Overview

In 1976, John Raven caused a stir in the University of Cambridge when he began his Gray Lectures on Plants and Plant Lore in Ancient Greece with a reappraisal of long-accepted identifications of ancient names for modern plants. He soon ranged to wider questions of classical botany, in myth, medicine and illustration, from the plants of Homer and Sappho, to Theophrastus and Theocritus, Hippocrates and Dioscorides. He examined Minoan art and the tulips of modern Crete. In a tour-de-force, he sought the very pool on Cos, where fair Hylas was snatched by waternymphs, to the dismay of Hercules. John Raven's four Gray lectures are here presented with another he gave in Oxford in 1971, which is illustrated with photographs by Faith Raven. These lectures display John Raven's lifetime's intimacy with Greek plants on the ground. His themes are discussed and expanded in the light of recent research by distinguished and botanical and classical scholars: Dr William Stearn and Professors Nicholas Jardine and Peter Warren. Two related papers (one unpublished) by Alice Lindsell, a pioneer in the field, are included, and extracts from her Botanical Sketchbook, made in Greece in 1930-31 , are published among the abundant colour plates.

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Between the ignorance of the Stone Age and the ignorance of today, humans took a much closer interest in [the] field of flowers. For centuries our ancestors looked at the very same site and saw signs of death and rebirth, sex, madness, and then, a little later, satyrs, fauns and nymphs. About 400 years before the birth of Christ the local Greeks began to replace their many-faced religion with an even more influential science of categories, classification and names. This new science of naming became as fashionable for the middle classes as a Greek island vacation is today. And once the philosophers had spoken to the poets, the carefully delineated names for flowers and fruits and trees moved into literature too. ... But what was an aigipuros ? Did the Greeks classify their plants in the same way that we do? Was a hyacinth in Hyettus the same as a hyacinth in Hull, a crocus in Cos the same as one in Kew? Throughout most of the 19th and 20th centuries, in the high days of classical scholarship, no one cared too much about that. The important fact was that a whole meadow of plants had been named at all - an act of the intellect that can be credited to the pupil of Aristotle and slightly older contemporary of Theocritus, Theophrastus. To the Cambridge classicist, John Raven, however, the correct identification between ancient names and modern flowers did matter ... this quiet gardening scholar cut a swath of indignant derision through the modern definitions of Greek botany. As an observant traveller rather than library-bound researcher, he showed that numerous flowers set out in Liddell and Scotts authoritative dictionary could not be what the compilers had said them to be. No mainland mountain was too high, no island meadow too boggy, if he could prove that the main 19th-century contributor on Greek flower names, the nepotistically appointed Director of Kew Gardens, Sir William Thiselton-Dyer, was in error. The ingeniously sustained outrage at his

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