, in all their beauty and
freshness, on which this symbolism was based, bearing testimony to
the broad basis of the Age of Faith in the religious traditions of
the countrysides of this predominantly rural, illiterate culture.
John S. Stokes Jr.
Copyright Mary's Gardens 1996