Vegetable Love
The clay and earth of Pulter’s opening lines soon give way to flowers, as she describes the effects of time on deciduous and evergreen plants. The first tree mentioned is the laurel (lines 17-19), which signified both military victory, a tradition dating back to ancient Greece, and poetic achievement, an association popularized by the fourteenth-century poet Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch). Shortly after Pulter wrote this poem, Margaret Cavendish commissioned several portraits of herself with laurel wreaths to assist in establishing her authority as a writer. Yet Pulter describes the laurel’s beauty fading over time, perhaps casting doubts on the longevity of poetry and poets’ reputations.
Pieter Louis van Schuppen after Abraham Diepenbeeck, Margaret Cavendish (née Lucas), Duchess of Newcastle upon Tyne, late 17th century, line engraving, 10.75 by 6.25 in. (27.4 by 15.9 cm), London, National Portrait Gallery, distributed under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.
This passage reveals Pulter’s awareness of the characteristics and uses of trees, information that she may have come across in botanical literature. The most popular book on botany in seventeenth-century England was John Gerard’s Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes, first published in 1597. Based on its author’s experience with gardening as well as the Latin translation of Rembertus Dodoens’s Cruydeboeck (1554), this large illustrated tome provides a useful index of botanical knowledge circulating during Pulter’s life.
Pulter echoes Gerard’s admiring remarks about the size of the cedar, writing that it “aspires so high, / Scorning the clouds, threat’ning to scale the sky” (lines 23-24). Gerard’s notes on the cedar’s uses also suggest an interpretation of Pulter’s line 27, “Though she the living kill and dead preserve,” as this tree provided wood and rosin used to embalm humans and eradicate pests.
The great cedar is a very big & high tree, not only exceeding all other resinous trees and those which bear fruit like unto it, but in his tallness and largeness far surmounting all other trees; the body or trunk thereof is commonly of a mighty bigness, insomuch as four men are not able to fathom it, as Theophrastus writeth …
There issueth out of this tree a rosin like to that which issueth out of the Fir tree, very sweet in smell … if it be boiled in the fire an excellent pitch is made thereof called Cedar pitch.
The Egyptians were wont to coffin and embalm their Dead in Cedar and with Cedar pitch …
The gum of Cedar is good to be put into medicines for the eyes; for being anointed therewith it cleareth and cleanseth the sight from the Haw [excrescence or speck] and from stripes [injuries].
Cedar infused in vinegar and put into the ears killeth the worms therein; and being mingled with the decoction of Hyssop, appeaseth the sounding, ringing, and hissing of the ears …
It is good to kill nits and lice and such like vermin; it cureth the biting of the serpent Cerastes [horned viper] being laid on with salt.
The long-standing association between cypress trees and death, which Pulter invokes in line 29, derives from Classical sources such as Pliny the Elder’s Natural History (77-79 CE). Pliny’s text gained a wider audience when it was first translated into English by Philemon Holland in 1601, an accomplishment that was not repeated until the mid-nineteenth century. Neither Pliny nor Holland minced words in describing the cypress:
Much ado there is with it before it come[s] up, and as hard it is to grow, and when all is done, the fruit is good for nothing. The Berries that it beareth be wrinkled, and nothing lovely to the eye; the leaves wherewith it is clad, bitter in taste; a strong and violent smell it hath with it; not so much as the very shade thereof is delectable and pleasant; and the wood but small & not solid, but of a hollow substance … Consecrated is this tree to Pluto, and therefore men use to set a bough thereof as a sign before those houses wherein a dead corpse lieth …
Nonetheless, there were some writers who appreciated the cypress’s aesthetic qualities, such as John Parkinson, who described it in his gardening book Paradisi in Sole (1629). Parkinson stresses its use as an ornamental tree, “of great account with all Princes” (p. 602), and the accompanying illustration depicts a cypress among other decorative evergreens (no. 4).
John Parkinson, Paradisi in Sole Paradisus Terrestris (London: Methuen & Co., 1904), p. 601, sig. G4. Reprint of 1629 edition. University of California Libraries, archive.org.