Carob to carat

As an avid plant person who is also a metalsmith and jeweler, I was surprised to learn that we get the weight measure for stones (carat) from the ancients who used carob beans as a standard weight. Because “carob beans are unusually consistent in size. This means that carob beans usually all weigh the same, no matter when or where harvested!”

My mind is reeling! How can that be? Nature doesn’t do that! Every plant is unique, I thought, weather, soil, location should change the harvest, I thought. Am I mistaken?

On that last point, you are not mistaken: there is variability in the weight of carob seeds, but it is relatively small. Ceratonia siliqua is in the bean/legume family [Fabaceae]. It is not the elongated carob pod that was used as a standard, it’s the seeds contained in that pod ( a typical pod contains about 10 seeds). Seeds from female trees are relatively consistent (0.197 grams or 1/150th of an ounce). This weight was standardized to 200 milligrams in 1907, and continues to be in use.

The scientific paper Seed size variability: from carob to carats (Turnbull et al., 2006, Biology Letters: The Royal Society, published online 2006 May 2) attempts to explain the “myth of constant seed weight.” As far back as ancient Greece, there was a weight called a kerat (which is echoed in carob’s Latin genus name, Ceratonia). Keration was the Greek word for carob (possibly a Semitic loan word from Aramaic/Syriac karta meaning pod or husk), and its literal meaning was ‘little horn,’ which describes the shape of the pods (not the seeds). Siliqua, carob’s species name, was the Latin word for carob, and used to refer to the smallest subdivision of the Roman pound. Carob seeds were no more consistent in mass than the other 63 species the article’s authors measured. They theorize that seeds used for weighing were a product of human selection.

Carob thrives in its native Mediterranean and Middle Eastern regions, and would simply have been readily available as a counterweight for precious substances, like gemstones and spices. Humans can perceive mere 5% differences in carob seed mass. In the ancient world, measurement of weight based on carob seeds would have been fairly dependable, based on the accuracy of the human eye—unless an unscrupulous vendor also kept sets of seeds that were heavier or lighter than the standard, either to shortchange or overcharge!

Ceratonia siliqua, Human-plant relationships, Seeds

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants

[Braiding Sweetgrass] cover

Braiding Sweetgrass makes for good reading about all of the topics listed in the subtitle. Robin Wall Kimmerer writes engagingly, drawing the reader in. The book is full of information about Native American connections to plants. Because the author is a biologist, the scientific relationship to her Indigenous background is always made clear. Kimmerer is a member of the Potawatomi nation and a professor of environmental and forest biology at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry.

She weaves the title elements together with her life as the mother of two daughters in a series of loosely connected essays. Her main themes are gratitude and responsibility, qualities valued highly among Native American peoples, values she argues are necessary if we are to save our planet from climate change and especially from our own greed. No one will find saving plants important enough to make sacrifices, she insists, unless they have a relationship with those plants.

Each chapter combines essay with narration. For instance, in “Maple Sugar Moon” she begins by telling an Anishinaabe creation story about Nanabohzo, the Original Man, diluting the sap of the maple tree, which originally had come directly from the tree as syrup. Now many hours of boiling down are required to make the same syrup. He did so as punishment after people became lazy and had not expressed gratitude or acted responsibly toward nature’s gifts.

Then Kimmerer tells how she had her daughters collect many buckets of maple sap and spend hours boiling them down, using Native American methods – a lot of very hard work. She believes part of being a good mother was teaching the girls their heritage through this work. Mixed into her narrative Kimmerer explains scientifically how the tree creates sap and how the process benefits the tree. She is blending the elements of gratitude, to the tree for producing sap, and responsibility, the work of making the syrup for people to enjoy.

Kimmerer doesn’t expect her non-Indigenous readers to follow her own practices of asking plants’ permission before harvest or giving them a tobacco offering in gratitude. By including these practices, she does illustrate ways of developing human-plant relationships. With her students, described in other chapters, as with her daughters, she shows that by taking them into nature she can help them make those connections. The rest of us will have to find our own paths, perhaps using her examples as models. This book makes a convincing case that those connections are necessary for the future of the plant world and therefore of our own.

Published in The Leaflet, March 2021, Volume 8, Issue 3.

Blooming Flowers: A Seasonal History of Plants and People

[book title] cover

How did the chrysanthemum move through history, associated in its native China as an elixir of youth to symbolizing Japanese imperial power, and then transform into an invitation to join a protest march against the Vietnam war in 1967? Read the delightful Blooming Flowers: A Seasonal History of Plants and People to find out.

Blooming Flowers is a work that documents how horticulture permeates society with both symbolism and literal enthusiasm for colorful displays. Author Kasia Boddy, professor of American literature at the University of Cambridge, takes a deep dive on the historic, cultural, literary, culinary, medicinal, and scientific background on common garden flowers, such as geraniums, and marigolds. She also includes a few less commonly grown flowers like saffron, almond, and lotus. Boddy relates why flowers are so significant to human culture:
“One reason we love flowers is because they help us talk to each other about the big and small questions of life: about love, death, class, fashion, the weather, art, disease, an allegiance to a nation, religion or political cause, the challenges of space and the passage of time.”

Divided into four seasons, each with four representative flowers, Boddy’s book entertains us with literary quotations and color images of flowers in famous paintings and illustrations. She unearths the earliest mentions of each flower and traces how the symbolism of some flowers changed over the centuries in Asian and European cultures. The sheer breadth of her knowledge is engaging, and the pace is steady. Just as she starts to get into details on one example in art history she moves smoothly on to the next example in art or politics. The chapter on the winter blooming almond starts with words from D. H. Lawrence while he lived in Tuscany: “pink houses, pink almond, pink peach and purply apricot, pink asphodels”. Also included is van Gogh’s painting of a blooming almond twig in a glass inside his modest room in Arles, France. The chapter concludes with observations of how much water California’s million acres of almond orchards require and notes that despite how toxic bitter almonds are to human health, internet quacks peddle the poison as a cancer cure.

I’ve grown twelve of the sixteen flowers explored in Boddy’s book and I now appreciate the hidden meanings and cultural connections lurking in my garden. I found Blooming Flowers pleasurable reading that provides many interesting tidbits of lore.

Published in The Leaflet for Scholars, December 2020, Volume 7, Issue 12

red and green plants and Christmas

Are the colors red and green associated with Christmas solely due to holly leaves and berries? And what is the origin of kissing under the mistletoe?

Holly’s red fruit and evergreen foliage is at least one reason for that color combination, as the plant has had ceremonial connections dating back to Roman Saturnalia. This carried over into Christianity, where holly was the locally available plant in Europe that called to mind the Crown of Thorns. The actual plant from which the crown was made was not Ilex aquifolium, however, but more likely Sarcopoterium spinosum (a common shrub in Israel, but not widespread in Europe).

Advertising also played a role in popularizing the red-green combination, as this story from National Public Radio mentions:
“Victorian Christmas cards used a lot of different palettes (red and green, red and blue, blue and green, blue and white) and they often put Santa in blue, green or red robes. All that changed in 1931. ‘Coca-Cola hired an artist to create a Santa Claus,’ Eckstut says. ‘They had done this before, but this particular artist created a Santa Claus that we associate with the Santa Claus today in many ways: He was fat and jolly — whereas before he was often thin and elf-like — and he had red robes.'”

Roy Vickery’s Garlands, Conkers and Mother-Die: British and Irish Plant-Lore (Continuum, 2010) mentions holly, mistletoe, and conifers used as decoration:
“It is often stated that Christmas evergreens are a survival from pre-Christian times, but it seems more probable that they were brought in simply to provide extra colour. In earlier times, it seems as if any evergreen plant was brought in at Christmastide, but since the end of the nineteenth century only holly, mistletoe, and various conifers have been regularly used. In theory, if not in practice, Christmas greenery should not be brought in before Christmas Eve, and should be taken down before Twelfth Night (January 6), or, more rarely, New Year’s Day.”

About mistletoe (obligate hemiparasitic plants, either Viscum album in Europe, or Phoradendron leucarpum in North America), Vickery says:
“Following Pliny the Elder’s report of Druids collecting mistletoe, it has been regarded as a pagan plant [Druids associated it with the sacred oak tree], and as such was banned from churches. One of the attractions of hanging up mistletoe indoors is the custom of kissing beneath it, a custom which is said to be unique to, or have originated in, the British Isles.”

That tradition may have developed because of mistletoe’s associations with fertility and death. According to The Green Mantle by Michael Jordan (Cassell, 2001), “the tradition was begun in the 18th century in England when a ball of mistletoe was hung up and decorated with ribbons and ornaments. We are , in fact, performing a small rite, in the part of the year when nature appears dead, guarding ourselves against the powers of the netherworld and strengthening our ability to procreate as winter turns to spring.”

Traditions wax and wane, and apparently the early 1970s were a low point for mistletoe, as this item in The Guardian, December 20, 1972 states:
“Covent Garden traders reported that this year’s sales of mistletoe are the worst for years. One reader said, ‘It’s a different sort of age. When they strip off naked in Leicester Square you can see why. They don’t need mistletoe today.'”

Vitamin N: the Essential Guide to a Nature-rich Life

Vitamin N book jacket New on our shelves this month you’ll find Richard Louv’s new book, Vitamin N: the essential guide to a nature-rich life. Joining his earlier work, Last child in the woods: saving our children from nature-deficit disorder, this thought-provoking hands-on manual introduces many simple ideas for getting outside and benefiting from everything nature has to offer, no matter one’s age and ability.

While the book will be useful for parents of small children, it also covers what individual teens and adults can do to have a nature-rich life as well as how teachers and grandparents can support outdoor play and learning for the children in their lives. Check it out!

Published in the October 2016 Leaflet Volume 3, Issue 10.

The Wild Places

Wild places cover Though I will probably never survey my surroundings from the top of a tall beech tree, or climb a frozen waterfall in the dark, I thoroughly enjoyed discovering unspoiled natural areas of Britain through Robert Macfarlane’s book The Wild Places (Granta Books, 2007).

In richly descriptive prose, he leads the reader to these increasingly rare spots on the map, from saltmarshes and moors to hedgerows and holloways (tunnels of vegetation). Under the tutelage of his friend Roger Deakin (author of Wildwood, who died in 2007), Macfarlane’s conception of wildness evolves over the course of his travels to include the humbler, smaller wild places that are within reach of even the most city-bound nature lovers:

“I thought about how the vision of wildness with which I had begun my journeys – inhuman, northern, remote – was starting to crumble from contact with the ground itself… The human and the wild cannot be partitioned. Everywhere that day I had encountered blendings and mixings.”