Episode 259: Succulentomania: illustrations from an eighteenth century botanical treasury
(Left to right) An Opuntia, an Agave, and a group of cacti including the succulent identified by Gordon Rowley as an ‘imposter’. Images courtesy of Bodleian Library Publishing.
Transcript
Episode 259
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
succulents, plants, book, aloes, cacti, called, seed, aztecs, illustrations, talk, colour, grow, 18th century, prickly pears, people, splendour, spanish, herbal, living, pots
SPEAKERS
Caroline Ball, Jane Perrone
Jane Perrone
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Jane Perrone
Hello, and welcome to On The Ledge podcast and this week I bring you a splendour of succulents and cacti! I'm your host, Jane Perrone, and in this week's show, I'm talking to author Caroline Ball about a groundbreaking book that brought succulents to life in the 18th century. A correction from last week's Q&A episode, episode 258: lots of you said you enjoyed the show, but thank you to Kevin Hawkins for pointing out that I made a boo boo! I'm always happy to own up to my mistakes and in this case, the question from The Happy Plotter which I said concerned a Calathea actually concerned a Caladium. Now, interestingly, the advice I gave, I'd pretty much keep the same whether it was a Caladium or a Calathea. Of course, Caladiums generally do die down in the autumn, in, sort of, my kind of climate and probably any kind of indoor climate where the light levels drop in the winter. Caladiums tend to die back to nothing and then regrow from their bulb. Calatheas, on the other hand - or to correctly give them their up-to-date genus name, Goeppertias - don't tend to do that unless they're really, really unhappy, and they tend to grow back from their rhizomes, which are another form of storage organ. They're sort of a special form of stem, so it's a slightly different mechanism, but the same things apply in terms of giving the plant some support with a clear plastic bag and putting it somewhere warm and bright, but not in direct light. So I'm sorry that I messed that up, The Happy Plotter! And I'm hoping to do a Caladium episode at some point, with an expert on Caladiums, so watch this space! Maybe we'll do more on those soon! Also, an On The Ledge sowalong update: I'm going to do an Instagram Live at lunchtime on the 22nd of March 2023. My Instagram is @j.l.perrone and I'm going to do an Instagram Live, about half an hour from one o'clock on the 22nd of March - that's UK time - talking about all of the issues to do with sowing seeds and I'll probably actually do a little bit of seed-sowing live as well, and be there to answer your questions. So do pop along to that if you can, for more seed-sowing goodness! Thank you to Ian for becoming a Super Fan and Chris for becoming a Ledge-End, joining the ranks of the Patreon clans, and you can do the same - just visit janeperrone.com for all the details!
Jane Perrone
It's tempting to think that the current clamour for cacti and succulents is a very new thing and that we're all very innovative and different for deciding to get into these plants, but if history tells us anything, it's that there ain't nothing new out there, really, is there, and that is very true with our current succulentomania, as we might call it!? And that's why I was keen to talk to author Caroline Ball about her new book, 'A Splendour of Succulents and Cacti', which uncovers the 18th century's passion for succulent plants via a groundbreaking book that included magnificent colour illustrations of beautiful plants from around the world, including many cacti and succulents. Here's Caroline to tell us more!
Caroline Ball
My name is Caroline Ball and I'm the author of some books about plants and this one is slightly different! It's called 'A Splendour of Succulents and Cacti' and I should say, right from the off, it's not an encyclopaedia of succulents, or how to look after them, but it's rather a celebration of a rare book of plants that was published nearly 300 years ago.
Jane Perrone
I've got it in front of me, Caroline! Welcome to the show, by the way, and it really is a splendour of succulents and cacti! I do love these illustrations! So we're gonna get into the origins of these and how it all came about, as we talk. It is fascinating to see that those of us who perhaps are new to the hobby of succulents think that succulents are a very new fascination, but this book tells a very different story about our love for succulents and how far back it goes. How far back can we trace the origins of this 'succulentomania', as you call it in the book?
Caroline Ball
Well, you could say it's as old as civilization itself! The ancient Egyptians, for example, used certain Aloes for medicinal purposes and their beauty preparations, and the Mayans and Aztecs, they used lots of different succulents because so many, something like 60% of cacti originated in Mexico, so they had lots on their hands! But the first big explosion of interest in Europe can be put down to Christopher Columbus. One of Columbus's tasks, as well as discovering and claiming new lands for the Spanish monarchs, of course, he was asked to seek out and bring back anything that was interesting and useful, gold and silver, naturally, but also anything, any curiosities and also plants. Now, we all know about tomatoes and potatoes and chocolate, which Europeans had no idea existed, but one of the particular plants they did know about and requested particularly, was Aloes. That jelly-like pulp inside their leaves and stems was always in high demand for all kinds of conditions, to treat skin complaints and gum disease and even battle wounds, and the Spanish king and queen, Ferdinand and Isabella, hoped they might, through Columbus, secure a supply of their own, from this as yet undiscovered new world they had such high hopes for, rather than have to rely on traders from Africa and Asia. And sure enough, Columbus did find a great number of new Aloes, or, at least, that's "Aloes" in inverted commas, because they're mostly what we would now call Agaves, but he also came across some other succulents that must have struck him and his fellow explorers as really weird, and these are the cacti. We imagine, because they look so at home in dry lands all over the world, that they must always have been there, but cacti are only native to the Americas. Actually, I must qualify that because there's bound to be an expert out there who'll pick me up on it! There is one cactus called Ripsalis Baccifera, the Mistletoe Cactus, which is believed to be native to Asia and Africa, but these early Spanish and Portuguese Conquistadors would never have seen anything like a prickly pear, or great round barrel cactus, and they must have been absolutely astonished! And so a whole range of extraordinary, never-before-seen plants began to be shipped across the Atlantic to Europe. So I guess that could be what would be called the first mania for succulents.
Jane Perrone
I guess the unwritten side of this, that we really don't know, is how the indigenous peoples of places like Mexico felt about their cacti and succulents being ripped out of the ground and taken to Europe! It's been happening since these times, but you can see why these plants were appealing to Western sensibilities. They were new, they were unusual, they were architectural and they were useful as well. I guess that all of those things applied? And looking through the illustrations in the book, what amazed me was quite how accurate the portrayals were. Were they changing hands for large amounts of money when they first arrived?
Caroline Ball\ Oh, definitely! I mean, the Aloes we've talked about, so they would have been very keen, anyone involved in medicine, or apothecaries, people like that, were always thirsty for new plants to try out on their poor patients! I've mentioned the aloes, but a popular treatment for many illnesses, was to purge the patient, to make them vomit or empty their bowels, and succulent members of the huge Euphorbia family were very effective for purging, which is why, by the way, that the common name for a lot of euphorbias is Spurge - purge, Spurge - so probably, a lot of people will have heard of John Gerard and his herbal, which came out to at the end of the 16th century, and he mentions prickly pears, Opuntias. He called them 'prickly Indian things' and he mentioned that they turn your urine to the colour of blood: not really very clear whether this was a good thing or a bad thing! But it's indicative of the sort of interest that these new plants piqued in people like that. You said about the extreme value - obviously, there were people who were collecting them - I'll say a little bit more about that in a moment - but prickly pears, in particular, were the source of something that turned out to be extraordinarily valuable and they had no idea because when those early explorers that we were talking about, when they came in contact with the Aztecs, they were as amazed by the Aztecs on shore as the Aztecs were amazed by these strange people who were arriving on their shores. And we won't go into the history of what happened, but the conquest was not a happy one. They were looking primarily for silver and gold, Eldorado and all that, but one thing that they noted, is that the Aztecs, in their paintings and in the fabrics that they wove for their clothes, one of the colours they had was an extraordinarily bright scarlet and Europeans, at the time, were using plants such as Madder, or minerals like Cinnabar, to make their red pigments, but they were nowhere near as brilliant as what the Aztecs could get, and the Spanish rightly predicted that Europe would go wild with this new colour, if only they could find out how the Aztecs made it. And this is something that the Aztecs did keep to themselves to begin with, but eventually the Spanish discovered the source and it was a insignificant-looking little insect that lived and bred on prickly pears, and the Spanish called it called 'cocinilio' - cochineal - and so by the middle of the 16th century, these little insects were the most valuable import from the Americas, after gold and silver, and the Spanish managed to keep their monopoly on it for more than 200 years, which is pretty impressive, but inevitably, eventually, the Brits and the French and the Dutch and so on found their own sources, and prickly pears and cochineals go on to have their own interesting history in quite different parts of the world. But to keep on track about this early fascination with these first new arrivals, as you picked up on, people wanted to collect them, so they were prized for their looks. And, as you said, the paintings in the book are very detailed - and we'll come on to how they were done and everything - but the Aloes in particular are presented rather beautifully, in their fancy, colourful urns that they're potted up in. They're not made to look like wild plants at all. And that's how they would have been displayed by collectors. And, perhaps surprisingly, some of the most enthusiastic collectors were in Northern Europe, where the cool, damp climate is quite the opposite of what most succulents like, but, I don't know, maybe that's exactly why: there's nothing like a challenge, or scarcity, or something, to make it covetable and a must-have!
Jane Perrone
Yeah, you're right. Some of these containers are, I mean, I might even describe them, that they're very jolly, and some of them, I would even say, are bordering on gaudy! Quite elaborate! I mean, there's a few which are kind of more simple, just look like sort of half oak barrels, but then there's some which have really gone for the whole, you know, pink and gold scrolls and ruffles look! I mean, it must have been made these plants look even more dramatic and also was just showing off the wealth of the owner, I'm assuming? Along with the valuable plant, they've got a valuable pot to go with it?
Caroline Ball\ That's definitely the case, because this wasn't your average Joe, living in an ordinary street who could afford these. The biggest collectors were the aristocracy. We all know the story about pineapple pits, and things like that, being grown, and it was all about saying, 'How wealthy, how grand I am, that I've been able to produce this exotic plant!" And yes, the pots were all part of that look, but rather nicely, we can see one of those collections today, if you happen to be in the vicinity of London, because of the collection that Mary II made. Mary was the daughter of James the Second - that's James the seventh for all those Scots out there - and her interest in plants probably began at a an early age because her tutor was an enthusiastic botanist who later became the Bishop of London. And then she was married off to Prince William of Orange and, of course, moved to the Netherlands and she would have come across a great many more plants that were new to her there because William was also interested in in botany and plants. And the Dutch at the time, had extensive territories, the Dutch East Indies and Malacca, bits of India and Southern Africa, and then right across to the Caribbean and the coast of South America. Then, when she and William came to England, they were asked to become joint monarchs in 1688, they brought with them what Mary called her tender exotics, and they were kept in special, early glasshouses and orangeries at the Royal Palace at Hampton Court. There's one section of gardens which was known as the Glass Case Garden, and it had three hothouses and each of them - these make our greenhouses seem very pathetic! - each pot house was 55 foot long. That's over 60 metres! And, very sadly, Mary died when she was very young, she was only 32, but the collection that she, and William as well, made was really one of the best in the world and it continued to be treasured by the royals who came after them. And when George the Third, decided to live at Kew Palace rather than Hampton Court, he had the plants all moved there and, in time, her exotic garden became one of the foundations of what's now world-famous Kew Botanical Gardens. And have you been to Hampton Court Palace recently, Jane?
Jane Perrone
I have, for the flower show, but I didn't get a chance to look at the gardens and I haven't really been to the gardens park since I was probably a child, which is a long time ago. I remember getting very lost in the maze!
Caroline Ball
Right, well, next time you go, avoid the maze and head for the Queen's Garden because for, oh, goodness, 30 years, I think the garden team there have been researching Mary's original collection, so you can now visit what they've recreated! There are lots of orange trees - William and Mary of Orange, of course! - but also lots of the succulents that she had and in the summer, they put them all displayed outside in replicas of the decorative pots that she would have used. There's lots of Delft-type blue and white, as you can imagine, but just the sort of pots that had been depicted in the book that the illustrations came from!
Jane Perrone
Oh, well that is definitely going on the garden visit list in that case! That's, yeah, that's interesting! And I didn't realise that that was the foundation, that then, that collection, sort of was the foundation of Kew, which is also really interesting! And there was one particular succulent that you talk about in the book, which is still going today - a caudiciform plant, one of these kind of fat plants - that's still going and alive today, although I suspect it's possibly past its best! Can you tell me a bit more about that?
Caroline Ball
Oh, you're thinking of such a sweet story, I think, though you've spoilt the ending, you realise!?
Jane Perrone
Apologies! Spoiler alert!
Caroline Ball
The Austrian emperors were also great collectors and, by the 18th century, the Imperial Palace Gardens in Vienna had an amazing reputation for the plants they contained. And right at the end of the 18th century, they received this really odd-looking plant from South Africa. It, as you say, is a type of caudiciform, which is, they're those succulents that store water in their trunks, so they usually have quite a, an odd look about them, but this was only small and nobody'd seen anything like it and it was just kept as a curiosity. In fact, for quite a while, it was believed not even to be a living plant! They thought it was a fossil! And it was only in the beginning of the 20th century that it was finally identified. And it's a Fockea crispa and it lived on and on! And during the Second World War, a caring gardener was worried about threats from bomb raids, so he took it home with him and it spent some time on his windowsill. Now, I called it "it", this plant, but actually, I should probably say "she" because she's come to be known as the "alte Frau von Schoenbrunn" - the old lady of Schoenbrunn - and if you visit Schoenbrunn, which is the enormous former palace in Vienna, she lives in the "Wuestenhaus", the desert house, and they reckon she's probably the oldest potted plant in the world!
Jane Perrone
Wow, that really is a venerable plant! And, I mean, I'm fascinated by that! You always think "Gosh, how can a plant live that long?" It's just, that's just an amazing thing! Maybe there's descendants of other plants, presumably, that were brought over, that their descendants are still alive, that we're enjoying in many of our European botanical gardens as well, but for one plant to be still alive, that was in its original form, is mind-blowing!
Caroline Ball
I think it was quite old when it arrived in Vienna!
Jane Perrone
Right! Wow!
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Jane Perrone
More from Caroline shortly and in next week's podcast, I will have botanist Scott Zona on the show to talk about this issue of "How long do plants live?" And if you're a Patreon subscriber, you can hear an extended interview with Scott on this subject, which will be going up in the next few days. But now it's time to bring you another fact from my book, Legends of the Leaf, coming out on April 27th, and it's getting close, it's getting exciting! Unfortunately, I do have some not-so-exciting news related to the book. This is a bit of a gut punch, to be honest. Not gonna lie. I have learned in the last week that the book is not going to be distributed in the US, so that means that you won't be seeing the physical print copy on amazon.com or other big book-selling websites. You will be able to get hold of the book. You will be able to go into a bookshop and order a copy and you'll be able to download the eBook, the, I guess it's a Kindle version or the electronic form of the book, but you won't be able to get the physical book in an Amazon order, or Barnes and Noble, or anywhere like that. This does not affect anybody who has pledged through the Crowdfunder: you will get your copies that you have bought, and any other rewards that you've bought, with no problem, and the book is available on amazon.co.uk and you could order that from from anywhere in the world, provided you're prepared to pay the shipping costs. This may change. The book may be picked up for distribution in the US, but currently that isn't the case and I know how disappointing that will be for a lot of people who hoped to pick the book up that way, and I'm really disappointed too because I know that there are so many listeners in the USA who want to get their hands on this book. On the plus side, if you're in Europe, I have seen that it's available on various European book websites and I'm putting together, for my website, janeperrone.com, a list of all the places where you can get hold of the book, which will be coming very soon, so you can hopefully track it down. So there we go - as always, moving onwards and upwards! And this week's fact concerns Lithops, the living stones, those incredible succulents and their seed pods. Now, if you have ever played the game Trivial Pursuit, picture the game counter, that round, pie-like structure with separate sections for each of the slices that you get every time you get the question, right? Well, that's what a Lithops seed pod looks like! It has five to eight little slots arranged in a pie structure and each one has its own lid that can work independently of all the other lids! And this is shut while it's dry, but as soon as rain falls, then the lid starts to open, raindrops can splash in and boom, the seed heads out into the world, is exposed to the rain, flooded out of that chamber, goes on to the ground and, where it finds somewhere to germinate, off it goes - that is a new Lithops plant on the way! But the plant doesn't want to waste any seed, so if some seeds get stuck inside their chamber, then, once the rain stops and things dry out, then the lid shuts down, dries out the seeds left inside and next time it rains, will be available again to make a break for freedom. Isn't that cool? That's how this plant reproduces itself. It doesn't want to waste those precious seeds. So it's a very, very, very clever little plant. More fascinating facts about Lithops in the Living Stones chapter. You can find out what rubrications are, and the role of tannins in this particular species. Oh, that sounds intriguing! You can find out more in the Lithops chapter of Legends of the Leaf! Now, back to my interview with Caroline!
Jane Perrone
Now we need to talk about the main character in all of this, the man who made all this wonderful splendour of succulents happen, and, presumably, bank the whole enterprise as well? Can you tell me about this chap, Johann?
Caroline Ball
Yes. You're on very familiar terms with him, aren't you!?
Jane Perrone
Well, it's probably because I'm looking at his second name and thinking my German is just not . . . I mean, I don't know how you pronounce . . . is it 'Vineman', I'm guessing?
Caroline Ball
That's exactly right! Yeah.
Jane Perrone
Okay, good! I shouldn't have doubted myself, clearly! But I knew how to pronounce Johann, so I'm glad that I managed! My German listeners are head-in-hands at this point! Oh, let's hear about Weinmann!
Caroline Ball
Right, well, yes, his full name was Johann Wilhelm Weinmann and he was a German apothecary. He was born in 1683 and he settled as a young man in Regensburg, which is on the banks of the Danube down in Bavaria, right in the south of Germany and he was obviously a pretty talented businessman because he built up a thriving business from what had been a failing apothecary shop and by the time he was about 40, he had plenty of money to invest in his other interests, which were mostly plant-related. He created a botanical garden for the city and he wrote several learned papers and then he had this idea for his legacy, I guess, if you wish. His idea was that he would commission expert plantsmen and artists to write and illustrate a reference book. It's a bit of a half-herbal, half-florilegium that would describe every plant in the world: detailed descriptions of how and where they grew and distinguishing features to help with ID and the uses they could be put to. And it's the illustrations that would be what we might call today a USP, unique selling point. And by this time, early 18th century, in printing history, etchings had replaced the cruder wood cuts that the old herbals used, but they generally had to be hand-coloured, but Weinmann wanted his printed in colour. It wasn't absolutely the first book to feature colour printing, but it was one of the first and definitely one of the most ambitious. It grew and grew and, in fact, it wasn't finished until three years after Weinmann himself had died, and it extended to four big fat volumes and features around three and a half thousand different plants. And you mentioned the bank-rolling, well, as you can imagine, it was a wildly expensive project and only 600 copies of the book were ever printed, and in the 280, nearly 300 years since it first appeared, many of these volumes have been broken up and the prints are sold individually because they're still very popular and you'll often see them popping up at auctions, or for sale online. But a complete volume is extremely rare and sought after and all the illustrations of succulents in my book have been reproduced from the editions of Weinmann's book that's held in the Bodleian Library, in Oxford. You were stumbling over German, we're both getting to stumble over something now! You and I both avoided saying the title of Weinmann's book!
Jane Perrone
Yes!
Caroline Ball
It's just such a tongue-twister! I'm going to say it now - get it out the way! It's called 'Phytanthoza Iconographia', but I think it's just easier to call it the 'Iconographia', or Weinmann's book, don't you!?
Jane Perrone
Absolutely! I mean, perhaps, back in the day, the complexity of the title was a reflection of some kind of value? I don't know why they gave it that title, but . . .
Caroline Ball
It's something he made up. It wasn't a well-known thing. All it means is a picture book of plants, really, but as was very common, when I say the title was - here we go again! - 'Phytanthoza Iconographia', that's only the first two words because the title page goes on and on, there's a whole page of it! But that was a very common thing in those days and books would just be known by a shortened version, but we don't even like the shortened version, do we!?
Jane Perrone
No! Indeed! I think we need to also get in, a little bit deeper, into this idea of herbals and florilegiums, as you've already mentioned - you've mentioned Gerard's Herbal - and this idea of these key texts. Was there an actual, tangible difference between a herbal and a florilegium and do botanists still refer to these kinds of documents today?
Caroline Ball
Oh there was a definite difference, yes. They're both types of plant books, but they had different aims in mind. Herbals were primarily about how to use the plants and they were a pretty vital reference for identifying them and differentiating between similar-looking species and advising on how they should be prepared and used and, in their time, they were the go-to book for apothecaries and the like, but also a standard in most households, at least households that could read because they advised on herbs for cooking and for strewing on the floor and how to prepare dyes from plants as well as things like home remedies. And a florilegium was more a record of a plant collection and so the focus was on beauty rather than utility, and it might simply be a selection of exquisite paintings of exotic flowers, or it might provide a record of all the plants in a genus, or those found in a particular area, or even in a particular garden. And yes, we don't really use herbals today because science has moved on, but florilegia are still produced and are very beautiful, and your English listeners may have heard about the Highgrove Florilegium, which King Charles commissioned as a record of all the plants in the garden of his Gloucestershire home when he was Prince of Wales.
Jane Perrone
Yes, of course! I hadn't thought of that but that's very true. Yeah, fascinating! Fascinating stuff! Focusing, though, on Weinmann in particular, and his - I'm not gonna say it! I'm not gonna say the title! - there's some amazing images in this book. What are some of your favourites, and the most interesting ones, in the work? And who actually was behind these? I'm guessing he wasn't taking up a paintbrush himself! Who actually did the illustrations for the book?
Caroline Ball
The short answer is no one knows! That's not quite true. Once he'd formulated the plan for this grand book, he began to collect suitable images, but then quite early on, he happened to encounter a jobbing gardener who, because he'd shown an interest in drawing and a talent for it - he'd also had some training in botanical illustration - and when Weinmann discussed the project with him and showed him the paintings he'd amassed so far, this young man, because he was only 20 but he must have had huge self confidence, because he turned around to Weinmann and said, in effect, "Oh, no, no, no! It'd be much better if I did them for you sir!" so they came to an agreement and this young man set to work. But there's no way he could ever achieve the rate of output that Weinmann wanted and, after a year, he'd 'only' done about 500 paintings and so they fell out and went their own separate ways. Well, we do know the name of this young artist, because it was Georg Dionysius Ehret, and if you float his name in front of anyone who's got an interest in botanical art, you'll probably get a really enthusiastic response, and, to some, he's on a par with Redoute, who did all his wonderful roses. And Ehret went on to work and learn from the very best. He collaborated with Linnaeus, who was, at the time, the same sort of age, the two of them, and Linnaeus was just formulating that new system, the Linnaean system, for classifying plants. And Ehret then came and settled in England, where he became a highly sought-after artist and also a tutor to the wealthy and titled. So after they'd broken up, Weinmann commissioned other artists and it was quite common in those days, the original illustrators, they remained anonymous, they were never credited. And it was the engravers who translated their work onto the copper plates for printing, and did the final colouring, we know their names, but we don't know the original artists who painted them.
Jane Perrone
That's a bit of a shame, isn't it, that those names were, kind of, were in obscurity? I think, hopefully, times have changed now, but the work that they did, I mean, it's just so . . . I mean, each one of those pictures must have taken such a long time and required such amazing observation and skills. It's, as I say, it's a tragedy we don't know all of those names. But are there any particular images from the book that are your absolute favourite ones that you always sort of turn back to, or maybe have framed on a wall?
Jane Perrone
Well, maybe a copy!
Caroline Ball
If only! Well, I'm sure everyone will have their own favourites and it's been interesting showing them to different people, ones that have been picked out, and some of the most beautiful, you'll probably agree, are the flowers, like the night-flowering Cereus. But I know that the publisher is particularly fond of all those Aloes, because of their great urns, that we've already talked about. But the ones that fascinated me, in a horrifying sort of way, are the Medusas Heads. They're a type of Euphorbia, but completely different from the ones we might grow in our gardens, and their common name says it all really. They look like a tangle of writhing snakes! But there's actually one other I would like to tell you about. It's another Euphorbium and, at first glance, it looks like a very ordinary, chunky, green succulent, with spines all along its edge, but what singles it out, is that it's actually fictitious! I'm sure that Weinmann - yes, I know! - I'm sure Weinmann has no idea about it, and he gives it a proper old fashioned Latin name and so on, but Gordon Rowley, who only died a few years ago - he lived until his late nineties and I'm sure some of your listeners would have come across his many books - he spotted it and he describes the page on which it appears in the Iconographia as 'two genuine euphorbias and a mythical one!' And so how that came to slip in, it might have been an artist who got carried away, or perhaps he was working from a misleading description because although many of the plants in Weinmann's book were painted from life, others were copied from illustrations, or sometimes they just relied on description. And in, I don't know if you know, there's a companion book to this, which I also did, which came out about eighteen months ago, that - a different theme; it's called A Cornucopia of Fruit and Vegetables - and in it, there's a banana, and it's pretty obvious the artist has never seen a real banana!
Jane Perrone
Well, yeah, that kind of gives it away, doesn't it? You're looking at it, going, "Really!?" I'm gonna have to look that up! That's fascinating. Perhaps you could provide us with an image for the show notes, because I think we all want to see how they've misinterpreted that!
Caroline Ball
OK, I'll do that!
Jane Perrone
Fantastic! I mean, obviously, Rowley's reaction was being able to identify the mythical succulent. Do you think there's anything that us modern succulent enthusiasts can learn from looking at this work?
Caroline Ball
Oh, I'm sure, yes. I mean, anyone, obviously anyone interested in botanical art will really enjoy them, I think, because they are so seldom seen because they are mostly locked away in the bowels of august institutions like Kew Gardens and the university libraries, but from us non-botanical artists, I think of it, everything that I've learned through it, and through the research, I think it is a little bit like travelling. We can visit a foreign city and enjoy looking at the buildings, the parks, the people, but we can gain so much more if we know a little bit about what's made that city and those people. I mean, maybe it's just me, but I think it adds something to know that they, although cotyledons are now grown for their pretty foliage and delicate flowers, they were once used for calming upset stomachs and getting rid of kidney stones, or that, back to prickly pears again, they're rampant everywhere warm and sunny, but they've also got little miniature relations who live in the Canadian Rockies, but they're only a few, tiny little, three or four inches tall, and I get, I just get some pleasure when I see, for instance, a barrel cactus, to know that when they first arrived in England, they were called Hedgehog Thistles!
Jane Perrone
Oh, that's great! Yes, I love that! That's a very . . . I suppose we're trying to relate something that feels so strange to something familiar?
Caroline Ball
You can see why they call them Hedgehog Thistles, can't you?
Jane Perrone
Absolutely!
Caroline Ball
And also, the sort of then-and-now thing, because I think it can be quite a surprise that so many of the succulents we know today, were studied and connected and painted back in the 18th century. Maybe it's a bit like when children realise their grandparents must have had sex.
Jane Perrone
Yes, that's a good, yeah, that's a good analogy! Yes, you're absolutely right! We tend to think these things have very short histories, whereas, in fact, as your book so eloquently illustrates, these things go back an awfully long way. Well, I'm gonna put the full details of the book in the show notes, along with some images from the book, Caroline. It's a wonderful thing and really nice to take the opportunity to look beyond the usual - and very useful - advice about how to grow cacti and succulents, to actually consider their history. So thank you so much for joining me today! I hope lots of readers will be dipping into your book soon.
Caroline Ball
Thank you. It's been a pleasure and great fun to talk to you!
Jane Perrone
Thanks so much to Caroline and if you want to see some of those illustrations from the book, do check out my show notes at janeperrone.com where you'll also find full details of the book, its title and where you can get hold of a copy for yourself. Thank you so much for joining me this week and I'll be back next week with another plant-packed episode. Bye! The music you heard in this episode was 'Roll Jordan, Roll' by The Joy Drops; 'The Road We Used To Travel When We Were Kids', by Komiku; and 'Whistle' by Benjamin Banger. The ad' music is 'Candlelight' by Jahzzar. All tracks are Licenced under Creative Commons. Visit the show notes for details.
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I talk to author Caroline Ball about her new book exploring a groundbreaking eighteenth century work whose illustrations of succulents are still much loved today.
This week’s guest
Caroline Ball is a writer and editor with a keen interest in gardening and a passion for garden history. Her other books include Heritage Apples and A Cornucopia of Fruit & Vegetables.
Her book A Splendour of Succulents & Cacti is out now, published by Bodleian LIbrary Publishing.
Check out the shownotes as you listen…
German apothecary Johann Wilhelm Weinmann was a prosperous apothecary in Bavaria when he commissioned a groundbreaking reference book with the very unwieldy title Phytanthoza Iconographia: a cross between a florilegium and a herbal published almost 300 years ago.
It aimed to feature every plant from around the world, including many wonderful cacti and succulents: it was one of the first books to be printed in colour and extended to four volumes, featuring 3,500 plants. Only 600 copies of the book were printed.
The illustrations in Caroline Ball’s book about the Phytanthoza Iconographia were all sourced from the copy of the book in the Bodleian Library in Oxford.
Succulents were highly valued by eighteenth century plant hunters: both as curiosities and in the case of some, for their medicinal qualities, including the Agaves and Euphorbias.
All members of the cactus family are native to the Americas, excepting Rhipsalis baccifera.
Phytanthoza Iconographia’s illustrations show the cacti and succulents in elaborate pots as they were high value items that rich Europeans liked to show off.
‘The Old Lady of Schönbrunn’ is a venerable specimen of Fockea capensis and is reputed to be the oldest potted plant in the world and can still be seen at the Schönbrunn Palace in VIenna.
One of the illustrations shows a plant called Euphorbium supinum squamosum (pictured in the bottom right hand corner of the image at the top of the page) was identified as an imposter by succulent expert Gordon Rowley. We don’t know how this happened - did an illustrator get carried away, or was the illustrator relying on an inaccurate description?
The image of a banana that was clearly created by someone who had never seen the fruit in person featured in Caroline’s book A Cornucopia of Fruit & Vegetables. You can see the image below.
A ‘banana’ from Johann Weinmann’s Phytanthoza Iconographia . Image courtesy of Bodleian Library Publishing
Episode 258 update: I made an error in saying that @thehappyplotter had a prayer plant that had died back to nothing - it was in fact a Caladium. Helpfully the advice is basically the same, but I have gone back and added an explanatory note to the episode’s show notes, as Caladiums grow from tubers not rhizomes.
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CREDITS
This week's show featured the tracks Roll Jordan Roll by the Joy Drops, The Road We Use To Travel When We Were Kids by Komiku and Whistle by BenJamin Banger (@benjaminbanger on Insta; website benjaminbanger.com). The ad music is Candlelight by Jahzzar.