10 March 2021

Plant Life Flash Forum:

The first meeting of the Plant Life research group took place at lunchtime on March 10th. It was a rapid-fire conference in which nine Faculty members (academic staff, early career researchers and PhD students) presented tantalisingly bite-sized pieces of research.

Session 1   

Intrinsique Balme: Donne’s Funeral Spices

Sophie Read explored the botanical origins and metaphorical reach of a mysterious early modern substance: balm. It thought about its medicinal properties, scriptural history and connections with new world discoveries, and how these resonances emerge and signify in the poetry and sermons of John Donne.

Trees, Iconoclasm, Ballads 

Bonnie Lander Johnson discussed the persistent and literary tradition that existed before iconoclast controversy began to shape early modern poetics, in which Christ was depicted as a tree. Often he was growing out of the bodies of the Virgin Mary and her parents. These devotional images were meditations on the doctrine of the incarnation; they located Christ in the world of plants but also in the sensual dynamics of procreation. Her paper examined the fate of the trope after it came under the pressure of iconoclasm and split into two quite separate traditions in the 17th century ballad: the reformed song about Christ as a spiritually pure tree and bawdy tree song.

Being a Vegetable in the Seventeenth Century 

Felicity Sheehy considered the meaning of the word ‘vegetable’ in the seventeenth century. She pointed out the word had different connotations, which have at times been lost on modern readers. Rather than simply suggesting ‘listless’ or ‘bare life’, the word also indicated ‘growing’, ‘flourishing’, or even ‘animating’.

Session 2            

Sweetgrass, or Wiingashk 

Amy Morris discussed sweetgrass or Wiingaashk (in Anishinaabe), Hierochloe odorata in Latin, one of the four plants sacred to many North American indigenous peoples. She focused on Braiding Sweetgrass, by Potawatomi writer and biology professor Robin Wall Kimmerer. Kimmer shares a vision of interweaving science and indigenous knowledge. She also signals a note of resistance: sweetgrass ‘is not mine to give, nor yours to take. Wiingaashk belongs to herself.’ Through its naming and its various uses, sweetgrass has things to say about indigenous-settler relations. 

Indian corn: crooked ears

Fiona Green’s paper was about corn songs in nineteenth-century poetry and ethnography. The ‘crooked ear’ – the blighted corn cob – in Hiawatha, pilfered from Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, signals an act of cultural theft and at the same time figures Anglophone metrics as a sort of pathogen, as though the verse culture in which Longfellow’s poem proliferated so wildly was also the medium that blighted the oral culture it pretended to transmit.

Popcorn: the plant, the snack, and its connotations of ‘childhood’ in US English 1840s-1920s

Laura Wright considered the polysemous plant-term ‘popcorn’, as its social connotations differ over time and place.  In American English the word popcorn in its ‘snack’ sense was used mainly in the context of children, sold from carts and in toyshops, and also at railway-stations, evidenced from the 1840s into the first quarter of the twentieth century.  Christmas time was popcorn time for rural children.  There was a difference between ‘rural’: home-grown, home-cooked, eaten and used for making decorations, and ‘non-rural’, bought for eating only ready-mixed with molasses from a street-vendor.

Popcorn Vendor Illinois, 1912

Session 3

Literary Beginnings: The Botanical Origins of Early Modern Paper 

Georgina Wilson began by explaining that early modern paper came from hempseed and flax. She discussed how Henry Vaughan’s ‘The Book’ and John Taylor’s ‘The Praise of Hemp-seed’ foreground paper’s botanical origins, and suggested that we might think of literary texts as ‘beginning’, in a material sense, as plant life.

John Taylor, The Praise of Hemp-seed, 1620.

‘Down with vexatious and vicious peeping’: John Ruskin among the botanists

Outraged by the ‘unclean or debasing associations’ of contemporary botanical taxonomies, John Ruskin attempted in Proserpina (1875-1886) to rewrite the texts of the scientific naturalists according to his own, predictably esoteric principles. Hollie Wells’s paper proposed that the source of Ruskin’s discomfort can be located in his preoccupation with an essence of wholeness and purity always already slipping from his grasp, a kind of grace made manifest in the evanescent glow of the undisturbed bloom.    

John Ruskin, Daffodil, Ruskin Library, University of Lancaster

Lichen fashions in Victorian studio photography

Drew Milne considered Victorian studio photographs in which rocks and tree stumps (or their representations) were commonly used as props. But whether real or imagined, these failed to include the lichen which always inhabit rocks and trees. Their absence offered a provocative conclusion to our meeting.