Symbolism of plants: examples from European-Mediterranean culture presented with biology and history of art: AUGUST: Bittersweet, woody nightshade.

Like the earlier series of articles on plant culture by Battey (2002, 2003), the forthcoming series is addressed to a readership of scientists, mainly plant scientists, who are working in certain more or less restricted fields of our scientia amabilis. In their particular fields they were strictly trained to follow logical and causal lines or controlled networks of thoughts and experimental facts, which is an absolute requirement of sound science. However, many scientists may have experienced during their careers that progress equally profits from intuitive ideas, ideas that very often arise from new combinations or sudden inventions, which cannot be derived merely from logical thinking. In this respect, science always had and still has a strong relationship and similarity to art. Battey showed this convincingly and he explained that this type of thinking is relevant to our understanding of the world and, thus, also to society. It is part of our worldwide culture. With the forthcoming 12 monthly articles we want to give a certain insight into how former generations and cultures, having far less access to rational and experimental scientific knowledge than modern scientists, tried to explain and interpret their observations in the plant kingdom. There were and are various religions and philosophies dealing with such problems, but within or without them people were looking for explanations of the rare and commonplace things of their daily life. Such trials are sources of symbolism and make clear that humanity and human thinking need more than just the analytical views of our present, highly developed science (Battey, 2002, 2004). Many also require some kind of holistic or synthetic view over the universe. Many of these symbolic explanations are embedded in myths and superstition. Biologists may often feel that plants are not yet explainable as biochemical machines and that they have properties greater in value than the sum of their parts (Battey, 2003). It is not surprising that our ancestors projected human and transcendental properties into plants. The aim of this series of articles is to give a little insight into such cultural and traditional aspects of plants and the symbolism ascribed to them over the centuries. Here, the question may arise how the term symbol can be defined. According to the Oxford English Dictionary ‘a symbol is something that stands for, represents or denotes something else. , especially a material object taken to represent something immaterial or abstract’ (as cited by Murray and Murray, 2004). Inevitably, plant symbolism is a wide field, and only a small selection can be treated here. The choice is restricted mainly to plants of Mediterranean– oriental antiquity and the European Middle Ages, omitting common food plants which have been dealt with elsewhere, for example, by Impelluso (2003) or in ‘Plants and Judaism’ (http: //www.tau.ac.il) by Tel Aviv University. Instead, old medicinal plants, ornamentals or conspicuous wild plants are chosen. Since ancient times such plants were used in connection with graves and sanctuaries, even by the Neanderthal people (Solecki, 1971). Today, some of the same symbol plants and their secondary metabolites are being tested with logical, analytical science in order to feed future research in medicine and in biological plant protection (for a list of the latter see Grainge and Ahmed, 1988). In this series, the 12 chapters throughout the year will report on seasonal symbol plants. We will present short summaries of biology and symbolism, covering human interest in these species over the last 4000 to 5000 years and up to the early Modern Age, when symbolism began to fade in the Era of Enlightenment. Later, plants were increasingly used as mere ornaments without transcendental background. Other metaphoric plant symbols have been described elsewhere (Levi d’Ancona, 1977; Baumann, 1982; Vickery, 1984; Addison, 1985; Beuchert, 2004: Zerling, 2007). We are grateful to Wolfram Hartung (University of Würzburg, Germany) for advice and encouragement, to Cornelia Ullrich (Darmstadt) for continuous advice and help in managing the electronic organization, and to Janet