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  • Book extract

What the wind can bring

In this extract from ‘This Book is a Plant’, Amanda Thomson shares a newfound fascination with flowers, and reveals why our relationship with plants can also be complicated.

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Images

  • A man suffering from attack by blue devils; representing depression or mental illness. Coloured etching after R. Newton, 1795.
  • A man suffering from attack by blue devils; representing depression or mental illness. Coloured etching R. Newton, 1795, after himself.
  • An army of red people behind a blue barrior bearing sparkling religious symbols attempting to quell a group of red devils bearing the word 'AIDS' and holding forks; an advertisement to use religions as a shield against AIDS by the Catholic Commision on AIDS. Colour lithograph, ca. 1996.
  • A Sinhalese black devil called Ayimane holding a cockerel in one hand and resting a leg on a giant blue cat. Gouache painting by a Sri Lankan artist.
  • Succisia pratensis Greene Asteraceae. Devil’s Bit Scabious, Blue Buttons. Distribution: Europe, W Asia, Africa. Culpeper (1650), under ‘Herbs’ he writes: ‘Succisa, Morsus diobolo, Devil’s Bit. Inwardly taken it easeth the fits of the mother [probably uterine spasm or pain], and breaks wind, taketh away the swellings in the mouth, and slimy phlegm that sticks to the jaws, neither is there a more present remedy in the world, for those cold swellings of the neck, which the vulgar call the Almonds [lymph nodes] of the neck than this herb bruised and applied to them. Folk lore attribute it as a cure-all which was so successful that the Devil bit off the bottom of the roots when he saw it growing down into Hades. However, the roots show no sign of such damage to support the myth. Photographed in the Medicinal Garden of the Royal College of Physicians, London.
  • A poor depressed man prepares to hang himself in a noose attached to the ceiling. Etching by T.L. Busby, ca. 1826.
  • An ill man next to his empty hearth tormented by the miseries of life; presented surrounded by assorted chastising demons. Coloured etching by G. Cruikshank, 1835.
  • A gouty man surrounded by his collection of artefacts, telling his doctor how they keep turning blue; suggesting the man's melancholic loneliness. Coloured lithograph, 1835.
  • The effects of medicine and wine-drinking compared. Ink drawing, 18--.
  • The pursuits of a man retired to the country. Etching by R. Seymour, 1829.
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