Seven Flowers

by Jennifer Potter

  common throughout her borders, hardy and conspicuous, of definite, unvarying and striking shape, easily sketched, moulded, and carved, having armorial capacities, ideally adapted for artistic reproduction, with its strong, distinct disk and its golden circle of clear glowing rays – a flower that a child can draw on a slate, a woman can work in silk, or a man can carve on stone or fashion in clay.

  Many years later, the nearby state of Iowa tried to outlaw the sunflower as a noxious weed because of the havoc it wreaked on the soybean crop. In retaliation, Kansas picked a quarrel with Iowa’s state bird, the eastern goldfinch, which feeds on sunflower seeds, threatening to declare it a public nuisance. Neither resolution was ever formally adopted and the row eventually subsided. The sunflower remains firmly fixed in the Kansan psyche, celebrated for its love of open spaces, neither hiding in the dark nor seeking solace in the shade. In the words of one nostalgic Kansan, ‘It stood by the dusty roadside and out on the high prairie – and you always knew what it meant . . . It turned its gold petals and black center always toward the sun. No matter how fiercely the heat beat down, it faced the music and never blinked.’ And as any Kansan will tell you, if you travel through the state in late August and early September, you will encounter a landscape dominated by sunflowers, looking bright and vigorous ‘when everything else, including the residents, are brown and wilted’.

  A native of New Jersey rather than the Kansas prairies, the beat poet Allen Ginsberg drew on the ‘perfect beauty of a sunflower’ to castigate the desolation of urban America, as he sat with Jack Kerouac on the ‘tincan banana dock’, hung-over like two old bums, beneath the huge shadow cast by a Southern Pacific locomotive. Unusually for Ginsberg, who wrote his ‘Sunflower Sutra’ in 1955 in Berkeley, California, the sunflower brings a glimmer of hope that America might rediscover its progressive roots and become beautiful again – a different sort of hope to van Gogh’s sunflower dreams, but hope nonetheless.

  TODAY, THE SUNFLOWER has reincarnated itself more widely as the emblem of good causes. Adopted as the trademark of the British Vegan Society and recognized around the world – except perhaps in the Asia–Pacific region, where the mark has metamorphosed into the lotus – it stands for the values of caring and compassion: for animals and people, and for the earth as a whole. You are just as likely to find its cheerful, sunlit presence endorsing a hospice, a brand of margarine, or an estate agent’s flyer wishing to breathe new life into an ailing market. And the sunflower lives on in art, most recently in the millions of hand-painted porcelain sunflower seeds with which the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei filled the great entrance hall of London’s Tate Modern. ‘“Sunflower Seeds” invites us to look more closely at the “Made in China” phenomenon and the geo-politics of cultural and economic exchange today,’ promised the gallery. Or you could simply stand and stare.

  4

  Opium Poppy

  Not poppy nor mandragora

  Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world

  Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep

  Which thou owedst yesterday.

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Othello

  12. Poppies from a late printing (1790) of Nicholas Culpeper’s The English Physitian Enlarged (Image provided by Peter H. Raven Library, Missouri Botanical Garden, http://www.missouribotanicalgarden.org/)

  EVEN ON A rain-swept Sunday in early June, the opium poppies at London’s Chelsea Physic Garden stopped me in my tracks, their translucent petals crumpled like silk in shades of pink, red and a gamut of ghostly purples. ‘The poppy is painted glass,’ wrote the Victorian art critic John Ruskin in Proserpina, his rambling study of wayside flowers; ‘it never glows so brightly as when the sun shines through it. Wherever it is seen – against the light or with the light – always, it is a flame, and warms the wind like blown ruby.’ Sodden and unilluminated, these poppies were glowing nonetheless as the limp young buds unfurled into proudly erect flower heads, their four petals splotched with basal purple enfolding a petticoat frill of pollen-bearing anthers around a radiating star – the stigmatic disc – at the flower’s heart.

  The opium poppy’s power does not reside in its beauty, however. ‘Joan Silver Pin’, they called it in Elizabethan times, ‘of great beautie, although of evill smell’. The royal apothecary John Parkinson was even plainer in his verdict, calling it ‘faire without and fowle within’; for the power of this most beautiful of flowers lies in the opium it contains, a drug hailed as the most important remedy in the pharmacologist’s entire materia medica, yet one judged capable of creating more misery by its abuse ‘than any other drug employed by mankind’.

  When I delved into its long history, the opium poppy’s European origins – as a plant and as a drug – took me by surprise. Misled by its current notoriety, I had long viewed it as a more easterly plant, born in the badlands of countries such as Afghanistan, which today cultivates more poppies for their illegal drugs yield than any other nation. But the opium poppy is in fact a plant of the western Mediterranean, which gathered strength as it moved eastwards and would later return to haunt those who had first recognized its potency.

  The opium poppy’s history is full of such paradoxes; constant under tones of fear and dislike are counterbalanced by periodic outbursts of reverence for its brilliance as a drug and as a garden plant. People were right to fear it, as its power was – and still is – very real. This power was particularly evident in the nineteenth century when the legal consumption of opium products was at its height, and Britain went to war to defend the ‘right’ of her merchants to bring illicit opium to China in defiance of the Chinese government’s wishes. Yet by the end of the century, America would introduce desperate measures aimed at blocking the advance of opium smoking into her territory, and the world woke up to the dangers of the illegal drugs trade. Such are the ironies of this most perverse of flowers.

  LIKE THE SUNFLOWER’S, the story of the opium poppy, Papaver somniferum, begins with men’s stomachs, for it is as an oil plant that it leaves its first trace in human history, domesticated in the western Mediterranean some six thousand years ago. Remains of charred poppy seeds and occasional capsules have been uncovered from Neolithic and early Bronze Age settlements in northern France, Switzerland, Germany, Poland, northern Italy and southern Spain. The crop is closely related to the wild and ‘weedy’ poppies, previously known as P. setigerum and now usually classed as a subspecies of P. somniferum, that grow around the fringes of the Mediterranean basin to the west of Sicily and the toe of Italy, and along the North African littoral. From south-western Europe, the opium poppy then moved eastwards into central Europe and on to the eastern Mediterranean. Although most of these early finds tell us that poppies were cultivated for their food value as seeds or oil, the discovery of several beautifully preserved poppy capsules from a burial site in southern Spain suggests a connection with death rituals dating back to at least 2500 BCE.

  The poppy’s narcotic powers were also essentially discovered by Europeans and not, as you will sometimes read, by the ancient Mesopotamian civilizations of the Sumerians, Babylonians and Assyrians. The confusion was essentially linguistic. Among the many thousands of clay tablets excavated at Nippur on the Euphrates, a short distance south of modern Baghdad, was a detailed list of the animal, mineral and plant material used in medical prescriptions – in effect the world’s oldest recorded list of materia medica, written in cuneiform script c.2100 BCE by a Sumerian physician. Throughout much of the twentieth century, the ideogram transliterated as ‘HUL-GIL’ was identified with opium or the ‘joy plant’. As the same ideogram appeared in later Assyrian plant lists and medicinal tablets, it was assumed that both opium and the opium poppy were known to the Assyrians. As a result scholars constructed a whole set of intriguing linguistic relationships linking narcotics in general and opium in particular to the root words ‘to curse’ and ‘to rejoice’ – the twin poles expressing the extreme effects of this most potent drug. Yet far from indicating the opium poppy, the symbol ‘HU
L-GIL’ in fact refers to a kind of cucumber, quite possibly the stink cucumber, and the expert view today is that no word in Sumerian, Akkadian or Assyrian positively identifies poppy, opium poppy, or opium. Nor is the evidence of Assyrian bas-reliefs from Nineveh any more convincing, as scholars continue to argue over the identity of plants held by priestly physicians at a ritual scene.

  Quite when the opium poppy arrived in Egypt is also disputed. The poppies depicted on the casket lid of Tutankhamun’s tomb, and the dried poppy flowers found in his ornamental bouquet, are generally classed as common corn poppies, Papaver rhoeas, while an ancient Egyptian plant known as ‘spn’ is identified only ‘very dubiously’ as the opium poppy. Its soporific effects were, however, much the same. Among the seven hundred or so medical remedies and magical formulae contained in the Ebers papyrus of c.1500 BCE, is this remedy to calm a crying child: ‘spn-seeds; fly dung from the wall; is made to a paste, [mixed with water?], strained and drunk for four days. The crying will cease instantly.’

  More intriguing – and convincing – are reports by the Danish Egyptologist Lise Manniche that opium in some form may have been buried with the dead during Egypt’s eighteenth dynasty (c.1400 BCE), although its ancient function and purpose remain obscure. According to Manniche, fatty material recovered from the tomb at Deir el-Medina of Kha, a high-ranking official involved with the royal tombs at Thebes, was subjected to laboratory analysis and introduced into a frog. After half an hour the frog began to leap about, reacting instantly to stimuli, but it later calmed down and its reactions slowed. A larger quantity injected into another frog caused paralysis and death, after initial excitement; and when dissolved in water and injected into a frog and a mouse, the drug induced deep sleep, after which the two creatures returned to normal. The chemical contained in the ancient substance was identified as morphine, one of opium’s main alkaloids, isolated only in the nineteenth century.

  Whatever ritual or medicinal use the ancient Egyptians made of opium, it seems unlikely that they were the first to revere its potency. As with the lily, that honour belongs to the Minoans of Crete who, possibly influenced by the Mycenaeans from mainland Greece, created the oldest surviving large-scale icon linking the opium poppy to the gods. This is the terracotta Minoan goddess with eyes closed, hands uplifted and lips clamped in a beatific smile suggesting either torpor or ecstasy, who wears in her hair three removable pins now recognized as poppy capsules, notched to release their precious sap. Known as the ‘poppy goddess, patroness of healing’ and dated to the second millennium BCE, she was discovered in 1936 in a sanctuary at Gazi near Heraklion in Crete, amid paraphernalia that may have been used to produce opium vapours, giving the drug a role in her worship.

  Many smaller artefacts from mainland Greece confirm the link between poppies and a fertility goddess, among them a celebrated gold seal-ring from Mycenae, which shows a goddess under a sacred tree receiving gifts of poppy capsules, lilies and unidentified flowers. Living up to its later Elizabethan nickname of ‘Joan Silver Pin’, the opium poppy appears to have been a favourite ornament of ancient Greek pinheads, such as the silver pin excavated at the sanctuary of Hera at Argos, inscribed with a dedication to the goddess.

  WRITTEN EVIDENCE CONFIRMS the part played by ancient Greece and the lands of the Aegean in spreading the cult and culture of the poppy into the eastern Mediterranean. It had reached Corinth by the eighth century BCE at least, when the poet Hesiod wrote of a nearby town named Mekone, or Poppy Town, so named because of its extensive poppy fields. Others held that it was here the goddess Demeter first discovered the fruit of the poppy, which legend suggests consoled her as she searched for her daughter Persephone, snatched by Hades and taken to the underworld.

  At much the same time, Homer used the poppy’s limpness to describe in the Iliad the drooping head of the Trojan Gorgythion, killed by an arrow intended for his half-brother Hector. More controversial is the identification of nepenthes, the narcotic drug in The Odyssey, which Helen slipped into the drinks of her husband’s guests returning from Troy.

  No one who drank it deeply, mulled in wine,

  could let a tear roll down his cheeks that day,

  not even if his mother should die, his father die,

  not even if right before his eyes some enemy brought down

  a brother or darling son with a sharp bronze blade.

  Although widely assumed to be an opiate because of its ability to dispel anger and pain, nepenthes has never been conclusively identified. Homer tells us that Helen acquired the drug from Polydamna, wife of Thon, ‘a woman of Egypt, land where the teeming soil / bears the richest yield of herbs in all the world’. Everyone in Egypt was a healer, claimed the poet, drawing on Egypt’s contemporary reputation as the primary source of medical wizardry. But this proves neither the identity of the drug nor its supposed Egyptian origin. Indeed, writing some four centuries after Homer, Theophrastus – the great botanist of the classical age – hints that nepenthes might have been a figment of the poet’s imagination, that ‘famous drug which cures sorrow and passion, so that it causes forgetfulness and indifference to ills’. Others, too, have suggested that Helen stupefied her guests not with drugs but with her charms.

  Far from clarifying the role of the opium poppy in Greek botany and pharmacology, Theophrastus omits it altogether from his three types of poppy: the horned poppy, the corn poppy, and a third kind (Herakleia) with a leaf like soapwort, used to bleach linen. Only the middle kind is a true poppy, much like today’s corn poppy, Papaver rhoeas; he called it rhoias, ‘which is like wild chicory, wherefore it is even eaten: it grows in cultivated fields and especially among barley. It has a red flower, and a head as large as a man’s finger-nail. It is gathered before the barley-harvest, when it is still somewhat green. It purges downwards.’

  The omission of the opium poppy is puzzling, especially as Theophrastus described how to harvest the poppy’s juice for medicinal purposes: not from the stalks or roots but ‘from the head, as in the case of the poppy; for this is the only plant which is so treated and this is its peculiarity’. The ancient Greek physician Hippocrates, who died about the time Theophrastus was born in 371 BCE, frequently mentioned opium and the opium poppy, especially in his gynaecological tracts, so perhaps midwives were more keenly aware of its painkilling properties than male physicians. Or perhaps Theophrastus kept silent because of the controversies that have always bedevilled its use as a drug.

  Ancient knowledge about the different kinds of poppy and their effects on human physiology coalesced in De Materia Medica by the Greek-born Pedanius Dioscorides, who acquired his great know ledge of plants while travelling around the Roman Empire as an itinerant physician – perhaps in the wake of the Roman army – in the first century CE. Dioscorides distinguished between three kinds of poppy: one with white seeds, ‘cultivated and set in gardens’, whose seeds were made into bread and used with honey instead of sesame seeds; the wild corn poppy, P. rhoeas, whose heads could be boiled in wine to produce a sleeping draught or taken as a drink with honey and water to soften the bowels; and a third kind, ‘more wild, more medicinal and longer than these’, which was the focus of his medicinal remedies.

  13. An opium poppy from the ‘Vienna Dioscorides’, an early sixth-century Byzantine copy of Dioscorides’ De Materia Medica created for Princess Juliana Anicia.

  From Dioscorides, we get a sense of opium’s power as a drug but also of the care and respect it demanded. While discounting from his own experience the cautions of other authorities that it could turn men blind and should be inhaled only, he declared that drunk too often ‘it hurts (making men lethargic) and it kills’, nonetheless recommending it for a range of conditions that called for a ‘cooling’ remedy. Boiled in water and applied with hot cloths, the capsules and leaves induced sleep, as did a decoction taken internally. Pounded into small pieces and mixed into poultices with polenta, the heads could reduce inflammation and a streptococcal skin infection known as erysipelas. Boiled first in wate
r and then with honey, the capsules produced a ‘licking medicine’ suitable for coughs and abdominal afflictions, while ground black poppy seeds drunk with wine were used to reduce diarrhoea and excessive discharges in women. Various parts of the plant could also be mixed with other ingredients and used for earaches, inflamed eyes, gout, wounds and as a general painkiller; while ‘put up with the finger as a suppository it causes sleep’. The best poppy juice, according to Dioscorides, was ‘thick, heavy, and sleepy in smell, bitter to the taste, easily pierced with water, smooth, white, not sharp, neither clotted nor growing thick in the straining’.

  Dioscorides’ very detailed descriptions set out the two main ways by which the Greeks harnessed the medicinal power of the poppy. The less potent method was to squeeze the pounded stems and leaves through a press, beat the resulting mash in a mortar, then turn it into lozenges; this was called meconium. Pure opium – a far stronger medicine – was harvested by slitting the fruit with a small knife, ‘after the dew-drops have become well dried. The knife must be drawn round the crown without piercing the fruit within; then the capsules must be directly slit on the sides near the surface and opened lightly, the juice drop will come forth on to the finger sluggishly but will soon flow freely.’ You were also advised to stand well back when preparing the latex, to avoid contaminating your clothes.

  Pliny the Elder, a near contemporary of Dioscorides, added a few new facts: that poppy seeds offered a cure for elephantiasis, for instance, and that opium was a favourite recourse of suicides, giving the ex ample of a man of Praetorian rank who killed himself with opium after an incurable illness had rendered his life intolerable. Condemned by earlier authorities as a deadly poison, the drug was then generally ‘not disapproved of’, although Pliny himself did not favour its medicinal use for sore eyes, upset stomachs or to reduce fevers.