Category: oakland cemetery

From “The Virtuous Plants” in The Origins of Garden Plants by John Fisher:

“Chrysanthemum parthenium, feverfew, was, as its name implies, cultivated as a herb for lowering the temperature, and its strongly aromatic foliage no doubt helped to sustain its image as a herb of considerable efficacy. Its white daisy flower and pale green chrysanth foliage can be detected on the fringes of many walled gardens. Its name is said to have been derived from an incident related in Plutarch’s Life of Pericles during which a man who fell while working on the Parthenon escaped death by grabbing hold of a clump of feverfew.”

From “Border Flowers” in Flowers and their Histories by Alice M. Coats:

“C. parthenium. Feverfew. This plant is generally accepted as a native, though some think that it was introduced by the Romans, on the ground that it is one of a number of trees and herbs whose Anglo-Saxon name is obviously derived from the Latin. In this case, feverfew is said to be a corruption of febrifuge, ‘taken from his force of driving awaie agues’ [according to John Gerard’s Herball.] But it is equally possible that the Romans found the plant already here, and merely brought its properties to notice.

A double variety was brought into gardens at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and was then regarded as ‘peculiar onely to our owne Countrey’. ‘It abounds in Britain’, wrote the Dutch florist Crispin de Pass, in 1614, ‘because it appears to be grown there with skill and industry, and indeed from thence many kinds of flowers composed of a manifold series of petals are first brought into the neighbouring countries.’

Later on, it became popular as a foliage-plant for bedding-out purposes, particularly the golden-leaved variety, C. parthenium aureum. As to its properties, it was held to be ‘a special remedy to helpe those that have taken Opium too liberally… In Italy some use to eat the single kinde among other greene herbes… but especially fried with eggs, and so it wholly loseth his strong and bitter taste.’ It was ‘very good for them that are giddie in the head, or which have the turning called Vertigo… also it is good for such as be melancholike, sad, pensive and without speech’.

It appears on garden lists in various spellings — ‘Double Featherfew’, ‘Double Feaverfew’, and ‘Febrefeu’ are among them — for nearly a handful of centuries…. It was called Parthenium by the early botanists because of a tradition (recounted by Plutarch) that it saved the life of a man who fell from a height — having presumably become ‘giddie in the head’ — during the building of the Parthenon….

The scent is supposed to be particularly distasteful to bees. Varieties of C. parthenium are sometimes listed as Matricarias.”

From “A Stroll” by Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger in Harvest of Blossoms: Poems from a Life Cut Short, edited Irene Silverblatt and Helene Silverblatt:

The fields are merely clods of darkest brown
and here and there a bit of yellow-green,
and little sparrows, silly, fresh, and daring,
are darting over them like raucous children…
And far away the city with its towers,
with houses storming forth, so light and merry,

is like an image from a fairy tale.
The air is quiet, filled with yearning,
so that you wait for sky-blue larks
and want to ride in slender rowboats.

Here stand white asters, white and pure,
and there a head of cabbage, small and young.
They’re like a long forgotten parasol
in the middle of snow covered streets.
A rabbit, running past, cannot believe it….

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Hello!

This is the second of two posts with photographs of Tanacetum parthenium — a plant whose common names include Feverfew, Featherfew, Bachelor’s Button, and many others listed here — that I took at Oakland Cemetery in October. The first post is Feverfew and Featherfew, or, Tanacetum parthenium (1 of 2).

Alert readers (like you!) might notice that the two excerpts above — from books published in 1982 and 1971 — refer to the plant as Chrysanthemum parthenium, something that emphasizes what I wrote about in the first post: its current name Tanacetum parthenium is a recent enough change that even contemporary botanical references use the previous name. Those two excerpts also elaborate on the parthenium part of the plant’s name (which has remained constant) with rescue stories, though one might still puzzle about whether “grabbing hold of a clump of feverfew” would have mitigated against gravity.

Thanks for taking a look!

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From “Meaningful and Useful: A Plethora of Chrysanthemums” in Chrysanthemum (Botanical) by Twigs Way:

“[A plant] which has at times been awarded the ‘chrysanthemum’ title is the daisy-like feverfew. Easy to grow, it is native to Eurasia, originating in the Balkans, but long ago spread to northern Europe. Feverfew has a small, bright, daisy-like flower with white petals and a sunny yellow centre. It loves to grow in sunny places and spreads rapidly by seed to overwhelm flowerbeds on dry slopes. The feverfew was originally classified by herbalists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as Chrysanthemum parthenium but later became Pyrethrum parthenium, before being finally (one hopes) transferred yet again to become Tanacetum parthenium, aligning itself with the tansy, which was also once a chrysanthemum.

“Originally given the common name ‘featherfew’ after its feathery leaves, the feverfew is widely regarded as most useful for fever, arthritis and headaches and is recorded as being used as an anti-inflammatory in the first century AD. It may well have been introduced into England from central Europe by the Romans, who used it for these medicinal properties…. In his 1597 The Herball; or, Generall Historie of Plantes John Gerard did not hazard a guess as to the feverfew’s familial or (in modern terminology) genetic associations, but instead listed its virtues in physic, including being a remedy for ‘those of a melancholic nature’ who might be ‘sad, pensive or without speech’….

“Feverfew has attracted renewed interest in its medicinal usage thanks to its parthenolide content, which preliminary research indicates may have an impact on cancer-cell growth. It was traditionally known as ‘bachelor’s buttons’, a naming it shared with cornflowers. Explanations for the derivations of this vary from the flower literally having the appearance of a button, to the wearing of a small posy of such flowers in the buttonhole to indicate romantic availability….

“The parthenium part of the plant’s name, which has remained constant, contains a reference to virginity, but this meaning (or the Latin name) is unlikely to have been known to the country folk who originated the name ‘bachelor’s buttons’ or the alternative ‘pale maids’.”

From “Farewell Summer” by Marion Doyle in Who Tells the Crocuses It’s Spring, selected by Pearl Patterson Johnson:

Acre on acre, mile on mile,
Like spray from a waterfall,
The little wild white asters
Offer their beauty for all:
Fairyland-flowers that frost
Will copy on window panes;
Blossoms, like breath of winter,
Drifting the valleys and plains.
When the wind passes they whisper,
Like the sound of the sea in a shell,
A silver good-bye to summer:
Summer, farewell… farewell….

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Hello!

This is the first of two posts with photographs of Tanacetum parthenium, that I took at Oakland Cemetery in October. This plant has a large number of common names (see here for an extensive list), but it seems that the most commonly used common names are Feverfew, Featherfew, and Bachelor’s Button.

As I’ve likely mentioned before, Oakland’s gardens include an extensive collection of plants from the Asteraceae family, a family that includes delights like aromatic asters, chrysanthemums, coneflowers, cosmos, daisies, goldenrod, sunflowers, tansies, and zinnias — among many others — which I’ve been photographing for about five years. In 2022, I started trying to identify the specimens I photographed more accurately and to segregate them by genus name, so that for at least the past three years, it would be possible to view those I identified as chrysanthemums and those I identified as asters, for example, independently. I’m sure I’ll continue to refine that as this body of work evolves, and perhaps at some point go back to older posts and give their tags a tuneup as I learn more.

The excerpt from Chrysanthemum (Botanical) by Twigs Way at the top of the post hints at the complexity that I sometimes encounter. The Tanacetum parthenium plants featured below not only have a large number of common names, but have also had shifting scientific names. At various times, they’ve been botanically known as Matricaria parthenium, Chrysanthemum parthenium, Pyrethrum parthenium, and now Tanacetum parthenium — the most recent genus name assigned after genetic analysis determined that the plants shouldn’t be classified as Matricaria or Chrysanthemum, and the genus Pyrethrum had fallen into disuse. The earlier names were often culturally reflective — Matricaria, for example, was derived from terms associated with maternal or reproductive health — but changed over time as horticultural observation suggested they had been categorized inappropriately, or scientific methods improved (especially in the 20th century) to refine their botanical characteristics and group similar plants more precisely. It will always be something of a moving target, I suppose, yet it’s weirdly fascinating to me how much I learn by just exploring how these names emerged and were modified over time.

This is especially true for the Asteraceae family of plants, which contains nearly 2000 individual genera, including the Chrysanthemum genus, the Aster genus, and the Tanacetum genus, which together include about 400 species, and are respectively referred to as mums, asters, and tansies. This might suggest something obvious: it’s difficult to identify specific species of many mums, asters, or tansies when working from photographs, because there are so many possibilities to choose from and those featuring similar color combinations — like the white-petaled, yellow-centered flowers in this post — create additional identification challenges. Even my favorite plant i.d. source, PlantNet, trips on the challenge sometimes, and will often simply identify plants like these as genus chrysanthemum or genus aster only, as it can’t differentiate among their subtle differences to figure out the species. Nevertheless I persist! — and hope that as I do more and more research, I’ll get better at targeting my photos with the right plant names. And I’ll keep doing it since I learn so much about plants, their history, and their botanical characteristics along the way — something that can only happen if I do the research.

When I use PlantNet as a starting point for identification, I upload photos one at a time so that it can analyze the plants from different perspectives, without one image influencing its analysis of another. With this series of photos, closeups like this one — while aesthetically pleasing — don’t provide PlantNet with enough information, since the plant’s stems aren’t visible and its leaves are out-of-focus in the background.

While PlantNet did identify it as Tanacetum parthenium, the likelihood of a match was around half a percent — a low probability that in itself reflects the fact that so many Asteraceae family flowers look very similar. With this image, instead…

… PlantNet had more detail to work with, and the probability that the plant was Tanacetum parthenium increased quite a bit. Yet it was still quite low — so I was left with only a slim possibility that the identification was correct, but could conclude that the plant’s leaves were key to getting its name right. As historical botanical drawings have played a role in plant identification for several centuries, I searched for botanical drawings of the plant by its long-established common name “feverfew” to see how naturalists have documented the plant in the past. Click here if you would like to see the search results, where the plants’ leaves — and their distinct parsley-like appearance — are very evident, helping to confirm that Tanacetum parthenium was the correct botanical name for this plant.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

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