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Chancing to look at weeds in Hamlet I notice that three of the four times “weeds” is used to refer to plants (it is used two more times to refer to clothing) it includes the adjective “rank”. Rank etymology… Though at this point I couldn’t tell you how reliable that weeds in Hamlet post is.

My interest in the tamarisk is, I suppose, of a more literary and symbolic sort where that of Theophrastus was botanical and scientific; nevertheless, it occurred to me to read his works on plants on deep background, as it were, for my tamarisk investigation. His mentions of the tamarisk in the first volume of his Enquiry Into Plants (Loeb edition, translation Sir Arthur Hort) are below. Some preliminary observations:

Otherwise, what’s most notable is that Theophrastus doesn’t mention the tamarisk a great deal, and usually we find it in a list of other plants given to provide an example of a certain quality or attribute. Nor does he mention it in his chapters on the industrial uses of plants, suggesting there was no such use for the tamarisk among the Greeks. (Whereas Herodotus, in his history, mentions that in Egypt the tamarisk was used for building rafts and its sap used to sweeten foods,– though we know from the below that Theophrastus considered the tamarisk in that part of the world somewhat different from that to be found in Greece.)

Tamarisk in Enquiry Into Plants I.

(Note that Theophrastus doesn’t separate items of a list with commas, which style the translator has preserved.)

I.IV.3 “However, if one should wish to be precise, one would find that even of these some are impartial and as it were amphibious, such as tamarisk willow alder, and that others even of those which are admitted to be plant of the dry land sometimes live in the sea, as palm squill asphodel.”

I.IX.3 “Again some trees are evergreen, some deciduous. Of cultivated tree, olive date-palm bay myrtle a kind of fir and cypress are evergreen, and among wild trees silver-fir fir Phoenician cedar yew odorous cedar the tree which the Arcadians call ‘cork-oak’ (holm-oak) mock-privet prickly cedar ‘wild pine’ tamarisk box kermes-oak holly alaternus cotoneaster hybrid arbutus (all of which grow about Olympos) andrachne arbutus terebinth ‘wild bay’ (oleander). Andrachne and arbutus seem to cast their lower leaves, but to keep those at the end of the twigs perennially, and to be always adding leafy twigs. These are the tree which are evergreen.

I.X.4-5 “Again there are various other difference between leaves; some trees are broad-leaved, as vine fig and plan, some narrow-leaved, as olive pomegranate myrtle. Some have, as it were, spinous leaves, as fir Aleppo pine prickly cedar; some, as it were, fleshy leaves; and this is because their leaves are of fleshy substance, as cypress taramisk apple, among under-shrubs kneoros and stoibe, and among herbaceous plants house-leek and hulwort. This plant is good against moth in clothes. For the leaves of beet and cabbage are fleshy in another way, as are those of the various plants called rue; for their fleshy character is seen in the flat instead of in the round. Among shrubby plants the tamarisk has fleshy leaves. Some again have reedy leaves, as date-palm doum-palm and such like.”

III.XVI.4 “The arbutus, which produces the edible fruit called memaikylon, is not a very large tree; its bark is thin and like that of the tamarisk, the leaf is between that of the kermes-oak and that of the bay.”

IV.V.7 “Some of these regions however have the plane in abundance, and others the elm and willow, others the tamarisk, such as the district of Mount Haemus. Wherefore such trees we must, as was said, take to be peculiar to their districts, whether they are wild or cultivated. However it might well be that the country should be able to produce some of these trees, if they were carefully cultivated: this we do in fact find to be the case with some plants, as with some animals.”

IV.VI.7 “The ‘sea-oak’ and ‘sea-fir’ both belong to the shore; they grow on stones and oyster-shells, having no roots, but being attached to them like limpets. Both have more or less fleshy leaves; but the leaf of the ‘fir’ grows much longer and stouter, and is not unlike the pods of pulses, but is hollow inside and contains nothing in the ‘pods.’ That of the ‘oak’ is slender and more like the tamarisk; the colour of both* is purplish.” (*Am fairly sure this ‘both’ refers to the sea-oak and sea-fir, not to the sea-oak and tamarisk.)

V.VI.8 “Moreover, the wood of the tamarisk is not weak there [Arabia], as it is in our country, but is as strong as kermes-oak or any other strong wood. Now this illustrates also the difference in properties caused by country and climate.”

*

“Who are you, reader, reading my poems an hundred years hence? I cannot send you one single flower from this wealth of the spring, one single streak of gold from yonder clouds. Open your doors and look abroad. From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories of the vanished flowers of an hundred years before. In the joy of your heart may you feel the living joy that sang one spring morning, sending its glad voice across an hundred years.”… Rabindranath Tagore [@ wikisource]

Blog title: Rheotaxic proprioception played by Paul Mitchell

“Dans ce livre, où il n’y a pas un seul fait qui ne soit fictif, où il n’y a pas un seul personnage « à clefs », où tout a été inventé par moi selon les besoins de ma démonstration, je dois dire, à la louange de mon pays, que seuls les parents millionnaires de Françoise ayant quitté leur retraite pour aider leur nièce sans appui, que seuls ceux-là sont des gens réels, qui existent. Et persuadé que leur modestie ne s’en offensera pas, pour la raison qu’ils ne liront jamais ce livre, c’est avec un enfantin plaisir et une profonde émotion que, ne pouvant citer les noms de tant d’autres qui durent agir de même et par qui la France a survécu, je transcris ici leur nom véritable : ils s’appellent, d’un nom si français, d’ailleurs, Larivière.” [Time Regained, 183, 184] Google Translated

(I think this passage may be Proust’s only explicit statement in La Reserche about where exactly the book falls in the spectrum between Fictional Novel and True Autobiography (though, come to think of it, there is at least one other passage that deals with this subject: the one in which the narrator, seeking to give a name to himself, seems to hold it as a matter of indifference whether the narrator is the author himself or not).

The account is perhaps self-serving for Proust to a degree, as he had reason to defend himself against accusations, made by friends, that he had portrayed them as personnage « à clefs ». Perhaps all that’s to be admired here is Proust’s cleverness in casting doubt upon on such claims.

Nevertheless, I find compelling the idea, which is probably only inadvertently implied here (or rather, something I’ve sentimentally inferred) that people only really exist in a fiction when they have selflessly existed in their real lives. That is: that only decency can exist, as it is, and only decent people can exist, as they are, in both real life and fiction; — or again: that decency, whatever its limitations may be, has the extraordinary power of remaining exactly itself both in life and imagination.)

From 1965, an excellent tribute from Lilian Helman to Dashielle Hammett. NYRB.