Mnemonic (21 page)

I tried to locate an ear trumpet, thinking that I might be able to detect drinking or lack of it (using a live tree as an example) by holding it to the trunk. I checked on eBay, at sites outfitting people involved in Civil War re-enactments (I'd discovered replica tin ear trumpets were available for those playing the roles of medics, but had no success in actually locating one). I called one son, who I thought might be willing to check antique and junk stores in the medium-sized city where he lived. He agreed to check a few places to see if one might surface.

But I had no luck finding an ear trumpet.

Then I thought, well, what about a fetoscope? Not the newer Doppler ones, but the older ones, which are essentially metal trumpets, or wooden? That made sense. (The sound of the
whoosh
as the cells took in water is not unlike the rush of blood in the placenta.) The doctor who delivered one of my babies is now a family friend. He thought he could find one to lend me. It didn't happen, though. He was away, and then there was a death in the family, and I felt shy about asking again.

I thought some more. What about a stethoscope? I called a recently retired nurse in our community, and she was very willing to lend me not one but two stethoscopes, one with better amplification than the other. There might be a difference, she said, and that in itself would be interesting. We arranged for me to collect the stethoscopes, but she forgot to leave them for me on my way to the ferry I was taking for the first leg of our journey into the Interior. I returned home to an apologetic message from the nurse, saying she hoped it wasn't too late. By then I was resigned to the fact that listening to trees, living or dying, wasn't in my immediate future.

Following simple instructions

The day after we arrive home from the Interior, I fill the kitchen sink with warm water, add a little laundry soap and two tablespoons of bleach. Beginning with the last bundle collected, I gently wash the pine needles, swishing them through the soapy water, and rinse them briefly. I wrap them in a soft towel and wash each of the other bundles, too.

The messy collection of needles from Nicola Lake has to be sorted. Broken or obviously damaged ones discarded, all of them laid out on the counter with sheaths at the top, and then washed in what I think might be suitable amounts for working with at one time. This is hard to estimate, because none of the material I've read specifies what quantity is needed for a small basket. One book sells pine needles in four-ounce increments, which should give me a rough idea. I quilted for years and have recently taken up knitting, something I did in my late teens and early twenties, but not since; I can estimate cottons and yarns reasonably accurately. But looking at needles heaped under a tree or sorted into bundles, I am lost. Even though I have a small scale, I don't weigh the bundles, thinking that I ought to figure it out by looking, imagining.

For a few days, I simply look at the washed bundles, wondering about them, reading and rereading the instructions for beginning a pine-needle basket. I have real difficulty translating the written words with their line drawings into something I can envision: my fingers handling the materials in a confident way. One version of the first step has the weaver moving from left to right, like reading or writing. The other version, considered more “authoritative,” has one working from right to left. I look at my hands, wanting them to decide. They're mute, unable to help.

Take a bundle of three pine needles (or two bundles, says one book). So take your three, six, or even eight pine needles, and snip the sheath(s) off the end (or pinch off between your fingers). Make a little circle of one end with a tail of the sheath-end of the needles. Thread a length of raffia onto a wide-eyed tapestry needle and begin to wrap the circle, drawing the tapestry needle from back to front. Oh, I am all fingers, all thumbs! No dexterity at all. I study the diagram, wrap my circle, drop my pine needles, and unravel my raffia until it is impossible to work with. I begin again, burning that first attempt. Then the second.

The fire welcomes them, the dry needles and crisp raffia going up in smoke that floats above our house, providing for a moment an echo of those campfires years ago when we sat with our children under pines in the evening while loons called out on the lake and a few bats darted above us. When I tucked them into their sleeping bags and smelled smoke in their hair, the greeny water of the lake.

The third try is a little more successful. I've learned to choose a strand of raffia carefully and to keep a second needle threaded in case of accidents. Although I study the instructions on how to make a variety of stitches — chain, open V, diamond, wheat, fern, and Indian wrap — I can only just make the simplest of stitches, something without a known name, to keep my pine needles in place. The basket I gave my husband is characterized by the most delicate stitching, something to aspire to, or else feel the weight of, against the fingers, and perhaps give up basket making completely. I'm determined to try harder.

Despite my clumsiness, the little beginning grows. I've managed to figure out how to slide new bundles of needles, their sheaths removed, into the ones that have already been stitched into place. Around, around, my fingers tuck and stitch, the needles coiling obediently. It's a kind of dance, the slow waltz of turning and holding. I gradually begin to leave more space between stitches, trusting that the coils will stay in place.

Sometimes an image falls into your hands and becomes part of your thinking. You cannot see anything else (or so it seems) without the knowledge of this image. I have always read botanical texts of one sort or another and have viewed hundreds of pictures of trees, flowers, the root systems of grass. All of them have been interesting and some of them instructive. The before and after pollination pictures of fawn lilies, for instance — the demure tepals nodding, then turned back after being fertilized by bees or other insects: a sign to say “no nectar; don't bother.” I had simply thought the turned-back tepals were a sign of maturity — and in some ways that's exactly right. The language of flowers is as provocative as any other kind of body language.

The image I am thinking of now is of two pines, one of them hung with cones, from the Carrara Herbal, a parchment codex made in the very last years of the fourteenth century in Padua. I encountered the illustration in Anna Pavord's
The Naming of Names: The Search for Order in the World of Plants
. It's a marvellous book, taking the reader from Theophrastus (c.372 BC-287 BC) through to the seventeenth-century British flora of John Ray, providing a history of the development of botanical nomenclature. I was familiar with some of the plantsmen, illustrators, and herbalists who form the cast of characters in Pavord's book, but others were utterly new to me, and I confess I fell in love with the anonymous artist who illustrated Jacopo Filippino's text for Francesco Carrara, the last lord of independent Padua. This text is an Italian translation of a medical-botanical treatise,
The Book of Simple Medicine
, written in the twelfth century by an Arab physician, Serapion the Younger. The Arabic treatise is very close in content to
De materia medica
by Pedanios Dioscorides, written in Greek but known by its Latin title, compiled just as the first millennium turned.

My Italian is minimal, though I have a grammar and a dictionary and can puzzle through short passages with some understanding. However, Jacopo's translation is an archaic Paduan dialect. There is a commentary
³
on the Herbal, in contemporary Italian, and I have some of this to consult: pages photocopied by a son with access to the one copy in university library holdings in Canada (the University of Alberta).

Art historian Sarah Rozalja Kyle, who specializes in the Carrara Herbal, has been very helpful: she directed me to
De materia medica
by Dioscorides, knowing how close the two texts were, particularly the entries on pines, and knowing that
De materia medica
is more easily available in English translation. So I do have some sense of the relationship between text and image in this work. Back to the commentary on the Herbal: the entry on pines is intriguing. Like Dioscorides, Serapion (via Jacopo Filippino) tells us that the bark can be pounded finely and used in the treatment of boils. Decoctions of inner wood are used for painful teeth and uterine disorders. The wood itself seems to have been made into pessaries to hold a prolapsed uterus in place or to prevent incontinence. (How times change, and don't change! Pessaries are now made of plastic or rubber or silicone, but serve the same function. I assume that pine was used because the antibiotic qualities of the resins helped prevent infections.) I learned that pine cones are useful also for urinary problems and the corruption of the humours.

Reading this material is a window into another time, when plants were an important part of healing, a window that also acts as a hinge between what was known before that and what we know now. I mean by this that Dioscorides and Serapion took a leap forward from Theophrastus, also discussed in Pavord's book, and who impresses the reader with his keen powers of observation. He wrote many works but only two of those concerned with botany survive,
Historia plantarum
and
De causis plantarum
, written sometime around 300 BC but pretty much forgotten until translated into Latin in the thirteenth century. A Greek from Lesbos, Theophrastus worked hard on a system of classification, of plant structures, and reproduction but he didn't understand the mysteries of pollination. When he describes the catkins of filberts, you want to nudge him that little distance to realize what was happening that allowed nuts to form. (He knew that something occurred when the spathe of the male date palm was shaken over the flower of the female. But he didn't actually know what this had to do with the formation of fruit. And who can blame him? It's not as though all that people came to learn over the next twenty-three hundred years was available to him. And how many people now could readily write so attentively of filbert catkins? “The filbert after casting its fruit produces its clustering growth . . . several of these grow from one stalk, and some call them catkins.”
⁴
) So I'm quite fascinated to read the texts that build on that body of knowledge handed down by Theophrastus, texts which accommodate more specific observation about cause and effect, hypothesis and proof: in short what we know as science.

But really it's the gouache portrait of the two pines that I love most in Anna Pavord's book. The artist has outlined with green pigment and then delicately painted on the foliage, even cones on the tree on the left. Grass grows delicately beneath, each tussock articulated as individual and discrete.

There are other portraits in this codex that are ravishingly beautiful. A leafy melon plant with a single opulent fruit that occupies two-thirds of a folio. A
Zizyphus jujube
with a bit of moss on its trunk. Grapevines so life-like they could be photographs, the tendrils reaching for something to attach themselves to. The unknown artist of the Carrara Herbal observed plants in their natural setting and allowed them equal ease on the page. There is such joy in his renderings, exuberance in his line and detail. And yet he never finished the work. Space was left for many more than the fifty-six portraits that exist. It seems that the fate of the patron Francesco Carrara — deposed in 1403 and strangled in prison three years later — was also the fate of this Herbal with its flowers and vines, its lively trees, its beguiling barley and asparagus: vitality cut short, as a root might be severed from a stalk or a seed head pinched off too early.