Free The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature by DavidGeorge Haskell

justify their practices. The shape, color, and growth of plants indicated their divine healing purpose. The showy, scented blossoms of the apple tree were intended to heal disorders of fertility and complexion; red, peppery plants were stamped with the sign of blood and anger, and so could be used to stimulate the circulation or the spirit. The
Hepatica
’s three-lobed purple leaves bore the liver’s mark.
    The use of external marks to deduce and remember the medicinal function of chemicals inside plants became known as the Doctrine of Signatures. The idea spread across Europe and attracted the attention of the scientific elite. They tried to haul the herbalists’ doctrine out of folklore and into the then modern science of astrology. The signature in each plant, they claimed, reflected God’s purpose, but it did so through the complex cosmology of the planets, moon, and sun. Theapple blossom was governed by Venus, hence its beauty and its healing powers. Jupiter governed all hepatic plants, and Mars ruled the warlike peppers. Correct diagnosis and treatment therefore required that a qualified scientist cast a horoscope and create a remedy incorporating his extensive, expensive knowledge of the celestial spheres and their influence on both plants and the human body. The scientific establishment railed against the country quackery of the simpleminded botanists while expropriating the quacks’ remedies for use in an updated astrological medicine.
    This tension between the medical establishment and the quacks continues, of course. The astrological Doctrine of Signatures now finds itself out of favor. Our physicians no longer believe that God left providential medicinal hints in the shapes of leaves and in the arrangement of the stars. We should not, however, be too quick to dismiss the Doctrine of Signatures as a trifling superstition. As a method of cultural transmission of medical knowledge, the doctrine was a powerful organizing device, richer and perhaps more coherent than the mnemonics used by modern physicians to navigate their large stores of knowledge. The method gave healers, most of whom could not read, linguistic cues to connect patients’ symptoms with the sometimes arcane details of botanical identification and medical knowledge. The Doctrine of Signatures persisted for so many years not because our ancestors were simpleminded but because it was so useful.
    Hepatica
’s name reveals our culture’s propensity for naming plants after their uses. This method of naming helps us to remember humanity’s dependence on plants for medicines and foods. But utilitarian names can also stand in the way of a full experience of nature. For example, our nomenclature has its teleology wrong.
Hepatica
exists not to serve us but to live out its own story, one that began in the forests of Europe and North America millions of years before humans came to be. Likewise, our naming imposes tidy categories on nature. These maynot reflect life’s complicated genealogies and reproductive exchanges. Modern genetics suggests that boundaries in nature are often more permeable than we suppose when we name “separate” species.
    On this bright morning in early spring, the
Hepatica
’s confident welcome of the first warm sun and flying bees reminds me that the mandala exists independent of human doctrines. Like all people, I am culture-bound, so I only partly see the flower; the rest of my field of vision is occupied by centuries of human words.

March 13th—Snails
    T he mandala is a molluskan Serengeti. Herds of coiled grazers move across the open savanna of lichens and mosses. The largest snails travel alone, plying the crazy angled surfaces of the leaf litter, leaving the mossy hillsides for the nimble youngsters. I lie down on my belly and creep up on a large snail that sits at the edge of the mandala. I lift the hand lens to my eye and shuffle closer.
    Through the lens, the snail’s head fills my field of vision—a magnificent