Lilies of the Hearth. - book reviews

Women and plants have been close associates throughout human history, but being the relatively quiet types, this hasn't been much talked about. Jennifer Bennett. the gardening editor of Canada's Harrowsmith, has spent years collecting anecdotes, myths, medieval references, rites, herbal practices, and even correspondence between proper English lady gardeners. In Lilies of the Hearth, she focuses largely on European and Mediterranean societies of the past several thousand years, and their North American descendants, but then these are the women who have written or been written about, Combined in this book these fragments make a densely detailed tapestry of evidence that women have represented, nurtured and repeatedly altered the place of nature in culture. Women have in turn been altered by it: Our social standing and perceived value has fluctuated with our botanical stereotypes, especially in the two hundred years of witchhunts (we knew too much about medicinal and magical plants), and the Victorian era, during which we were modeled after delicate flowers, easily wilted.

Bennett covers such topics as the Virgin Mary's plants, botany as the first science women could pursue, female botanical artists, and women in horticulture. She then looks to the future with some questions about where this relationship is going now, as we recultivate the earth goddess, and with so much depending on us. The book is a valuable resource, with some interesting illustrations and a great bibliography. --Kathleen Harrison McKenna

Weeder women were employed by royalty and the wealthy in Renaissance England, and diarist Celia Fiennes wrote that she saw a "figure of stone resembling an old weeder woman used in the garden" at Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire in the 17th century.

As someone apt to be illhumoured while performing the necessary but endless job of weeding, I am amused by a story in The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia, in which Bronislaw Malinowski describes the natives of the Trobriand Islands. The islanders believed that the women, when carrying out the strictly female task of weeding the gardens, would seize any man who wandered by, rape him and submit him to other indignities. The native men avoided the gardens during weeding season, as did Malinowski himself. In 1656, however, when William Coles published The Art of Simpling, all such danger and drudgery were merely wholesome. "Gentlewomen," he wrote, "if the ground be not too wet, may doe themselves much good by kneeling upon a Cushion and weeding." It's all for your own good, dear.

Persephone's symbol was the pomegranate, because as a result of eating its seeds, she was committed to an eternal marriage with Hades in the underworld. (The pomegranate is an emblem of red, womblike, seedfilled fertility and, like the apple, recurs throughout the history of women and plants. It is interesting that the pomegranate has recently been found to contain small quantities of the female hormone progesterone.)

Of course, such "fathers of herbal medicine" as Dioscorides did not simply pull their therapeutic theories out of the air. His herbal was the human, largely female heritage finally recorded by a man interested in the subject and literate enough to be able to write it down. Ironically, the early records of women's knowledge could be read by very few women.

The mandrake (Mandragora officinarum), however, a powerful plant and one of the witches' favourites, was mentioned in the Song only as the source of "a smell." Like other poisonous plants, it was decidedly not Marian. Women could be divided metaphorically into two groups, then, according to their herbal affiliations: those who sided with Mary could be considered much like flowers or benign medicinal plants, while those who followed the ancient codes of the witches were considered to be as poisonous as the plants they grew.

COPYRIGHT 1992 Point Foundation
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group