Ash

Weather: With the rain and generally overcast days, I haven’t been watering much; last rain 9/13/12; 12:21 hours of daylight today.

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid perpetual roses, silver lace vine, datura, Heavenly Blue morning glory, African marigolds, zinnias.

Beyond the walls and fences: Leatherleaf globemallow, white and pink bindweeds, white sweet clover, goat’s head, yellow and white evening primroses, snakeweed, native sunflowers, áñil de muerto, Tahoka daisies, heath, purple and golden hairy asters.

In my yard, looking east: Maximilian sunflowers.

Looking south: Floribunda and miniature roses, crimson rambler morning glory.

Looking west: Calamintha, leadplant, David phlox.

Looking north: California and Shirley poppies, nasturtium, chocolate flower, blanket flower, black-eyed Susan, Mexican hat, chrysanthemum, yellow cosmos.

Bedding plants: Snapdragons.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geraniums, aptenia; brought the petunias indoors.

Animal sightings: Blue bird, small brown birds, geckos, bumble bees, other bees, hornets, harvester and small black ants.

Weekly update: Earlier this summer, my neighbor finally gave up on his globe willows that had been damaged by sun scald, and brought in a back hoe. Then, he told me, he bought some ash trees because he missed his shade.

I know the reason he bought them - they were left over from some construction project and at the end of the spring season, the local store who had procured them was selling them cheap to recoup its investment. They even delivered the things with their root balls wrapped in burlap and a good six foot across.

I assume they are green ash, although landscapers sometimes choose more exotic species. None are native to Rio Arriba county. Fraxinus pennsylvanica has escaped in Colorado. Farther north and to the east it likes wet areas.

In the past the ash was grown for fire wood. It’s European cousin, the common ash, will burn quickly and cleanly, even when green. Farmers there and in early Virginia cut the trees so they would regenerate from the stumps.

The combination of combustibility and regeneration gave Fraxinus excelsior mythic status: when hit by lightening ash trees burst into flame and then regrow. In the Icelandic Younger Edda, Snorri Sturluson recorded man was created from a tree wrenched from the earth, and that woman came from an elm. As the symbol of creation, yule logs were burned in the ceremonies that celebrated the return of the sun after the winter solstice.

The other reason the trees were coppiced is all ashes make good tool handles. White ash, which grows east of the Mississippi, may be used today for ball bats and cabinet facings, but in the west the Havasupai, Omaha, Pawnee, Cheyenne, Sioux, Winnebago and Ojibwa used green ash for bows and arrow shafts.

Whether because of its use in hunting or its general utility, wood from green ash trees was used to make sacred poles by the Omaha and Sioux. The Cheyenne used the ash to build the sun dance ceremony lodge, while the Omaha, Pawnee, Ponca, Cheyenne, Lakota and Dakota used the wood for pipe stems.

I don’t know if the ashes are a good choice: the members of the olive family are late to leaf, early to drop, and currently being attacked by pathogens. On the other hand, they can survive bad air and high winds and still grow a hundred feet tall. In Europe, they once believed the common ash acted as a lightening protector, taking hits intended for their homes. If that were an ash genus trait, that alone would be worth the price in late summer when storms aimlessly prowl the area.

Notes:
Gucker, Corey L. “Fraxinus pennsylvanica,” 2005, in United States Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Fire Effects Information System, available on-line.

Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998, summarizes data from a number of ethnographies, including J. W. Blankinship, Native Economic Plants of Montana (1905); Dilwyn J, Rogers, Lakota Names and Traditional Uses of Native Plants by Sicangu (Brule) People in the Rosebud Area, South Dakota (1980); Melvin R. Gilmore, Uses of Plants by the Indians of the Missouri River Region (1919); Jeffrey A. Hart, “The Ethnobotany of the Northern Cheyenne Indians of Montana” (1981); Huron H. Smith, Ethnobotany of the Ojibwe Indians (1932); and Steven A. Weber and P. David Seaman, Havasupai Habitat (1985).

Photographs: My neighbor’s trees, soon after they were planted, 23 June 2012; small fruit tree, possibly a peach, in the rear.

Great Mullein

Weather: Storms passed over all week, but only brought increased humidity and, one morning, a wet fence; last rain 5/13/12; 14:32 hours of daylight today.

Afternoon clouds first appear over Tsikomó, then drift north behind the Jémez. This is probably one reason this was seen as a sacred mountain.

With afternoon clouds moderating temperatures a little, buds that didn’t open in the heat are coming out, including a hedgehog cactus, a Dr. Huey rose, the Persian rose and a cluster on the catalpa. Also, the raspberries are no longer drying before they’re ripe, though they’re stunted.

What’s blooming in the area: Tree of heaven, hybrid perpetual roses, buddleia, bird of Paradise, silver lace vine, trumpet creeper, red yucca, daylily, rose of Sharon, hollyhock, datura, sweet pea, alfalfa, Russian sage, purple garden phlox, single sunflowers, yellow flowered yarrow, zinnias, Shasta daisies; apricots ripening.

Beyond the walls and fences: Tamarix, leatherleaf globemallow, mullein, alfilerillo, tumble mustard, stick leaf, scarlet bee blossom, velvetweed, white and pink bindweeds, scurf peas, bush morning glory, silver leaf nightshade cut down, buffalo gourd, Indian paintbrush, horse tail, prostrate knotweed, goat’s head, Hopi tea, plain’s paper flower, goat’s beard, fleabane, horseweed, local Mexican hat, golden hairy asters, áZil del muerto, native dandelion; buds on goldenrod.

In my yard, looking east: Snow-in-summer, bouncing Bess, white and creeping baby’s breath, coral beardtongue, Jupiter’s beard, pink evening primrose, winecup mallow, sidalcea Party Girl, California and Shirley poppies, Saint John’s wort; leaves turning brown on oriental poppies.

Looking south: Rugosa, floribunda and miniature roses, Dutch clover, Illinois bundle flower.

Looking west: Caryopteris, oriental lilies, blue flax, Siberian and Seven Hills Giant catmints, leadplant, Johnson’s Blue geranium, Goodness Grows speedwell, David phlox, white spurge, perennial four o’clock, sea lavender, ladybells, Mönch asters, purple coneflowers.

Looking north: Golden spur columbine, hartweig evening primrose, butterfly weed, squash, chocolate flower, coreopsis, blanket flower, anthemis, Mexican hat, chrysanthemum.

Bedding plants: Petunia, nicotiana, snapdragons.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geraniums, aptenia.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, hummingbirds, small brown birds, geckos, hummingbird moths, cabbage and other butterflies, bees, hornets, harvester and small black ants.


Weekly update: When I was child in the 1950’s I believed almost anything I was told about how Indians had lived. The protests of the 1960's and 70's made me less credulous.

When I recently read that native Americans used mullein leaves for diapers, my first thought was have you - and I think it was a male blog writer - have you ever really handled a mullein leaf?


I know the leaves are large, up to 20" long, 4" wide, and 3/8" thick. I also know they’re covered with soft, tiny hairs which give them a fuzzy feel. But would you seriously place them next to your more sensitive body parts if anything else was available?

I picked a leaf from a roadside plant and stuck it in some water to bring home. Within half an hour, the submerged section was dark green from the moisture. The exposed part still repelled droplets. I’m not sure which attribute the blogger thinks would make it useful as a diaper.


When I was searching the web to reread that blogger, I came across another man who called himself Quaker Dan who said he knew great mullein as Indian Toilet Paper when he was a child. That’s a very different thing. Verbascum thapsus has also been called Witch’s Candles, Beggar’s Blanket and Quaker Rouge.

Most such names are less facts than negative stereotypes perpetuated by outsiders.

The only natives I’ve found who claim to have used the leaves for diapers are the Lumbees of Robeson County, North Carolina, a people who know better than most the dangers of exoteric perceptions. Anthropologists consider them to be tri-racial, while local politicians defined them as legally black in an era when that condemned them to Jim Crow segregation.

They’ve been arguing ever since they’re pure descendants of the Cheraw who migrated to the Pee Dee river from the Danville area of Virginia in 1703. In 1737 they sold their land in South Carolina and moved north.

The source of their belief they used the leaves as diapers could have come from local Scots Irish, slave or Indian traditions, or could have been absorbed from stereotypes. I haven’t found any other group in Europe, Africa or this country who admits to such a usage.

In fact, according to Wikipedia, diapers have only been traced back to the 1590's in England, just before European settlement in North America and just as Protestantism was spreading and attitudes toward the body, bodily functions and child rearing were changing. In this country, Matilda Stevenson says Zuni children simply didn’t wear much clothing until they were four years old.

Even had mullein been used by Europeans for diapers, there was none here to be used in 1620. It ranges from Scandinavia to Africa and west toward China. Gene Wilhelm believes seeds were brought here by men who used them to stupify fish.

However, it also had to have been brought earlier for other reasons. Manasseh Cutler reported its long terminating yellow spikes were “common in old fields” in July in New England in 1785.


Dioscorides first mentioned great mullein was used in the Roman empire in the first century AD to treat old coughs, while Francis Quinlan suggested it was particularly valued in Ireland for treating tuberculosis in 1883. Its use for these and related respiratory problems has been reported by tribes with close relations to either the English (Cherokee, Creek, Delaware, Lumbee, Malecite, Micmac, Mohegan, Penobscot, Shinnecock) or the French (Iroquois, Menominee, Potawatomi).

Ben-Erik Van Wyk and Michael Wink suggest the efficacy of this and related members of the figwort family comes from the presence of triterpene saponins like verbascosaponin combined with mucilage in the dried petals. They also say it’s been used successfully for ear aches (Iroquois), hemorrhoids (Iroquois), sores (Catawba, Lumbee, Malecite, Micmac) and boils.

All these tribes live east of the Appalachians or around the Great Lakes. The only groups in the west who used the herb are the Atsugewi of California and the Salish of Montana. The first used it for colds and in their sweat lodges; the second for tuberculosis.

The small seeds may not have arrived in New Mexico until modern roads were built. Stevenson doesn’t mention its use by the Zuni in the early twentieth century when Elmer Wooton and Paul Standley could still list all the places it had been found: Cedar Hill, Pecos, Mogollon and along Ruidoso Creek.

It since has spread to many parts of the state, at least those parts where there are major roads. A tall plant’s blooming behind a steel barrier on the way to Santa Fé. Usually leafing stalks get cut by road crews, and only the ones that bolt after the onset of the monsoons survive to flower. They usually leave brown stalks about two feet high and seeds that can survive for decades in the soil.


Someone down the road has let one grow by the entrance to his front drive. The biennial would have appeared as a rosette of wide grey leaves last summer, and wintered over to send up its stem of compressed leaves this spring.


When mullein first appeared in the southwest, people apparently noticed its similarity to the local tobacco, Nicotiana attenuata, and experimented with rolling powdered leaves in corn husks. Local Spanish speakers called the tobacco punche and mullein punchón. As a consequence, they discovered inhaling the smoke was good for asthma symptoms.

The Zuni also recognized the plant’s similarity to tobacco when they finally saw it and called it anna lanna. In the 1970's, people said they had used powdered roots to treat athlete’s foot. They also called the plant amidolan kwiminne when they used the roots to treat sores, rashes and other skin infections.

The Ramah Navajo considered it to be a male plant which they combined with a female, Frasera speciosa or deer’s ears, whose leaves were mixed with mountain tobacco “to give strength and to clear mind if lost while hunting or if confused after returning from a hunt, enables clear thinking so the way to camp may be found.”

The Hopi called their tobacco paviva and mullein wupaviva. The chief smoked the tobacco mixed with Macromeria viridiflora to bring rain. When mullein arrived, people mixed it with yoiviva to “cure people who have ‘fits” or who are not in their ‘right mind’” or who have “power to charm at a distance.”

Dan Moerman thinks the last refers to witchcraft, which brings us back to the nature of plants that leads to the rediscovery of the same traits by different people in different places and different times. The Apuleius Platonicus herbal, a pastiche of Dioscorides, Anglo-Saxon and possibly north African beliefs surviving from the late 1000's, says Mercury gave the plant to Ulysses to protect him from the evil magic of Circe.


Notes:
Apuleius Platonicus. Comments on Verbascum from P. Buchan, Witchcraft Detected and Prevented, 1824. In book 10 of The Odyssey, Homer has Ulysses say “The Slayer of Argus plucked from the ground the herb he promised me. The Gods call it Moly, and he showed me its nature, to be black at the root with a flower like milk. It would be difficult for men and mortals to dig up Moly; but the Gods can do anything” (translated by T. E. Shaw). There’s no scholarly consensus on the identity of moly, since it doesn’t sound like mullein.

Boughman, Arvis Locklear and Loretta O. Oxendine. Herbal Remedies of the Lumbee Indians, 2004.

Camazine, Scott and Robert A. Bye. “A Study Of The Medical Ethnobotany Of The Zuni Indians of New Mexico,” Journal of Ethnopharmacology 2:365-388:1980.

Curtin, Leonora Scott Muse. Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande, 1947, republished 1997, with revisions by Michael Moore.

Cutler, Manasseh. An Account of Some of the Vegetable Productions, 1785.

Dioscorides, Pedanius. De Materia Medica, book 4, translation found on Cancerlynx website. He claimed white phlomis was female and listed additional uses, including bruises and wounds.

Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998. He includes other uses not mentioned here, including its use as ceremonial tobacco by the Isleta and Menominee.

Quaker Dan. “Indian Diapers & Toilet Paper,” Back 40 Forums website, 8 August 2009. The discussion began when someone who called himself The Old Buzzard described the complex way he shredded first year leaves and placed the fragments within layers of leaves to create modern style diapers for his children.

Quinlan, F. J. B. “A Note upon the Use of the Mullein Plant in the Treatment of Pulmonary Consumption,” British Medical Journal 27 January 1883, pages 149-150. He read his paper at the 1884 International Medical Congress in Copenhagen. His talk and article were widely publicized in this country and its recommendations adopted by men like Herman Wilfert, who reported his experiments in “The Treatment of Pulmonary Consumption by the Mullein Plant,” The Cincinnati Lancet and Clinic 14:584-185:1885.

Stevenson, Matilda Coxe. The Zuni Indians, 1904, reprinted by The Rio Grande Press, Inc., 1985.

_____. Ethnobotany of the Zuni Indians, 1915.

Van Wyk, Ben-Erik and Michael Wink. Medicinal Plants of the World, 2004. They discuss another species, the one used today in commercial herbal medicines, but they indicate all Verbascums have the same properties.

Vestal, Paul A. The Ethnobotany of the Ramah Navaho, 1952.

Whiting, Alfred F. Ethnobotany of the Hopi, 1939. He used the synonym Onosmodium thurberi for deer ears.

Wikipedia. On-line articles on “Diaper.”

Wilhelm, Gene, Jr. "The Mullein: Plant Piscicide of the Mountain Folk Culture." Geographical Review 64: 235-52:1974. Although it’s widely cited, I haven’t been able to locate the article or an abstract to determine exactly what location he is describing. If it were Appalachia, the people could have been related to the Scots Irish who made contact with the Cherokee, Creek and Lumbee.

Wooton, Elmer O. and Paul C. Standley. Flora of New Mexico, 1915, reprinted by J. Cramer, 1972.

Photographs:
1. Giant mullein growing down the road, 6 July 2012.

2. Same plant, 5 June 2012.

3. Leaves on mullein growing along road to Santa Fé, 2 July 2012.

4. Leaf from above plant along road to Santa Fé, 2 July 2012.

5. Flower stalk from mullein growing down the road, 2 July 2012.

6. Dead stalks along road to Angel Fire, 18 June 2012.

7. Young plant growing along road on Santa Clara land, 2 July 2011.

8. Dead stalk on plant left in someone’s yard in town, 6 July 2012.

9. Close up of stem and leaves of plant on way to Santa Fé, 2 July 2012.

10. Flowering stalk from mullein growing along main road some years ago, 13 September 2008.

Chaste Tree

What’s still green: Juniper and other conifers, roses, Apache plume, honeysuckle, prickly pear, yucca, red hot poker, vinca, rock rose, sweet pea, sea pink, hollyhocks, pinks, snapdragon, golden spur columbine, some grasses. Someone down the road was pruning his apples yesterday.
What’s gray, blue or gray-green: Piñon, winterfat, saltbush, buddleia, loco, snow-in-summer.
What’s red: Cholla, coral bells, beardtongues, soapworts, pink evening primrose, purple aster.
What’s blooming inside: Brazilian Christmas cactus, South African aptenia, rochea, and kalanchoë.
Animal sightings: Small birds in the cottonwood yesterday; sounds of fowl by the river earlier in the week.
Weather: A little rain Friday night, afternoons warmer.
Weekly update: Last summer’s remaindered temptations were two blue-flowered chaste trees. It wasn’t until I got the pots home that I remembered they need protection to survive zone 6 winters.
Rather than watch them die in the western blue border, I stuck the woody shrubs on the enclosed porch with some vague hope they might grow like trees in an atrium. Instead, their buds turned to dark berries without any evidence of an intervening stage, then the leaves turned brown. Since they’d shown no tolerance for missed waterings, I assumed they needed to be kept moist. To no avail, the leaves fell. I abandoned them in December. The only reason they’re still here is the snow, ice and mud have so disrupted use of the drive that only the most critical trash has been taken to the road.
Monday I happened to look at them when I was watering the geraniums and noticed new green leaves towards the top of each. Nothing obvious had changed: they’d had no water for more than a month, temperatures had ranged between 36 and 92 since I last reset the thermometer. Only the quality of the light streaming through the southeastern windows was different.
I thought I knew what deciduous meant. By the time I was in fourth grade, I’d been told the difference between northern evergreens and Michigan hardwoods that turned color after the first frosts of fall. However, the ability to shed and regrow leaves actually appeared in the warm Early Cretaceous when swamps were widespread and flowering plants just evolving. Daniel Axelrod believes when the climate began drying, the wetland plants that survived were those that sloughed unnecessary energy drains during droughts, like my chaste trees had done last summer when I forgot to water them.
After the unknown event that killed off the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous, temperatures rose an average 18 degrees and precipitation quadrupled for nearly a million years. Jack Wolfe found deciduous trees moved north, then became dominant towards the poles. At some latitude, the absence of winter light became more critical to sustaining photosynthesis, than temperature or water. Those plants that could respond to reduced day length by shedding leaves were the ones that survived, like my nursery-grown clones did last fall.
Vitex agnus-castus seeds have been found in Syria at Jerf el Ahmar in layers dated between 9800 and 9300 BC, where George Willcox’s group traced changes in cereal grains as people in the early villages learned the ways of food plants. It’s impossible to guess what those settlers discovered about chaste tree berries. We know now they contain chemicals that stimulate the pituitary gland to produce female hormones, and that long before they appeared in fifth century BC Greek medical texts, they were used as contraceptives.
In the second century BC, Nikainetos described the tree as "wreathing of the Carians," implying it had been brought from Anatolia to Samos where it was used to bind the cult statue of Hera to a tree during her ritual marriage to her brother Zeus. Several hundred years later, Ovid said Athenian wives participating in the Thesmophorian festival reenacting Demeter’s wait for her daughter, Persephone’s return from the underworld prepared themselves by abstention and strewing their beds with agnos branches. Later, Pausanias reported Hera was born under the lygos tree on Samos and the statue of Artemis at the temple to Orthia Artemis in Sparta was found in a basket woven from its flexible branches.
Whatever the symbolism of associating these goddesses of procreation, Hera, Demeter and Artemis, with a plant that prevents pregnancy, the use of lygos branches suggests that in these sanctuaries, near the same latitude as my enclosed porch, people may also have been struck by the wondrousness of a deciduous shrub that’s among the first to return after the solstice, the first sign of returning life and the promise of spring.
Notes: Española is at 36E00' north latitude, Jerf el Ahmar at 36E22', Sparta at 37E4', Samos at 37E45' and Athens is at 37E94'.Axelrod, Daniel I. "Origin of Deciduous and Evergreen Habits in Temperate Forests," Evolution 20:1-15:1966, abstract available on-line.O’Brien, Joan V. The Transformation of Hera: A Study of Ritual, Hero, and the Goddess in the Iliad, 1993, discusses Nikainetos.Ovid. Metamorphoses, 8 AD, cited by "Thesmophoria," Encyclopedia Britannica, 1911.Pausanius. Description of Greece, c.143-161 AD, cited by Ioannia N. Tsoulogiannia and Demetrios A. Spandidos, "Endocrinology in Ancient Sparta," Hormones 6:80-82:2007 and by O’Brien.Riddle, John M. Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance, 1992.Willcox, George, Sandra Fornite, and Linda Herveux. "Early Holocene Cultivation Before Domestication in Northern Syria," Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 17:313-325:2008, available on-line.Wolfe, Jack A. "Late Cretaceous-Cenozoic History of Deciduousness and the Terminal Cretaceous Event," Paleobiology 13:215-226:1987, abstract available on-line._____ "Palaeobotanical Evidence for a Marked Temperature Increase Following the Cretaceous/Tertiary Boundary," Nature 343:153 - 156:11 January 1990, abstract available on-line.
Photograph: New chaste tree growth with unshed leaves and berries on enclosed porch, 24 January 2009.

Vinca

What’s still green: Juniper and other conifers, roses, Apache plume, yucca, prickly pear, honeysuckle, red hot poker, vinca, rock rose, blue flax, sweet pea, sea pink, winecup, hollyhocks, pinks, bouncing Bess, snapdragon, Jupiter’s Beard, golden spur columbine, Saint John’s wort, purple aster, some grasses; arborvitae turning brown.
What’s gray, blue or gay-green: Piñon, winterfat, saltbush, buddleia, loco, snow-in-summer.
What’s red: Cholla, coral bells, coral beardtongues, soapworts, pink evening primrose.
What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, rochea, bougainvillea; Christmas cactus close to opening.
Animal sightings: Birds were out Tuesday as soon as there was enough light to see, even though a low wind made it difficult for them to perch. Sunday the blue bird huddled above the porch post under the eave, obviously regretting the decision to winter here.
Weather: Sunday, wind and rain in the night before Monday’s fine snow that turned heavy after dark. The 7" in my drive has been compacting and evaporating ever since, but there’s still a thin covering in many places ready to turn to ice if it’s stepped on. 8:23 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: Something still green for the solstice should not pass unnoticed.
The Vinca minor I planted in deep, dry shade in 2000 and 2001 has survived and produced a few flowers, but the trailing stems have yet to find places wet enough to root and expand. Even so, after this week’s snows the sparse, leathery leaves are green.
John Williamson noticed periwinkle in the "Unicorn in Captivity" tapestry produced in France around 1500 for François IV de La Rouchefoucauld. One group of five-petaled blue flowers appears with a carnation under the animal’s tail, where it signifies the promise of fertility. Another clump, beyond the enclosing fence near a pomegranate, is intended to ward off the evil represented by the white campion.
The unicorn hunt, shown in five tapestries in the set, climaxes when the male animal is killed on the solstice, after having been tranquilized by the attention of a young virgin. The animal’s immediate rebirth into captivity was associated by church leaders with the birth of Christ a few days after mid-winter, but has deeper roots in the annual battle, first suggested by James Frazer in The Golden Bough, between the oak, representing summer and the sun, and holly, signifying the winter that must kill the god-king so a younger, more vital man may rein.
Robert Graves noticed the same juxtaposition of periwinkle with the lure of fertility and betrayal leading to death in a French ballad from the 1100's in which a shoemaker representing Llew Llaw Gyffes is tempted by a beautiful lady into a large bed with blue pervenche flowers on the four posts. The Celtic sun god is murdered by his rival after she binds him with the runners.
Myrtle, as my mother prosaically called periwinkle, is peripheral in the iconography of these artifacts of high French culture, but its associations with death and fertility go back to those times when plants, not animals, were used to express man’s relationship with nature and the supernatural.
Around 1230, Guillaume de Lorris wrote one of the most popular romances of the period, "Roman de la Rose," which is set in May when, to quote Chaucer’s translation, "the erthe wexeth proud" and men forget the past solstice "in which that winter had it set." A young man enters a walled garden posted with warning signs of evil where he falls in love with a rose, but is imprisoned by the guardian before he can liberate her. The first flowers Lorris lists in the garden are violets and "fresshe pervinke, riche of hewe."
The thing I wonder is how a flower, for it is always the flower that is used, no matter how inappropriate the season, went from being the healing herb used by Romans for its astringent qualities to a symbol for the sorceress who lures a man to his destruction. One possibility is that when the Romans took the Apocynaceae north to places like Britain it no longer produced seed, and any sterile plant was seen with suspicion by people who relied on grain.
After the courtly culture of the troubadours passed, the plant that had been emblematic of destructive virginity became the magical tool to cure it. In London around 1525, the unknown man who published The Book of Secrets of Albertus Mangus prescribed a charm made from powdered periwinkle, houseleaks and earthworms to "induceth love between man and woman."
In 1650, Nicolas Culpepper associated periwinkle with Venus and told his English readers the French used an infusion "to stay women’s courses," the physical manifestation of barrenness and impotence. This use of tannin from the leaves persisted into the early twentieth century when homeopathists recommended lesser periwinkle for the heavy flows of menopause that signal the end of female fecundity.
Today, both pagans and papists notice the perennial: Magica D’La Luna proclaims violette des sorciers a Wiccan patron herb while Mary DeTourris Poust includes pucellage in her garden devoted to flowers sacred to the virgin Mary. The constellation of motifs found in medieval France may have dissolved, but myrtle still blesses both the solstice and Christmas with green leaves rising from the snow.
Notes:Anonymous. The Boke of Secretes of Albartus Magnus, of the Vertues of Herbes, Stones, and Certaine Beastes. Also a Boke of the Same Author of the Maruaylous Things of the World and of Certaine Effectes Caused of Certayne Beastes, 1525, edited by Michael R. Best and Frank H. Brightman as The Book of Secrets of Albertus Magnus, 1999.
Boericke, William. Materia Medica, 1901; augmented 1927 edition kept in print by B. Jahn Publishers of New Dehli; his description is "continuous flow, particularly at climacteric."
Culpeper, Nicholas. Culpeper’s Complete Herbal and English Physician, 1650's; 1826 edition republished in 1981.

D’La Luna, Magica. "Periwinkle," available on-line.

Frazer, James George. The Golden Bough, 1922 abridged edition.

Graves, Robert. The White Goddess, 1966 second edition.

Poust, Mary DeTurris. "Planting with Prayer in Mind, 7 May 2008, available on-line.

Tuckwell, William. Chaucer, 1910, grouped with early work, translations before 1373.

Williamson, John. The Oak King, the Holly King, and the Unicorn, 1986; the seven tapestries are now owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Photograph: Vinca minor and dead June grass and iris leaves, 18 December 2008.