A Medieval Description

Hello all. It's my first time in this board, and I don't come to you with a picture. What I need your help for, is to try to identify some information from a medieval "book of secrets", which are recipe books, essentially. I can provide the original (old French) version. In both cases, he is describing plants that would make good dyes, and I believe the material is leather, but the writer was not clear on this.


An herb which grows in hedges, which has a stem similar to flax, long and broad leaves like little bugloss, which has a violet flower verging on blue and looks like the fleur de lys, makes a quite beautiful turquin, better than azure.


Another columbine flower of the shape and size of the bugloss flower, which has a leaf like that of the pansy, also makes a very beautiful turquin. It grows in wheat in light earth.


I have come across the columbine flowers but considering a previous paragraph in the text, I believe the author means columbine as a colour (which is a warm gray, like a quail), but I could be dead wrong.
I am open to any suggestions as wild as they can be.

 

Welcome to Gardeners Corner

Ooo, I like a challenge like this, "goes to get books....."

 

Can't find anything that looks like the fleur de lys but i'm wondering about Hedge Woundwort, Stachys silvatica, or Viper's Bugloss, which is bigger than the "little bugloss"

Then again, they don't have stems like flax

Meadow Clary is a possibility, but that's quite rare now.

 

Thank you for the input, I really appreciate it!
The book was written in the 1500's so I wouldn't worry too much about current occurrence.

 

Trouble is the book could be referring to plants from South France ...warmer climates than UK
Plants we might not grow in UK...wild or otherwise.

 

Yep. That's very likely.

 

Never mind the plants, have you got a copy of the book?

 

Oh, I wish. I believe the original is in the US, which is a shame.

 

This answers the question I was going to ask, which was going to be, are you sure about the translation.

In the 1500s, the English language had yet to be standardised. I think you mentioned French too, which again was not standardised back then. Even after the first 'standard' version of the English language, which didn't come til sometime in the 1700s I believe, local dialects were still very much the thing. In fact I think it wasn't til about the latter half of the Victorian era that plant names started to be standardised with botanical names, and even then the standard was not widely adopted straight away. All of this means that it can sometimes be nigh on impossible to be certain what plant these very old texts are referring to. I think in this instance, a good starting point might be to research a list of wild plants that can yield a blue dye, and then cross check by description against the description in the text. Then if there's still ambiguity, research old local/regional names for the other plants mentioned, to see if any have alternative names, for example, to see if anything else was ever called flax (i suspect several plants were).

 

Welcome to GC Nukii.

The first paragraph of this link below rings bells. The Iris flower is definitely a similar shape to the Fleur De Lys but I'm not sure about the stem. If we're thinking medieval then the plant could have looked quite a bit different in it's original form. Ironically there is a modern day Iris named 'Fleur De Lys'.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleur-de-lis

Could the second plant be a Viola?

 

Oh yes! The Iris does seem like the description given, and even the dye colours seem to check out. I will be doing some more researching now that I have a name-

And the viola also seems to fit the description- I can't tell you how happy I am right now

 

I hope the Iris and Viola come good for you and please let us know how things progress.