The star of Hester Pulter’s Heliotropians (Emblem 3)69 is a blue flower that turns with the sun. It also exhibits a fabulous physics: her solar pursuit extends beyond the horizon and seems to involve some kind of drilling, by which means “She breaks through all to meet her radiant lover” who is now on Earth’s other side (l. 22). No known flower is so dogged in its adoration of the sun. Even so, I’ve often wondered if the emblem might nonetheless be animating a kind of heliotropic flower that was known to Europeans in the seventeenth century. Can we identify which kind based on the flower’s description? Exciting and as promising as this project in amateur botany may sound, it is also marked as nearly impossible from the start: “That many heliotropians there be, / Philosophers unanimously agree” (ll. 1–2). For the purposes of this Curation, I’ve reduced the untold abundance of Pulter’s “many” flowers to just four potential heliotropic candidates.

In assembling this lineup of candidates, I’ve drawn liberally from Pulter’s other poems and less so from the great Elizabethan botanical encyclopedia, The Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes, which appeared under John Gerard’s name in 1597. Plant lovers will notice as absent from this lineup a beloved candidate, the fragrant, purple flowers that we today call “heliotropes.” These popular garden flowers made their way into Europe from South America in the century after Pulter. In the final analysis, the fabulous flower of Emblem 3 may well be a fanciful patchwork of a few other heliotropes.

Candidate 1: The Sunflower

John Gerard, The Herball, Or Generall Historie of Plantes (London, 1597). Image courtesy of the UBC Library Digitization Centre and its generous donors.

There’s perhaps no better place to begin than with Pulter’s own description of the flower. According to the narrator, she is an “azure flower” (l. 10) that stretches her body quite a way towards the sun: “And when he [the sun] mounts to his meridian height, / Then many cubits she doth stand upright / Above the earth” (ll. 11–13). We don’t know exactly how “many cubits,” but we do know that a cubit is 18 inches in length. Such great heights might well lead us to identify the flower as the sunflower. Although not native to Europe, this charismatic megaflora had entered European gardens by the end of the sixteenth century. In The Herball, Gerard classifies several flowers under the larger rubric “Of the flower of the Sunne, or the Marigolde of Peru.” The first of these is called “The greater Sunne flower” (Flos Solis maior), or “The Indian Sunne or the golden flower of Peru,” and about it Gerard observes that “it hath risen vp to the height of fourteene foote in my garden” in London. He admits, though, that he has not witnessed the flower’s heliotropism: it is “reported … to turne with the sunne, the which I could neuer obserue, although I endeauoured to finde out the truth of it.” He does not believe that the sunflower is named for this heliotropic habit; he “rather thinke[s] it was so called bicause it doth resemble the radiant beames of the Sunne.”1 Gerard’s experiments in the garden remind us of the difficulty of seeing plant movement, such as heliotropism, with only the naked eye.

Recap: Gerard’s sunflower might approximate the height of Pulter’s fabulous flower, but it is the wrong color (golden, not blue) and does not follow, according to Gerard, the sun over the course of a day. The geographical reference to Peru is tantalizing, but it’s obvious that this flower is different from the fragrant, purple flowers we call heliotropes today.

Candidate 2: The Solsequium

As the Headnote to the Amplified Edition of Heliotropians (Emblem 3)69 shows, Pulter’s fabulous flower has a relative that appears in A Solitary Discourse44, a poem that comes earlier in the manuscript. Here, the flower seems to follow the sun, but the incredible means by which she would have to do so go unremarked: “But when the sun is nadir to us here, / She meets him in the other hemisphere” (ll. 69–70). The flower in “A Solitary Discourse” is also not measured as it is in Emblem 3. All we know is that she “thrusts her head / … / Into the liquid azure sea above her / To follow Phoebus, her admiréd lover” (ll. 61, 63–64). It’s curious that the narrator euphemizes the sky as “the liquid azure sea”: it is as if blueness has been transferred from an unclouded sky in “A Solitary Discourse” to the petals of the fabulous flower in Emblem 3. Finally, nowhere in “A Solitary Discourse” — a poem whose title embeds a pun on sun (sol) — is the flower named “sunflower” or “heliotrope.” Instead, it is identified as “solsequium,” a Latinate word that could be translated roughly as “that which follows the sun.” The Online Oxford English Dictionary records the use of “solsequium” throughout the 1560s and links it to the noun “solsecle,” which designates in Middle English a marigold.

Recap: It may be that the Pulter’s fabulous flower takes its blueness from the sky of “A Solitary Discourse” and, with more certainty, that the flower in “A Solitary Discourse” is a marigold. Gerard’s Herball affords evidence that the sunflower, recently imported from the New World, was also understood to be a marigold.

Candidate 3: The Marigold

John Gerard, The Herball, Or Generall Historie of Plantes (London, 1597). Image courtesy of the UBC Library Digitization Centre and its generous donors.

In one of Pulter’s more ambitious poems, The Garden, or The Contention of Flowers12, the eighth flower to speak, or engage in the debate, is designated as “The Heliotropium” (l. 307). (In the manuscript, the speaker’s name is also rendered in the margin as “The Sunflower.” To cut through the nomenclatural confusion, I refer here to this flower as “Heliotrope.”) The Heliotrope compares herself, with advantage, to the previous speaker, the Violet: whereas the Violet says that she “make[s] my moan” “in silent shades” (l. 268), the Heliotrope crows about following the sun over the course of the day. Unlike the flowers of “A Solitary Discourse” and Emblem 3, the Heliotrope, despite her amazing capacity for speech, seems to track the sun less incredibly than do her sisters: “But when he doth descend to Thetys deep, / To part with him in golden tears I weep” (ll. 319–20). She gets a nightly break, which she turns into a point of pride:

The Heliotrope imagines herself as equal to, and conjoined with, the sun: notice how “my leaves, my love his light,” whose possessive pronouns signal individuation, collapse quickly into “our golden curls” and “Our love and light.” When the sun sets, so too closes the Heliotrope. It is as if she’s the day’s on-off switch, as if she’s the sun.

Recap: The Heliotrope is not azure. She tells us that she is gold, a rich yellow: when the sun sets, she cries “in golden tears,” and, when he rises, “our golden curls unfold.” The Heliotrope in “The Garden” just may be a marigold.

Candidate 4: “Heliotrope”

And yet botanical identification in Pulter is never quite so simple. Later in her speech in “The Garden,” the Heliotrope refers to a misdeed the Violet committed against Apollo, which accounts for why she is in the sun’s bad graces. The Heliotrope explains: “But now he scorns on her to cast an eye, / ’Cause enviously she made Leucothea die; / E’er since he hath refused her wanton bed, / Since when, ashamed, she hides her guilty head” (ll. 344–347). The Amplified Edition of The Garden, or The Contention of Flowers12 records that these lines allude to a story of transformation from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In Book 4 of Ovid’s poem, which I quote from the sixteenth-century translation by Arthur Golding, Clytie snitches on Leucothoe, her rival for Apollo’s love; for loving Apollo, Leucothoe’s father buries his daughter alive. For her role in this nasty business, Apollo refuses Clytie, who “did pine herself away.” For nine days, consuming “only dew and … her tears,” she “never rose but starèd on the sun / And ever turned her face to his as he his course did run.” Clytie became an “herb,” “The flower whereof, part red, part white, beshadowed with a blue, / Most like a violet in the shape, her count’nance overgrew.”2

As the Amplified Edition of “The Garden” explains, the Heliotrope “thus tells what might be viewed as a story of its own origins but presents it as evidence against the Violet.” We could also say that Ovid provides the Heliotrope an alibi for miscasting the Violet as blabbermouth Clytie: the flower into which Clytie transforms is “Most like a violet in … shape” in the translation of Ovid. Resemblance, though, is not identity: unlike the flower into which Clytie transforms, the Violet in “The Garden” is definitely not heliotropic.

Ovidian sidebar: Gerard’s Herball is strewn with classical poetry about plants, which topic I discuss in Marvellous Vegetables in the English Renaissance. Attributed to “the poet,” a couple of lines of verse about the Ovidian myth of Clytie appear in Latin (and are not translated into English) in a chapter that Gerard dedicates to the “Tornesole” or turnsole. This flower is classified as heliotropic “not bicause it is turned about at the daily motion of the sunne, but by reason it flowreth in the sommer solstice.”3 It was used in France in recipes for making “a perfect purple colour” for dyeing and cooking; the active ingredients in these preparations must have been its pulverized seeds and leaves, since the turnsole’s flowers are marked as white and, in one instance, yellow.

Poetry inspired by Ovid, in Latin, from the myth of Clytie, featured in a chapter that Gerard dedicates to the turnsole.

John Gerard, The Herball, Or Generall Historie of Plantes (London, 1597). Image courtesy of the UBC Library Digitization Centre and its generous donors.

Recap: “The Garden” features a character called Heliotrope, whose golden color associates her with marigolds, but whose Ovidian allusion confuses — rather than clarifies — this identification. Ovid’s flower, the metamorphosed Clytie, is “part red, part white, beshadowed with a blue.” Pulter’s Heliotrope in “The Garden” is not Clytie, which she (Pulter and Heliotrope) is at some pains to reinforce by assigning that Ovidian role to Violet. Perhaps, just perhaps, Golding’s reference to “blue” in the translation of Clytie’s story in Ovid, which is not evidence in the later seventeenth-century translation of Ovid that the Amplified Edition of “The Garden” excerpts, inspires Pulter’s decision to make her fabulous flower in Emblem 3 “azure.”

Conclusion

According to Pulter’s Emblem 3, there are “many heliotropians.” This botanical exercise affirms her point: sunflowers, marigolds, turnsoles, and heliotropes, all of which we could bundled under Pulter’s umbrella category “heliotropian,” grew in early modern English gardens. None of them, though, is a clear match for the fabulous flower in Emblem 3. This flower has been granted special capacities, and it may well be that Pulter drew on a number of sources, including her own natural-philosophical fancy (see line 2 and its gloss in the Amplified Edition), in bringing it to life. We won’t find the fabulous flower of Emblem 3 in an encyclopedia of plant natural history; it instead is a creature of poetry.

Footnotes