True Dirt

a Melancholy Thistle on Nithdale holm

The Doe Library bookstore is history. Once tucked away down a narrow hallway in the neo Classical book temple of UC Berkeley, it was the bookstore of a bibliophile's dreams. Full of discards from other campus libraries, the small and obscure ones that were gradually consolidated and closed down: cultural anthropology, geography, naval architecture, botany, slavic languages....and of old books that nobody wanted anymore. It was here that I found treasures like Gardens of the World, with oversize fine-grained black-and-white photos of gardens arrested in their pre-WWII incarnations. Also odd floras of places unknown to me. These gems sit on my bookcase, unread until a moment of curiosity strikes. Yesterday the moss green spine of The Flora of Dumfriesshire caught my eye.

A small volume, the inside cover bears a curious bookplate showing a room with a bookcase below a window looking out upon The Campanile, the bell tower of the Berkeley campus. A pair of bearded iris flanks the window and the name Charles Atwood Kofoid sweeps across on a triple banner. A cartouche below the bookcase reveals in minute detail a sailing ship on a roiling sea below which small, botanically accurate single-cell creatures float, ready to be caught up in the conical net of the sea-going scientist.

The title complete: The Flora of Dumfries-Shire Including Part of the Stewartry of Kirkudbright. Published in 1896 by G.F. Scott-Elliott and "assisted by" J. M'Andrew, J.T. Johnstone, the Misses Hannay, G. Bell, R. Service, Rev. W. Andson, B.N. Peach, and T. Horne. Dumfriesians all and avid notationers of the rich plant life of a land curiously like J.R.R. Tolkien's Hobbiton. In this case we must find on a map the Mull of Galloway in Solway Firth and follow from its coastal estuary the River Nith which meanders eastward to Drumlanrig, the Scaur, and Beld Craig Linn.

A hand drawn map folded into a pocket of the back cover offers a tabletop lexicon of the Scottish countryside where a water is a creek, and designated Water of Milk, or Water of Nith; a burn appears to be a smaller stream; linns are groves and corries mountain ravines. A scaur, unlike a craig, is bare "whinstone rock" and broken boulders. A lake is a loch and a holm an alluvial plain in the dales of river valleys. Peat comes in bogs and haggs.

Already by the end of the 19th century in this thinly populated farmland the "introduced" and exotic species are numerous. Many plants are "escapes" from domestic gardens. Vinca major, the blue periwinkle that is a scourge of Oakland hillsides, was even then in Dumfriesshire a vigorous weed.

Elliot's et al. flora follows the strict botanical (Linnean) nomenclature of the time, but common names are included for locally named species. This revealed a curious fact. The most common names for wild plants were concentrated in two categories: ferns and thistles. Of the ferns, there were 18 common names (of 15 genera). One fern was called "parsley", and there were maidenhairs, and rue, a Male Fern, Broad Buckler, Mountain Shield, and Hard Fern. There were fewer thistle species but each had a local name (two of them identified as "escapes"), including the Milk, Spear, Marsh, Creeping, and Melancholy thistle.

Carduus heterophyllus, so named by that intrepid cataloger Linneas, but familiar to Dumfriesians as "Melancholy Thistle" is found along the silty alluvial dales of the River Nith, first sighted by J. Shaw, Esquire, of Tynron, and verified by the Misses Hannay, who noted "Specimens seen".

One only wishes for a small portrait and the names of the botanical sisters Hannay.

Posted by briggs at April 6, 2006 10:13 AM