Herbarium: Convallaria majalis, 1934, Pri treh ribnikih, Maribor
Photography: Tamara Jare
Category: History
I guess people do have in common at least a slight inclination towards collecting different artifacts. Then I am among the ones who have stronger tendency for collecting. Which makes me happy is not the possession of different items, but the ways they can be arranged in logical categories. From that point of view I could find ferns interesting items.But I was still surprised to hear about pteridomania, a fern collecting craze in Victorian England. People got crazy collecting different ferns to that extent that some of the ferns got almost extinct! Honestly, I can’t blame them, arranging those photos I’ve almost started collecting ferns!
Pteridomania, meaning Fern Madness or Fern Craze, a compound of Pteridophytes andmania, was coined in 1855 by Charles Kingsley in his book Glaucus, or the Wonders of the Shore: Your daughters, perhaps, have been seized with the prevailing ‘Pteridomania’…and wrangling over unpronounceable names of species (which seem different in each new Fern-book that they buy)…and yet you cannot deny that they find enjoyment in it, and are more active, more cheerful, more self-forgetful over it, than they would have been over novels and gossip, crochet and Berlin-wool.[1]
from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pteridomania
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Gros Noir d’Hiver is another name for winter radish. Can you imagine that among the hobbies of nobleman at the French court was breeding ? And even more weird, the plant they were interested in was a simple winter radish they named many aristocratic names? French revolution of course didn’t have inclination for such frivolities and so we can eat only simple winter radish now. Which relates us to the Egiptian workmen on pyramids, in a sense, as radishes were their food, too. Herodotus wrote about it ,leaving the question how similar to the slaves are we today up to us……
Citation: Many noblemen in the French court bred different varieties, so many types of radishes had aristocratic names. In the fallout of the French Revolution these names were dropped, causing even more confusion when trying to trace how certain modern radishes are related to the older ones. from: http://academics.hamilton.edu/foodforthought/Our_Research_files/radishes.pdf
On the pyramid it is declared in Egyptian writing how much was spent on radishes and onions and leeks for the workmen, and if I rightly remember that which the interpreter said in reading to me this inscription, a sum of one thousand six hundred talents of silver was spent; and if this is so, how much besides is likely to have been expended upon the iron with which they worked, and upon bread and clothing for the workmen, seeing that they were building the works for the time which has been mentioned and were occupied for no small time besides, as I suppose, in the cutting and bringing of the stones and in working at the excavation under the ground?
Read more: http://www.touregypt.net/herodotuskhufu.htm#ixzz2srfzyWaZ
Young Woman At A Window Pealing Radishes, by: Jacobus Johannes Lauwers , from: http://www.wikigallery.org/wiki/painting_377064/Jacobus-Johannes-Lauwers/page-1
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Floral ornaments
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Vatican gardens
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My Botanical Garden 