A year or so ago the wife pointed out some striking yellow flowers in
our lawn. Rich color. Nice and low they were too, not like dandelions. She said maybe we
could dig them up and put them in a wildflower patch. But then I saw
some of them over by the rock wall, where I don't mow. They were a foot tall or more and
didn't create the same impression. So I promptly forgot about transplanting them.
I looked em up. They're called
bird'sfoot trefoil. Now, if I had any business sense at all, I'd be
advertising and selling them as "Micro Trefoil". Kinda like the "Micro
Clover" that came up in my Clover post: As long as you keep
mowing it, it maintains the "micro" features that you paid an arm and a
leg for.
If I had any business sense at all.
I don't think anybody ever gets my sense of humor.
I want it for my lawn
Around here, in April the low part of the yard is so wet
you can't drive the mower there. By May things are better,
and drier yet in June. In July and August things are so dry the plants
start to die. This year again the lawn all turned brown -- or I should say, all except
the weeds.
I'm never going to be a guy who can out-think the
weather, remember when last it rained, and know when to water the plants. I only see it
after things are dead or dying. Nor do I have time or hose enough to
water the lawn. So I started looking at the survivors, the green weeds in the lawn,
looking for something that would make a good-looking lawn, stay green
despite drought, and stay low and fairly even for a week or more
after mowing.
I found something, but it's not the clover. It's the trefoil, birdsfoot trefoil. The one the wife pointed out two years ago.
I'm just calling it "trefoil" by the way.
Herodotus, the old Greek, the father of history, wrote about the customs of the Persians, the enemies of Greece. In this part, from perseus.tufts, he writes of the Persian method of sacrifice to the gods:
To
pray for blessings for himself alone is not lawful for the sacrificer;
rather, he prays that the king and all the Persians be well; for he
reckons himself among them. He then cuts the victim limb from limb into
portions, and, after boiling the flesh, spreads the softest grass,
trefoil usually, and places all of it on this. When he has so arranged
it, a Magus comes near and chants over it the song of the birth of the
gods, as the Persian tradition relates it; for no sacrifice can be
offered without a Magus. Then after a little while the sacrificer
carries away the flesh and uses it as he pleases.
Don't let the word "victim" get you thinking this was human sacrifice. It was some animal, probably a sheep that was sacrificed.
What
I really want to say about this ancient Persian ritual is that they
used "the softest grass, trefoil" when offering their sacrifice to the
god. What I really want to say: If trefoil is good enough for the
Persian gods, it is good enough for my lawn.
In a different translation, Herodotus says not "the softest grass,
trefoil usually," but instead says
the tenderest herbage that he can find, trefoil especially.
"Trefoil
usually" seems to leave it up to the sacrificer to decide what soft
greenery to use. "Trefoil especially" seems to make trefoil the rule
rather than just one of the options.
Unfortunately, in the time of
Herodotus and the ancients, they were not as fastidious about
identification of plants as we have been since Linnaeus. It's more like
they had a favorite name for plants they liked a lot, and they used that
name for all those plants: They were all trefoil.
And half of those, the most prized half, were the lotus.
The identification of plants
I found this great PDF from Harvard, called "Plants Named “Lotus” in Antiquity". I just call it Huh! Harvard. From the Abstract:
In
ancient times, several plants were named “lotus.” They assumed very
important roles in the religions and art of many cultures, but
historiography and descriptions of the various plants called “lotus”
have always been poor. The aim of this work is to define what plant
species correspond to the ancient name “lotus.” Through analysis of
classical texts and other historiographical sources, three types of
“lotus” have been identified: “arboreal lotus,” “herbaceous lotus,” and
“aquatic lotus.” From the sources examined, several botanical species
have been identified for each “lotus” category.
For
my lawn, I wouldn't want tree lotus or aquatic lotus. I'd want
herbaceous lotus: something green and soft and nice to walk on. The "Huh! Harvard" paper identifies not one genus of plants, but
four, and several species in total, as the plants the ancients described
as "herbaceous and fodder lotus". Apparently no one really knows for
sure which plants they were talking about.
It gets worse. At perseus.tufts I searched for lotus clover.
The relevant results all offer interpretations of the ancient Greek
word "λωτός" that apparently means "lotus". In the sumary below, I have
shortened the text, and removed links and references. It looks like
lotus is lotus. But for herbaceous and fodder lotus, lotus is trefoil is
clover. And "clover" is not necessarily the clover we know as clover.
- λωτός.
The lotus here is a sort of trefoil or clover, not to be confounded
with the lotus of bk. 9. According to Sprengel, Bot. Hist., it is the Lotus corniculatus of Linnaeus.
From: W. Walter Merry, James Riddell, D. B. Monro, Commentary on the Odyssey (1886)
- λωτός. name applied to various plants and trees providing fodder or fruit:
[Under "fodder plants" they list]
1. clover, trefoil, Trifolium fragiferum
2. fellbloom, Lotus corniculatus
3. fenugreek, Trigonella Foenum-graecum
4. melilot, T. graeca
4b Italian melilot, Melilotus messanensis
From: Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon
- λωτός. the lotus, name of several plants.
I. the Greek lotus, a plant on which horses fed, a kind of clover or trefoil
II. the Cyrenean lotus, an African shrub, whose fruit was the food of certain tribes on the coast, hence called Lotophagi
III. the Egyptian lotus, the lily of the Nile
IV. a North-African tree; from its hard black wood flutes were made
From: Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon
- λωτός. lotus.
(1) a species of clover
(2)
the tree and fruit enjoyed by the Lotus-eaters. Said to be a plant with
fruit the size of olives, in taste resembling dates, still prized in
Tunis and Tripoli under the name of Jujube.
From: Georg Autenrieth, A Homeric Dictionary
I
think the name "lotus" was applied to plants that were the most special
in some way: for example, the ones that provided the softest herbage,
the most satisfying narcotic, the most perfect flower, the most
beautiful flute music.
The terms "trefoil" and "clover" described
lesser members of the plant community, except the Greeks apparently
thought their trefoil horse fodder was good enough to be called lotus:
the best horse fodder ever. And apart from the upgrade to "lotus" for
the fodder plant, the terms "trefoil" and "clover" appear to have been
used interchangeably -- if they even had the two separate terms in the
ancient language.
I'm still using "trefoil" to mean birdsfoot trefoil, or whatever it is I have in my lawn. But I do like that name "fellbloom".
Want to buy some Micro Fellbloom?
Why did Linnaeus call it Lotus?
One more item from the "Huh! Harvard" paper. I thought this was odd:
The most typical of autochthonous [native] plants used for fodder is Lotus corniculatus L. (Fabaceae), which has yellow flowers and rich nectar sought by bees. Therefore, the reference to the genus Lotus for herbaceous and foraging lotuses is well justified.
I think they are saying the yellow flowers and rich nectar justify Linnaeus's decision to use Lotus
as the genus name for birdsfoot trefoil. I was wondering why he used
that name; but their explanation seems a weak one, and odd I think: The
paper seems to agree with the old Greeks that birdsfoot trefoil really
did make fodder that was lotus-good. That's a strange explanation.
By the way, the "L." following the name Lotus corniculatus is used to indicate that it was Linnaeus himself who came up with that name for the species. News to me.
Here's a different explanation for Linnaeus's choice of the name "Lotus", this from Puzzlements, at In the Garden, jamesfolsom's place:
Linnaeus himself assigned the Latinized word Lotus
to members of the bean family. At the time, that was no surprise; the
Greeks had long used the word for a group of small woody plants in the
bean family.
I give this explanation more
weight than the "flowers and nectar" explanation. But "Huh! Harvard" has
a better explanation, too: Their opening sentence stresses the economic
value of the various plants called lotus in ancient times.
In ancient times, the name “lotus” was applied to several plants, and each had a relevant economic importance...
"Huh!
Harvard" also says the ancient lotus plants "assumed very important
roles in the religions and art of many cultures". Sure. But I'd add that
lotus became important in art and religion because it was important to
people, because it was important economically.
As for myself, the months I spent reading Simkhovitch's "Rome's Fall Reconsidered" and Huntington's "Climatic Change and Agricultural Exhaustion as Elements in the Fall of Rome"
made the important even more important to me. Either Simkhovitch's
exhausted soil or Huntington's long-term drought caused the decline of
Roman agriculture. But Huntington and Simkhovitch agree that the decline
of agriculture (and agricultural income) caused the fall of Rome.
(Remember, Roman civilization was based on agriculture. Declining agricultural income hurt almost everyone.)
To have an expanding civilization you need an expanding economy, particularly when civilization is organized so as to require expansion
(as Carroll Quigley so wisely points out). Keynes, too, knew that
civilization rises and falls with the economy. He said economists are
"the trustees not of civilization, but of the
possibility of civilization." Thus, if economists cannot fix the economy, the civilization cannot survive.
Me, I've said that so often I'm tired of saying it, and now I talk about trefoil.
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