Sunday 22 April 2012

On putting words into the mouths of the departed, by Jane Borodale

Popular myth has it that the hollow stalks of certain umbelliferous plants lead straight down to the place of the dead. I’m transfixed by this idea, that you might pour yourself through their narrow, jointed tubes, to arrive in the otherworld.


The virtues and dangers of individuals from the Umbelliferae family through history range from poison to plague cure – hemlock, fool’s parsley, water parsnip, lovage, alexanders, pepper saxifrage, sweet cicely, fennel, sanicle, angelica. These plants can be difficult for the unwary or careless to identify: see how similar they can look.

Hemlock Water-dropwort © Valerie Hill
Hemlock Water-dropwort © Valerie Hill


Hemlock Water-dropwort (not for nothing once called Dead Tongue, or Horsebane in Somerset) is so highly poisonous it could take you quickly to the otherworld in person, bypassing all metaphors. Mrs Grieve in her 20th-century classic A Modern Herbal describes how in April 1857, ‘two farmer’s sons were found lying paralysed and speechless close to a ditch where they had been working. Assistance was soon rendered, but they shortly afterwards expired. A quantity of Water Hemlock grew in the ditch, where they had been employed.  A piece of the root was subsequently found with the marks of teeth in it, near to where the men lay, and another piece of the same root was discovered in the pocket of one of them.

Angelica sylvestris © Valerie Hill
Angelica sylvestris © Valerie Hill
But the channel between worlds could go either way. In the 16th century (when my new novel The Knot is set) the umbellifer Angelica archangelica with its fat, crisp, candiable stems and potent properties against the plague could actively help you return from the dead, offer you a hand back up those hollow stems. Henry Lyte’s Niewe Herball or Historie of Plants (1578) is one of many that points out how, ‘the late writers say, that the roots of Angelica are contrary to all poyson, the pestilence, and all naughty corruption of evill or infected aire.’

And I like to think of writing about the dead, too, as being a two-way possibility. On the one hand we take from them and give them voices they didn’t necessarily have and they have no say in the matter, yet there is also an obscure reciprocal kind of deal whereby the living pay attention to the dead for a while, warm up thoughts towards them, listen harder maybe? I like to think it is an acceptable practice, if the unwitting participant is approached with utmost diligence and respect and a certain kind of openness to unspoken things beneath the surface – resonances, textures, fragments of things left over from the past that might be so small that they can’t easily be pinned down into immoveable ‘truths’. Isn’t it this gap that historical fiction can animate so effectively?

Even as I write this I can see a tangle of metaphors emerging that I don’t quite mean. Words – like plants, weeds, umbellifers – can rapidly get out of hand, and paths to questions of identity are fraught with hazard…

Angelica sylvestris © Valerie Hill

Jane Borodale’s new novel The Knot is about the botanist Henry Lyte (c1529-1607) and his translation of an influential 16th-century herbal.


Her website is here





10 comments:

Ms. said...

Utterly brilliant post...the photographs and metaphors, oh my!!! It's also a public service in regard to knowing the plant world. I must go search out her book...Intriguing.

alberridge said...

A beautiful post, Jane. I love your use of all those plant names, and found myself compelled to read them aloud. And those 'fat, crisp, candiable stems'...

Valerie Hill's photographs are wonderful too. Thank you so much for sharing.

H.M. Castor said...

I love this post. Pouring oneself down a narrow hollow stem to the underworld... what a fantastic image!

Katherine Langrish said...

Yes, what a riveting post! Thankyou!

Stroppy Author said...

Wonderful! Especially those hollow tubes to the underworld. *shiver*

adele said...

Yes, tubes to the Underworld sound good. Very spooky indeed. And your novel sounds really intriguing. V. good post!

Jane Borodale said...

Thanks for these lovely, encouraging comments on my first post. And hello - I'm really delighted to be joining such a great site with fantastic writers posting fascinating things - every day! Thanks for having me.

Linda B-A said...

Welcome Jane! How good to read such a gloriously botanical post with such beautiful photographs. Banks of cow parsley and giant angelicas are among my favourite things, so I was fascinated to learn about the link with the under/otherworld. Your comment about 'openness to unspoken things beneath the surface' is in relation to historical fiction is intriguing.

Leslie Wilson said...

Fascinating! I have angelica sylvestris in my garden, and also have sweet cicely and Alexanders, all edible. Carrots, parsley,lovage,chervil, coriander, etc, all part of a family that, as you so well remind us, can kill or feed. Are there medicinal uses of hemlock?

Jane Borodale said...

Your garden sounds really lovely, Leslie. Re hemlock, hmm, I hesitate to say anything more about it as it's so horribly toxic. I find the whole hemlock thing more and more confusing, for example the name water hemlock is often popularly applied to various species of water dropwort, and most are poisonous but to varying degrees, apparently, and there is an edible sort grown as a pot-herb in Asia. Mrs Grieve says that no British wild plant has been responsible for more fatal accidents than Oeanthe crocata. The Keatsian sort: 'a drowsy numbness pains/ My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk' or Conium was the execution method used in ancient Athens that famously did for Socrates. Dioscorides was using it medicinally in 1st century AD and it is still used today, though highly regulated, and also homeopathically. The more I look at these plants the more muddled I get... sorry, a rather longwinded reply.