Nutmeg in fruit (Photo Nandhu Kumar)
On 23rd December 1616 Nathaniel Courthope came into view of Pulo Run, an island situated in the Moluccas (Indonesia), which have been known as the Spice Islands of the East Indies, and is the region from which nutmeg originates. Courthope was the Captain of a trade ship who had been sent by the East India Company to make friends with the fierce locals and get them to agree to trade nutmeg (Milton, 1999). Continue reading
Imageries of the of the Mother and Child are often used in traditional Christmas cards but our modern versions seem to omit a fruit that has Christian symbolism. The pomegranate was often featured alongside the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus in artworks from the 15th century, with many famous artists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Sandro Botticelli creating numerous art pieces that explore this theme. The Italian Renaissance painter, Sandro Botticelli, painted the ‘Madonna of the Magnificat’ and the ‘Madonna of the Pomegranate’. In both paintings, mother and child hold a split pomegranate revealing its blood red seeds. The National Gallery in London holds ‘The Virgin and Child with a Pomegranate’ by the same artist. Continue reading
My childhood in New Zealand was punctuated every autumn by a bounty of a sweet, fragrant fruit called feijoas. Our garden, like many of our neighbours’ contained a couple of non-descript evergreen shrubs. Every summer they would develop a display of small white flowers with fleshy petals and brilliant red stamens, promising a bumper crop of egg-shaped green fruit for the coming autumn, as long as its pollinators: bees and small birds, do their job. When autumn came, the fruit would drop to the ground, where I’d have to be quick to harvest them by the bucketful every few days before they began to rot.
This is Dr M’s contribution to #AdventBotany for 2017 the fourth fantastic year of this true botanical original originating from the School of Biological Sciences, University of Reading! The 2017 edition is curated by Dr M’s colleague Dr Alastair Culham.
For day 11, ironically as I wrote this post it is snowing here in deepest darkest urban Berkshire, and was the timely inspiration for my title!
Two glasses of sloe gin
Sloe gin is an increasingly popular festive drink. Its astringent, alcoholic, delicate yet complex sweetness and rosy red colouration, make it a winning combination as a festive beverage finding a worthy place amongst the tinsel garlands and mince pies, guaranteed to warm the cockles of the heart on the frostiest of Christmas days!
In the family Rosaceae, Blackthorn and Sloe are two vernacular names for Prunus spinosa as it is scientifically known. In common with plants everywhere, the Sloe has many stories to tell us. Continue reading
At this time of year, there is always that one person who is impossible to buy a gift for. What do you get a botanist who has everything? Well, how about some microscope slides?
As we’ve been working our way through Manchester Museum’s 15,000 microscope slide collection, I can’t help but imagine some of these as presents. For starters, there’s all that beautiful paper; no gift is complete without the careful wrapping. Early microscope slides were wrapped in paper to keep the coverslip in place on top of the specimen. Other methods for attaching the coverslip were developed, but some slide preparators continued to use the papers for decoration.
![By Daniel Naczk (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0] via Wikimedia Commons https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0](https://blogs.reading.ac.uk/crg/files/2017/12/Glasgow_Botanic_Gardens._The_Elf_1899-150x150.jpg)
Glasgow Botanic Gardens. Kibble Palace. William Goscombe John (1860-1952), The Elf, marble, 1899
In the 1850s Louisa May Alcott, the American novelist, abolitionist, feminist and jogger (yes, really) first wrote about elves in her unpublished book Christmas Elves. Her elves, based on our modern notion of small male humans robed in green onesies, pointy hats, medieval pointinini style shoes and enslaved in Father Christmas’s toy workshop may have evolved from the Scandinavian pagan belief that elves were house gnomes who guarded their places of residence from evil. Continue reading
Rhododendron ‘Christmas Cheer’ CC BY-SA 2.0
And it only just dawned on me; there’s actually something similar happening in the cupboards of our herbarium. Plants from all different families and genera are cheering and celebrating Christmas through their names and appearances! After all, why should just the ivies (click here for the magnificent monograph), hollies and poinsettias have all the fun? Here’s a list of some of our dried and pressed cultivated plants that celebrate Christmas (or shall we say ‘CULTIVATING CHRISTMASES’!) Continue reading
Last year for advent botany I wrote about the Madonna lily (Lilium candidum) and its links to the Christmas story and the song of Solomon. This year, however, I propose another hypothesis as to the identity of the ‘Lily of the valley’ and the ‘Rose of Sharon’.
Another set of leaves makes its presence felt on my research nursery at this time of year. Curled and grey-green in colour they stand out vividly against the sand in their ‘long tom’ pots. From the moment they emerge they become a niggling worry. There is no easy hope here. They are a struggle and a torment, and my hope is only that I may keep them alive. If they reward me with flowers for my efforts, then I am jubilant. If they die I am afraid I am disappointed but never surprised. The aphids love them; spreading virus if I am not eagle eyed. When dormant and dry they are safe: yet If I water them too early to bring them into growth they rot, too late and they wither. They are my passion and have been my nemesis.
I have been told many times that I won’t be able to grow them successfully here in North Wales yet I carry on. They are a goal that I strive for and am pleased to say, tentatively, achieving. Continue reading
As we are entering the countdown to Christmas, preparations for the festive season reach new levels. For me, this usually involves a panicked trip to the shops with my Christmas list, the realisation that I’ve run out of wrapping paper minutes before closing time, and the overwhelming smell of dried oranges and spices from the decorative garlands that appear to have taken over every single shopping centre. My fondest pre-Christmas memories however do not involve shops or gift-buying: they are always linked with the smell of home-baking. Smells that I immediately connect to the celebration of Christmas: orange zest, mahleb, cinnamon, cardamom. And of course, mastic.
Hibberd’s monograph on Ivy comes in an ivy green cover
The first Advent Botany post, on December 1st, 2014, was about ivy, that most classic of British festive season species. English Ivy, as it’s known in North America (Hedera helix) is an evergreen woody climbing plant. It is native to much of Europe and Asia, and it was introduced to North America as a garden plant, where it promptly jumped over the fence. Ivy is considered invasive in Washington State, USA and in British Columbia, Canada. It also does very well in my Toronto front garden.
Ivy always makes me think of 19th century England, perhaps because it’s so common in Victorian North Oxford, where I lived for 6 years. We know that ivy was a popular garden plant during Victorian times because James Shirley Hibberd (1825 – 1890), the very successful gardening writer and journalist (Wilkinson 2012), devoted an entire book to it, called:
The Ivy, a monograph: comprising the history, uses, characteristics, and affinities of the plant, and a descriptive list of all the garden ivies in cultivation (1872). Continue reading
