Leo Lionni

Parallel Botany
PARALLEL BOTANY
 PL . I A garden of parallel plants

LEO LIONNI

PARALLEL BOTANY

Translated by PATRICK CREAGH

Copyright © 1977 by Leo Lionni

All rights reserved under International
and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
Published in the United States
by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York,
and simultaneously in Canada
by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.
Grateful acknowledgment is made
to Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc.,
for permission to reprint one line from
" Poetry" from Collected Poems of Marianne Moore.
Copyright 1935 by Marianne Moore,
renewed 1963 by Marianne Moore and T. S. Eliot.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Lionni, Leo [date]
Parallel botany.
Translation of La botanica parallela.
i. Botany -Anecdotes, facetiae, satin, etc. I. Title.
PQ5984.L55B6I3 sSi'.oao? 77-74985
isbn 0-394-41055-6 0-394-73302^-9 (pbk.)
Photographs are by Enzo Ragazzini
Manufactured in the United States of America
First American Edition

“Imaginary gardens with real toads in them.”

MARIANNE MOORE
 CONTENTS
PART ONE: INTRODUCTION 1
General Introduction 3
Origins 20
Morphology 35

PART TWO: THE PLANTS 57

The Tirillus 59
Tirillus oniricus 62
Tirillus mimeticus 64
Tirillus parasiticus 67
Tirillus odoratus 68
Tirillus silvador 70
The Woodland Tweezers 73
The Tubolara 78
The Camporana 80
The Protorbis 86
The Labirintiana 95
The Artisia 100
The Germinants 112
The Stranglers 117
The Giraluna 119
Giraluna gigas 134
Giraluna minor 1 43
The Solea 145
The Sigurya 162

PART THREE: EPILOGUE 171

The Gift of Thaumas 173
Notes 178

PLATES

i A garden of parallel plants

ii Leaves of Antola enigmatica
iii Woodland tweezers at the base of a ben tree
iv Algal Lepelara
v Lepelara terrestris
vi Fossil Lepelara from Tiefenau
vii Fossils of the bulbous tiril
viii Kumode plants
ix Anaclea taludensis
x Tirils
xi Propitiatory leaf-boat of the Okono Indians
xii Parasitic tirils
xiii Woodland tweezers
xiv Tubolara
xv Camporana
xvi Camporana menorea
xvii Protorbis
xviii The Katachek Protorbis
xix Leaf of Labirintiana labirintiana
xx Artisia
xxi Kaori tattoos
xxii The Cadriano germinanis
xxiii Strangler tirils
xxiv Giraluna (closeup of avvulta at right)
xxv The ebluk procession (Sumerian bas-relief)
xxvi Wo'swa, the bride of Pwa'ko
xxvii Giraluna minor in typical habitat
xxviii Casts of Solea
xxix Tips of Solea
xxx The great Stone of Ta
xxxi Sigurya barbulata
xxxii Sigurya natans
 PART ONE
INTRODUCTION
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
In ancient times botany was part of a single science that included everything
from medicine to the various skills of agriculture, and it was practiced by
philosophers and barbers alike. At the famous medical school of Cos (fifth
century b.c.) Hippocrates, and later Aristotle, laid the foundations of the
scientific method. But it was Theocrastus, a pupil of Aristotle, who first worked
out a rudimentary system for observing the vegetable world. The influence of his
Historia Plaitarum and De Plantarum Causis was passed on to later ages by
Dioscorides, and is to be found lurking everywhere in the medieval herbaria
composed by the scrivener monks in their cloistered gardens, with their humble
little plants, each on its minute altar of earti, as still and perfect as waiting saints,
wrapped in a solitude that defies time and the passing seasons.
After Gutenberg, plants also came to have a new iconography. Instead of the
delicate washes applied with loving patience, and expressing the very essence of
the petals and leaves, we now have the coarseness of woodcuts and the flat
banality of printer's inks.
In 1560 Hieronymus Bock published a volume, illustrated with woodcuts, in
which he described 567 of the 6,000 species of plant then known in the Western
world, including, for the first time, tubers and mushrooms. "These," he wrote,
"are not grasses, or roots, or flowers, or seeds, but simply the excess of humidity
that is in the soil, in trees, in rotten wood and other putrescent things. It is from
this dampness that all tubers and mushrooms spring. This we can tell from the
fact that all mushrooms (and especially those used in our kitchens) most
commonly grow when the weather is wet or stormy. The Ancients were in their
time particularly struck by this and thought that tubers, not being born from
seed, must in some way be connected with the sky. Porphyry himself expresses
as much when he writes, 'Mushrooms and tubers are called the creatures of the
Gods because they do not grow from seed like other living things.'"
Less than a century after the invention of printing, the conquistadores and the
captains of the East India companies showered an astounded Europe with a
perfumed cornucopia from the gardens and jungles which had until then slept
beyond the oceans. Hastily, thousands of new plants had to be named and placed
within a rudimentary and inefficient system of classification.
It was not until the first half of the eighteenth century that the Swedish botanist
Linnaeus created a system of botanical classification that seemed to be
definitive, a botanical register where all the plants of the earth, present and
future, could be given a name, a degree, and a brief description. Linnaeus
published his Systema Naturae and in 1753 introduced the double nomenclature
giving each plant two Latin names, one for the genus and the other for the
species. By now no fewer than 300,000 plant names compose one enormous
random poem that records, commemorates, describes, exalts, and celebrates all
that man has discovered of the world of plants.
All seemed ready for the emergence of the new science. Freed from their
obsession with classification, botanists began to ask themselves how and why
plants behave as they do. Chemistry, physics, and genetics provided new
instruments of research, while classification gave way to etiology, the study of
origins. Botany, called upon to establish a logical and causal relationship
between the morphological structure and the vital functions of plants by
experimental methods, became a modern science.
The future seemed securely mapped out: from the small to the smaller still, and
so ad infinitum. It was thought that at that point, paradoxically enough, would
occur the sudden fusion of knowledge that would explain everything in the
universe.
But the triumphant and comforting prospect of a research program gradually but
inevitably unraveling itself over the centuries was destined to be severely jolted
by the news of the discovery of the first parallel plants, of an unknown vegetal
kingdom which, being by nature arbitrary and unforesesable, appeared-and still
appears to challenge not only the most recently acquired biological knowledge
but also the traditional structures of logic.
" These organisms," writes Franco Russoli, "whose physical being is sometimes
flabby and sometimes porous, at other times osseous but fragile, breaking open
to display huge colonies of seeds or bulbs which grow and ferment in the blind
hope of some vital metamorphosis, that seem to struggle against a soft but
impenetrable skin- these abnormal creatures with pointed or horny
protuberances, or petticoats, skirts and fringes of fibrils and pistils, articulations
that are sometimes mucous and sometimes cartilaginous, might well belong to
one of the great families of jungle flora, ambiguous, savage, and fascinating in
their monstrous way. But they do not belong to any species in nature, nor would
the most expert grafting ever succeed in bringing them into existence."1
 Fig. I. A vegetable-lamb or Barometz, from a sixteenth-century woodcut .

When we think that in 1330 Friar Odorico of Pordenone, with truly angelic
devotion, described a plant which gave birth to no less than a lamb (Fig. I), and
that as late as the seventeenth century, on the threshold of the first real scientific
experiments, Claude Duret also spoke of trees which produced animals,2 we
cannot wonder if the discovery of a botany unconstrained by any known laws of
nature has given rise to descriptions that do not always treat the real character of
the new plants with objective accuracy. As Romeo Tassinelli puts it: "What are
we to say of plants that sink their roots, not into the familiar soil of our planet,
but into an infinitely distant oneiric humus, feeding on ethereal juices not
susceptible to measurement? The plants of this kingdom appear to be extraneous
to the well-ordered play of natural selection and the survival of the species. They
do not lend themselves to the surest and best-tried methods of experiment, and
resist the most elementary kinds of direct observation. Their etiology, their very
existentiality, can be assigned no place among the things of our planet. In short,"
he concludes, "we ought not to speak of a vegetable kingdom, but of a vegetable
anarchy."3
It was clear that to find a place within the Linnaean classification for plants that
were possible, or at best probable, but in any case totally foreign to our known
reality, would present insurmountable difficulties. It was Franco Russoli who
coined the phrase "parallel botany," at the same time giving a name and a
definition to what might be a science in itself, or might simply represent, in toto,
the organisms which are the object of inquiry. But it sometimes happens that
words possess a wisdom greater than their semantic density. By means of its
implications of unalterable "otherness," the word "parallel" freed the scientists
from the nightmare of seeing the traditional classifications virtually destroyed,
and along with them the very basis of modern scientific methodology. Insofar as
Wolotov is right in observing that if one of two sciences is parallel then by
definition the other must be also, we are of the opinion that the somewhat cloudy
ambiguity of the word must be taken to refer to a realm outside the established
boundaries of our knowledge. "Once aware of its parallelism," says Remo
Gavazzi, "we are forced to change the focus of our observation, to create new
paths for inquiry and maybe also new instruments of perception, if we are to
understand a reality that might formerly have appeared hostile to us."4
Every discovery, however small, implies a redefinition of everything that we
have so far comfortably accepted as the only possible yardstick of reality. Thus,
the discovery of this unusual and disquieting botany was bound to upset the
illusory consistency of our previous notions of reality and unreality. "So much
so," writes Dulieu, "that it is from these very notions that its plants, mysteriously
alienated from the events of growth and decay which struggle for the dominion
of the biosphere, appear to draw their vital juices, and thereby emerge,
perennially immune, outside the sphere of normal perceptions and the links and
associations of the memory, in a fashion quite 'other,' ambiguous, perverse, and
beyond our ken. We are unable to grasp it because of the long-consecrated
notion of reality which clings so obstinately, like a twining and perhaps
poisonous ivy, to our logic."
Jacques Dulieu, director of the Biological Studies Center at Provences and editor
of the journal Pensee, owes his international reputation not only to his celebrated
experiments into the vibratory and echoic language of the organisms living on
the seabed, but also to his detailed and original critical analysis of Descartes. It
may have been the fact that he was both a biologist and a philosopher that first
led him to take an intense and serious interest in the new botany.
Criticizing the ideas that since the Enlightenment had been held to be the sure
foundations of all our work in the sciences, in a historic interview for
Radiodiffusion Francaise Dulieu recounted the strange events which led up to his
intellectual crisis, to his controversial reevaluation of all ancient meanings, and
to the formulation of new methods of research for the study of phenomena which
"official" science refused to recognize as really existent.
His dramatic testimony was meant as a reply to those in French intellectual
circles who could not understand how a biologist of his stature might, with such
outspoken determination, have taken the risk of exploring new and seemingly
esoteric trajectories, so full of snares and inevitable pitfalls, when his reputation
as a scholar of exceptional flair and prudence seemed already to have assured
him a place among the luminaries of science.
In his radio interview Dulieu told how, shortly after the end of the war, he was
working in the botanical biology laboratory at the University of Hannanpur in
Bengal. There he met Hamished Baribhai, famous for his studies not only in
medical botany but also in Sanskrit literature, and particularly the Vedic texts.
When they met, Baribhai had just turned ninety-one years of age, but in mental
and physical agility he could still with ease match the young French scholar, who
at that time was one of the up-and-coming talents at the Sorbonne. The two of
them used to meet often in an "ashram" on a hill, near the great temple dedicated
to the monkey-god Hanuman.5

"One late afternoon, in the first glow of a long sunset, when the city was veiled
in a reddish smog and the acrid stench of burnt dung rose even to the hilltop,
Hamished Baribhai said to me, 'You are always talking about the real and the
unreal. If you promise to keep it to yourself I will show you a new experiment.
Come with me.' We walked for half an hour toward tie River Amshipat until we
came to the edge of a wood of gensum trees. There we came upon a freshly
whitewashed mud hut. The door was padlocked. Baribhai took a bunch of keys
out of his pocket and opened the door. There is your reality,' he said with an
ironic smile. I was rather dismayed by what I saw. In the semidarkness inside the
hut were two large white gibbons. One was stretched out on a pile of straw, and
appeared to be dead. Even when we entered it did not move. Meanwhile the
other, without stirring from its place, began to rock nervously on its paws,
showing its teeth and emitting little shrill cries. 'Is that one dead?' I asked,
pointing to the other monkey, which had still not shown the least sign of life. 'If
that one is dead, so is the other,' was Baribhai’s answer. Then he added, spelling
the words out slowly, 'You are looking at a single monkey.' Being perfectly
accustomed to the old man's witticisms I did not react to this absurd statement.
'What do you think they're doing, those two?' I asked, intending to tease him. But
Baribhai had already left the hut. I followed, wondering what on earth he was up
to. Though the monkeys were secured on long chains, I shut the door carefully
behind me.
"Next to the hut there was a long, narrow vegetable garden, no larger than a
bowling alley,* completely surrounded by six-foot wire netting topped with
barbed wire. It made me think, involuntarily, of a concentration camp for dwarfs.
Inside the garden there were three rows of plants, all fifty centimeters high and
all exactly the same. At first sight they looked like tomato plants, but the leaves
were very regular and rather swollen-looking, like those of certain succulents.
Baribhai took out his keys again and opened the gate. He went in, picked three
leaves from one of the plants with meticulous care, then came out, closed the
gate, snapped the padlock shut, and showed me the leaves. Do you want to see
reality? Come with me and watch carefully.' We went back into the hut. The
monkey which had been lying down had not moved at all, but at the sight of the
leaves the other became extremely excited. I was a little scared, without really
knowing why, and kept close to the door. Baribhai held out the leaves to the
monkey, who tore them from his grasp with a lightning movement, then sat
down and leaned against the wall like a Mexican peon, munching the leaves with
obvious relish. But as it ate, its frantic gestures slowed down, the eyes which had
followed our every movement with such lively interest began to close, and when
it had finished the third leaf it slid down onto the ground and lay there on its bed,
as if it had fainted. But at the instant it fell, completely inert, the other monkey
appeared to shudder. It opened its eyes, emitted c, long groan, rose to its feet,
and looked around aggressively and with suspicion. At first I failed to grasp
what was going on, but then I suddenly remembered what Baribhai had said
('You are looking at a single monkey'). There is your reality,' said the old
scientist for the third time. 'Let's go.'"

The radio interviewer was unable to disguise his incredulity, and Dulieu went on:
"I could scarcely keep my legs under me. We left the hut. Baribhai closed the
door and locked it. I confess I had to sit down on one of the two crates which I
found by the wall of the hut. Baribhai sat on the other, and for a while the only
sound was the occasional rattle of a chain. 'What does it mean?' I asked him at
last, almost in a whisper. 'Let's be off,' said Baribhai, as if he hadn't heard the
question. 'Let's go before it gets dark.' We walked toward the ashram. The sky
was now a fiery red, and here and there on the plain below us the first lamps
were already lit. Then Baribhai began to speak.

"'My young friend,' he said, 'you ask me what it means. Well, if I could tell you I
would be Krishna, Shiva, and Vishnu all rolled into one. Ten years ago I was at
Domshapur, in Orissa State, and a colleague of mine there told me about the
strange properties of a certain plant, Antola enigmatica,6 ( PL.II ) which grows
on the slopes of Mount Tanduba. The shepherds who graze their flocks of black
goats in the region pick the leaves of this plant and chew them. One day I asked
one of them why he chewed the leaves, and he replied, "Because when I close
my eyes I seem to have become a mirror, and in the mirror I see myself,
backyards." So then I tried the leaves, and after a few minutes I saw myself
sitting in front of me, like an old friend who had come to visit me. From
subsequent experiments I found that the leaves of the Antola contain a substance
comparable to mescaline, called metexodine H. B. I grew the plants in the
garden of my laboratory, experimenting with grafts from other hallucinogenic
plants such as Kolipta onirica, and after many attempts I succeeded in increasing
and varying the psychedelic properties of the leaves. The plants which you saw
in the garden by the hut represent ten seasons of experimental grafting, ten years
of research, and I have now managed to produce a form of hallucination which I
call "paragemination." It manifests itself as the feeling, and indeed the certainty,
that one's body has divided into two identical bodies, while the consciousness
remains whole, and comparatively unchanged. A few months ago I tried it
myself, and was so terrified that I decided in future to experiment only on
monkeys. The subject becomes two bodies with a single consciousness that
moves, according to particular circumstances, from one to the other. When one
body is "inhabited" by the consciousness, the other remains inert and apparently
lifeless. But the extraordinary and disturbing thing about it is not the
hallucination, weird as it is, but the fact that it is perceptible by others.
Hypothetical explanations are infinite, and faced with a phenomenon so novel
and bizarre they all seem valid enough. Maybe the leaves eaten by the monkey
emit secondary hallucinogenic effects within the surrounding area, so that we too
are involved. In that case the inert form might be an illusion on our part. Maybe
we are, in certain conditions, the victims of the monkey's hallucination, rather as
according to the Bahama all living beings are characters in a dream of Lord
Krishna's. And who knows, maybe the phenomenon ought to be viewed within
our habitual reality, as some new and totally unexpected combination of
experiences. Ultimately,' the old man added almost to himself, 'paragemination
in itself is a rather banal phenomenon. The important thing is to experiment in
order to discover the existence of new and tangible categories of reality.'"
 PL. II Leaves of Antola enigmatica

Dulieu's testimony may appear irrelevant, disproportionate, and perhaps outside

the scope of these essays. I have quoted it at length because I think that it
indicates, though obliquely, something of the possibilities of our escaping from
tie age-old contradictions of logic; and above all because the great French
biologist, always courageously open to new experiences, has since devoted
himself almost exclusively to the study of parallel botany, contributing in a
decisive way to defining the theoretical basis of the new science. In his book Un
autre jardin7 Dulieu first asks himself the question: What is it that distinguishes
the parallel plants from the supposedly real plants of normal botany?
For him there are clearly two levels, or perhaps even two types, of what is real,
one on this side and one on the other side of the hedge. "On this side," he writes,
"in our everyday garden, grow the rosemary, juniper, ferns and plane trees,
perfectly tangible and visible. For these plants that have an illusory relationship
with us, which in no way alters their exisistentiality, we are merely an event, an
accident, and our presence, which to us seems so solid, laden with gravity, is to
them no more than a momentary void in motion through the air. Reality is a
quality that belongs to them, and we can exercise no rights over it.

"On the other side of the hedge however, reality is ours. It is the absolute
condition of all existence. The plants that grow there are real because we want
them to be. If we find them intact in our memories, the same as when we saw
them before, it is because we have invested them with the image that we have of
them, with the opaque skin of our own confirmation. The plants that grow in that
garden are not more or less real than those others which bend and sway in the
wind of reason. Their reality, given them by us, is quite simply another and
different reality."

That the parallel plants exist in the context of a reality that is certainly not that of
"every day" is evident at first sight. Though from a distance their striking
"plantness" may deceive us into imagining that we are concerned with one of the
many freaks of our flora, we soon realize that the plants before our eyes must in
fact belong to another realm entirely. Motionless, imperishable, isolated in an
imaginary void, they seem to throw out a challenge to the ecological vortex that
surrounds them. What chiefly strikes us about them is the absence of any
tangible, familiar substance. This "matterlessness" of the parallel plants is a
phenomenon peculiar to them, and is perhaps the thing which mainly
distinguishes them from the ordinary plants around them.
The term "matterlessness," coined by Koolemans and widely used by both
Dulieu and Fiirhaus, may not be a very happy one, suggesting as it does the idea
of invisibility, which except for certain abnormal situations is not generally true
of parallel botany. "Para-materiality" would perhaps be a more correct word to
describe the corporeality of plants that are usually characterized by a fairly solid
presence, sometimes almost brutally intrusive, which makes them objectively
perceptible to the sane degree as all the other things in nature, even if their
substance eludes chemical analysis and flouts all known laws of physics.
But "matterlessness" does suggest that apparent absence of verifiable structure
on a cellular and molecular level common to all the parallel plants. Each
individual species has some special anomaly of its own, of course, and these are
more difficult to define and often far more disconcerting, though they are always
attributable to some abnormal substance that rejects the most basic gravitational
restrictions. There are some plants, for instance, that appear clearly in
photographs but are imperceptible to the naked eye. Some violate the normal
rules of perspective, looking the same size however close or far they may be
from us. Others are colorless, but under certain conditions reveal a profusion of
colors of exceptional beauty. One of them has leaves with such a tangled maze of
veins that it caused the extinction of a voracious insect that at one time had
threatened the vegetation of an entire continent
The parallel plants fall into two groups, but the distinction does not signify
different evolutionary levels, as is the case with normal plants, which are divided
into higher and lower orders. On the contrary, the two categories assigned to
parallel plants are derived from the two ways in which the plants are perceived
by us. Those of the first group are directly discernible by the senses and
indirectly by instruments, while those of the second, far more mysterious and
elusive, come to our knowledge only indirectly, through images, words, or other
symbolic signs. The first group is certainly the larger, and contains the more
widespread species. As Dulieu observes, its plants are "the more parallel."
Motionless in time ever since the strange mutation which triggered their
metamorphosis, they have shared-some of them for millennia-the rather shabby
history of the real world. But while all around them other plants grow, multiply,
and disintegrate into humus, the parallel plants preserve their formal identity
intact, like graven images.
If we are now in a position to perceive them, if we are able to observe, measure,
and study them, it is in spite of the disturbing absence of any recognizable
substance. This "matterlessness," referred to above, would seem to be the result
of a sudden halt in time which for causes as yet unknown appears to have
affected certain species of plant at various stages in the history of the vegetable
kingdom.
Whereas other plants, now extinct, have disintegrated and left no further witness
of their life on earth than the occasional fossil imprint or fragment of petrified
bark, the parallel plants are, in Spinder's words, "fossils in themselves."8 Neither
dead nor alive- conditions both of which would imply a normal passage of time-
they are still themselves, entire and perfect in their illusory corporeality after
millennia of immobility. It is as if they had been suddenly torn out of time,
emptied of matter and meaning, and given over to another order of existence.
Like a memory that has taken on actuality, they have preserved of themselves
only the outer appearance, a visible three-dimensionality without any substance.
Most of these plants, though impervious to any violent acts of nature,
disintegrate at the least contact with an object alien to their normal environment,
dissolving into dust and leaving only a chemically inert white powder. Their
behavior is similar to that of Egyptian mummies that have remained intact for
thousands of years in their dark tombs, but which fall to pieces at the first ray of
light, leaving only a spectral film of human substance in the bandages. Dulieu
observes that these plants are in fact like mummified plants which a strange
destiny has seen fit to immortalize not at the moment of death, but at the most
significant moment of their life, to preserve in their undisturbed integrity, still
protagonists of the landscape in which they stand, exuberant and happy.
The plants of the second group are also conditioned by abnormal and often
incomprehensible temporal relationships. But instead of being permanently
immersed in the constant flow of external time, they modulate their existence
according to changing rhythms, which to our perceptions are unpredictable.
While the plants of the first group are motionless in time, those of the second,
chimeras of previous existences, move so to speak outside of time, in the man-
made amorphous time of our own trains, in an unmeasurable series of sudden
spurts and equally sudden halts in the past, in the future, and in the defunct
present. They are the concrete image of this capricious non-time, parallel to the
time which passes and in which we are accustomed to move.
This "parachronomy," as Spinder calls it, as opposed to the "chronostasis" of the
other parallel plants, has implications which we have only recently begun to
understand. It was Spinder himself, faced with phenomena that clearly
overstepped the bounds of biology, who surmised that these plants can only be
understood by means of the principles and methods of phenomenology and
perhaps even of psycholinguistics. Connected to us by close psycho-symbiotic
links, their presence in a certain sense appears richer and "denser" than that of
the plants of the first group, because they grow in the rhythm of our subjective
time and eventually take the form of a long and intricate conceptual process.
These plants, which for inexplicable reasons lost their real existentiality at some
fairly remote point in real time, are today rediscoverable in the eventful
landscape of our imaginations, where they reemerge from the authentic distant
past, enriched with an ambiguous present, ready to be illustrated, described, and
commented on.
“Parachrononomy" is therefore the key to their doubly parallel existence. Like
the subjects of old portraits they are reborn today, after long repose in oblivion,
with a double identity: the one which lives in our imaginations, and the other,
now independent, which we see before us in its gilded frame, with its own
reality.
In a paper read at the 1973 Antwerp Conference, Hermann Hoem stated: "All the
things in the world dwell in us, in the mirror of our consciousness. All our
gestures, even the most insignificant, are bound up in some way with a part of
the world around us, altering the form of it and enriching it with new meanings.
This applies also to our decision to divide the parallel plants into two groups. It
reflects the coexistence of two important impulses in us: the impulse toward
clarity and the impulse toward ambiguity. One might say that one group is the
prose of parallel botany, while the other is the poetry. The plants of the first
group are subjected to language a posteriori; those of the second are born from
language, and verbal discourse is one of their preexistent conditions. Before
being plants, they are words."
But it is in the nomenclature, perhaps because the names are naturally short, that
these different relationships between plants and words are at their most
convincing. The plant names of the first group reflect a sunny simplicity, as well
as the particular circumstances of their origin and existence. Names such as
"tiril" and "woodland sugartongs" are clearly descriptive, even though like all
new words they are capable of giving rise to secondary images and associative
ideas. "All names tell a story," says Hoem.
Names such as "Solea" and "Giraluna" actually precede the existence of the
plants themselves and share, like a promise, in their very genesis. These names,
which Jean Renon calls "machines a faire poesie," are part of the substance of
the plant, like a leaf, a stem, or a flower.
Although parallel botany appeared so suddenly and prominently upon the
horizons of science, ten years passed before it was officially recognized. But it
was little less than a miracle that in such a short time so much information and
evidence could be collected and subjected to the necessary checks and
counterchecks, and that contacts could be made on an international level
between scientists and research workers, while specialized laboratories were set
up in several countries. From the first sensational discovery of the woodland
sugartongs in 1963 to the first Parallel Botany Conference in Antwerp in 1970
there was what Spinder has called a "parallel plant rush." News of fresh finds of
plants and fossils, of legends and stories related to the subject poured in from all
over the world, and there was scarcely an issue of any scientific journal without
some theoretical article or bulletin of new discoveries. Books, doctoral theses,
dissertations, and even new specialized journals piled up in the libraries of
botanical and biological institutes, while in the laboratories work went ahead to
improve or adapt the instruments to be used in documenting this new flora, so
utterly strange, fragile and elusive. The Antwerp Conference, organized thanks
to Cornelis Koolemans of the Royal University of Belgium, was in some sense
intended to "place" the new science, to combine many individual efforts into
one, to lay the theoretical basis for an understanding of the new phenomena, and
if possible to arrive at some form of systematization, even though tentative and
provisional.
Koolemans, who by a strange coincidence is the Go champion of Belgium, was
in Japan for the Anals of the Zendon Games9 in Tokyo in the autumn of 1963.
He had met Sugino Kinichi, a professor at Kyoto University and also a keen Go
player, not long after the war at a conference on paleobotany in Paris. It was in
fact Sugino who on that occasion had introduced Koolemans to the game of Go,
and without ever meeting again they had played interminable matches by
correspondence. Koolemans tells how one of these intercontinental matches
went on for sixteen months, and he estimates that between 1946 and 1963 their
games of Go had cost the two biologists about twelve thousand dollars in
postage, telephone calls and telegrams. When they finally met again in Tokyo in
1963, news pl. m came of the discovery of woodland tweezers in a wood near
Owari, a find that was to have a dramatic impact on the biological sciences.
Koolemans accompanied his friend on the first expedition and was so
overwhelmed by the experience that he decided on the spot to devote himself
entirely to the new botany. Although his work has been and still is chiefly in the
organizational realm, Cornelis Koolemans is considered by his colleagues to be
the first parallel botanist. Jacques Dulieu, in his closing speech at the Antwerp
Conference, observed that if it had not been for the extraordinary intuition of the
Belgian biologist, who from a single plant deduced the existence of a whole new
vegetable kingdom, parallel botany would still remain undiscovered.
The idea of dividing the plants of the new botany into two groups was formally
proposed at the conference by Koolemans himself and was accepted
unanimously by the sixty-eight delegates after scarcely more than an hour of
deliberations. But when it came to naming the two groups, things vent rather
differently: The debate lasted for nearly two days, but the lively and sometimes
factious speeches did serve the purpose of better defining the differences
between the two groups, which in the initial euphoria of the conference had not
really been outlined with sufficient clarity. The names proposed by the various
speakers, in fact, could not avoid describing the characteristics of the plants to
which they referred, and thus what should have been made clear in the
discussion of the first day's agenda ended up taking the form of a long debate on
nomenclature.
The first proposal was made by Spinder. Max Spinder, a scientist of great
intuition and inexhaustible energy, is Professor of Urban Botany at the
University of Hemmungen. His is a new chair, established at his own insistence,
for the study of plant life in urban areas. It may well have been his observation
of urban plants, forced to survive in the most preposterous ecological conditions,
that led the Swiss botanist to take an increasingly intense interest in parallel
botany. His laboratory, probably the best equipped in Europe, has provided him
with the ideal conditions in which to carry out basic research into the new
science. This research has been amply documented in his recent volume,
Parallelbotanik-Forschungen und Hypothesen, published by Hansen Verlag of
Zurich.
 PL. III Woodland tweezers at the base of a ben tree

In his address to the conference, Spinder reminded his colleagues that in spite of
a certain descriptive function, the name of the first group could in fact be
entirely arbitrary, while that of the second group ought, like the names of its
plants, to express the dreamlike quality, the vagueness, the profound ambiguity
characteristic of them. At the same time, he said, it would be risky to burden the
taxonomy of a science as young as parallel botany with a nomenclature which
subsequent discoveries or experiments might prove ridiculous. "But in spite of
this unresolvable dilemma," he concluded, "if we are to avoid cumbrous
circumlocutions where any word or sign, even the most abstract, would really
suffice to show what we are referring to, it is absolutely necessary that we come
to a decision."

Fig. 2. Max Spinder

Realizing that his colleagues would certainly propose names that contained some
allusion to the most salient qualities of the two groups, he himself suggested for
the really existent, tangible, and visible plants the term "paraverophytes," while
for the second group he suggested the name "anverophytes."
It was this latter suggestion that caused a debate which soon degenerated from
the scientific and technical level into useless pseudophilosophical disquisitions
on the nature of the real and the unreal, while semeiology, phenomenology, and
even ethics were dragged in to support a variety of opinions.
One of the most interesting and significant speeches was that of Jacques Dulieu.
To the admiration and amazement of the delegates, the French biologist quoted
from memory the four pages of Descartes concerning the division of the things
of the world into res cogitans and res extensa, and pointed out how the two
groups to be named were a clear and perfect example of the Cartesian categories.
He ended by suggesting the names "extendophytes" and "cogitandophytes."
We cannot here give all the proposals in full, varying as they did from the
hagiographic "Spindennses" and "Koolemanenses" to the clumsily allusive
"parabiogenes" and "imagogenes," and from "heliophytes" and "selenophytes' to
"oneirophytes" and "diodeno-phytes."
At the end of the second day of this absurd debate, Ezio Antinelli of the Centre
Lombardo per le Scienze Applicate referred the delegates to an article he had
written in Vita Parallela, the first periodical in this field intended for the general
public, and repeated his suggestion that all plants, both common and parallel,
should be divided into "existent" and "inductive." The "existent" plants, he said,
revealed themselves as real through the evidence of the senses and scientific
instruments. They in turn should be subdivided into "vital" (e.g. pinetree, carrot,
narcissus) and "paravital" (e.g. tiril, Plumosa, Labirintiana). The "inductive"
plants, on the other hand, are those which "live in a state of intention, waiting to
take on form and solidity from an act of will on our part, which describes them."
In other words, while recognizing two substantially different groups of plants in
parallel botany, Antinelli wished to assign one of them, by using the ambiguous
term "paravital," to the borderland of traditional botany, and to isolate the plants
which he calls "inductive," and which he considers truly parallel, in a category of
their own.
It was the Australian botanist Jonathan Hamston who reminded his colleagues of
Spinder's warning, and by so doing brought them back to common sense. He
begged the conference to avoid evocative or descriptive names, or those with too
specific a content, and to leave the youthful science with enough elbowroom in
the matter of terminology. He suggested calling the two groups of plants "Alpha"
and "Beta" as a provisional solution. This was welcomed with visible relief by
speakers and delegates alike, and on a motion proposed by Dulieu and seconded
by Antinelli it was accepted unanimously.

* Dulieu actually referred to an alley for playing boules, scarcely more than half
the length of an American bowling alley. [Translator's note,]

1. Franco Russoli, Una botanica inquietante (II Milione, Milan, 1972).

2. A vegetable-lamb is one of the illustrations in the Voiage and Travayle of Sir

Jhon Mandeville, Knight, published in London in 1568. This animal-vegetable
was also described by Parkinson in his Theatrum Botanicum in 1640, while a
century later Erasmus Darwin mentioned it in his Loves of the Plants. It is
known as Tartarian, Scytos or vegetable-lamb, but most commonly as Tartarus or
Barometz. First found in the Talmud, it appears in Europe during the Middle
Ages (1330) in the writing of Odorico di Pordenone, in the form of a lamb fixed
to a tree trunk which fed off the grass around the tree. In his Histoire admirable
des plantes et des herbes (Paris, 1605), Claude Duret describes Barometz as a
lamb whose wool is exceptional for its softness and beauty.

3. Romeo Tassinelli, Scienze al traguardo, various authors (Laguna, Venezia,

1972), pp. 105-22.

4. Remo Gavazzi, "Una rivoluziore vegetale" (Cornere di Verona, April

12,1970).

5. In Hindu mythology Hanuman is a central figure of the Ramayana. Son of a

nymph and the god of the vinds, Hanuman, aided by an army of monkeys,
helped Rama to save his wife Sita from the demon Ravana by taking boulders
from the Himalayas to build a bridge between India and Ceylon.

6. Antola enigmatica is a plant that grows in the Indian state of Orissa as well as
in certain parts of Central and South America. Its leaves form minute cups which
fill with dew which then pisses drop by drop into the cell-tissue of the plant.

7. Jacques Dulieu, Un outre jardin (Editions La Nuit, Paris, 1973).

8. Max Spinder, “Wachsen und Zeitbegriff” (Biologische Forschungen, Basel,

April 1968).

9. The Zendon Games are the Go championships played every year in Tokyo on
the occasion of the festivities known as "Okiri." Go is the Japanese national
game, in some ways resembling chess.

ORIGINS
The most recent theories in the field of paleobotany trace the origins of the two
botanies to aquatic protoplants, prechlorophyllic algae of the Ambrian era to
which, unfortunately, we have very few clues, and those practically
undecipherable. We do, however, possess fossil remains, of the next phase of
plant life, when a marine alga first put down roots on terra firma, thus becoming
the matrix of all vegetation on dry land. These fossils were recently discovered
in the Tiefenau Valley and its surrounding mountains by a group of German
paleontologists led by Johann Fleckhaus. This tangible evidence appears once
and for all to confirm the thesis which the paleontologist Gustav Morgentsen of
Palen University put forward at the 1942 European Conference on Botanic
History at Smorsk. Those were the days when the Nazi armies were at the gates
of Stalingrad, and the dramatic events of the war were destined to obscure the
scientific importance of that speech, which, we must add, was received by many
delegates with unconcealed skepticism.
However, the recent discovery of the Tiefenau fossils seems to have removed all
doubts as to the validity of the hypothesis put forward by the celebrated
Norwegian scientist. Twenty years after that historic event they are accepted by
the scientific community as a basic dictum without which the explanation we can
now give of the evolutionary "grand design" would be no more than a tentative
sketch. In the scientific supplement issued by the Smorskaya Gazeta on the
occasion of that memorable conference, Morgentsen wrote a brief popular
account of his theory, which is now known as Morgentsen's theory of the great
winds. He held that the origin of
 Fig. 3. Gustav Morgentsen

plant life on dry land is to be assigned to the second half of the Ambrian era,
when for causes still unknown to us the atmosphere was violently disturbed by
vast hurricanes which circled the globe for thousands of years. The continents
were then huge bare islands without the least sign of life, while in the oceans
self-propelling multicellular organisms had already developed. There were large
areas of floating algae at various depths. These plants were the first to utilize
solar energy directly through the operation of a particular substance, chlorophyll,
and by this means to transform water and carbon dioxide into the sugars and
starches needed for their life process.

There were four types of these algae, three colored and one colorless. The
colored types, modified structurally to adapt themselves to the increasing
saltiness of the oceans, have survived down to our times. The best known are the
green algae. Their color is derived from chlorophyll, which in the red and brown
algae is disguised by pigments of other colors: phycoerythrin and phycoxantin.
But the most common alga during the Talocene and Ambrian (pl. iv) eras was
the Lepelara, which has been extinct for at least 100 million years and which
must be considered as the true parent of all plant life on dry land. The Lepelara
was a single-celled alga shaped like a spoon (the name comes from the Dutch
word for spoon, lepel), which on account of its low specific gravity floated
nearer to the surface of the water than the other algae. It too achieved
nourishment by photosynthesis, but through the medium of a colorless and
autogenetic substance similar to chlorophyll, called atrophyll. This was present
both in the nucleus, which was in the middle of the rounded and slightly swollen
part of the cell, and in the rudimentary canal that ran down the "tail" or "handle"
of the cell. The Lepelara was the oldest of the algae, and like many of the
organisms then living in the seas it was completely transparent. As it was
invisible, the exigencies of survival and even “self-presentation” did not demand
that it have any particular size. There were Lepelara as big as oak trees, others as
tiny as the frond of a maidenhair fern. Millions of these algae lay floating near
the motionless surface of the waters.
But this primordial paradise, spread like an immense spangled embroidery
beneath the monotonous succession of sun and moon, was one day touched by a
sudden tremor. A breeze of unknown origin brushed it like the wing of a gull.
Sporadic winds began to ripple the surface, and then to rouse it into waves.
Scattered storms and waterspouts tore the algae from the water, hurling them
back in chaotic frenzy one upon the other. Eventually a number of violent
hurricanes came into collision, probably in the area where the Sargasso Sea is
now, and this started the rotary movement which was destined for thousands of
years to lash the seas and all that floated in them with insane and relentless fury.
Whirled up in the spray of the shattered waves, the Lepelara were flung round
and round the world, caught in an endless cyclone, to fall back into the raging
seas, to disintegrate in the air, or to fall, alone or in groups, on the sterile soil of
the continents and great islands. Then one day,
 PL. IV Algal Lepelara

the fury of the hurricanes abated and calm returned to the earth. Millions of
Lepelara of all sizes, piled up in crevices, against the rocky cliffs, between the
boulders, and in every little crack or fold in the earth's surface, began slowly to
die, still wet with the spray.
" But see," writes Morgentsen, "how one Lepelara, a 'guided case' in Teilhard de
Chardin's phrase, with a sudden mutating burst of inexplicable invention, begins
to breathe, to suck, to absorb oxygen, hydrogen, and minerals from the wet earth
that partially covers it. Slowly the inert form begins to swell, to become, to be. A
wash of color suffuses it, quite faint at first, then more and more intense,
condensing to a strange opacity. The transparent alga is now alive and green,
ready for the sign from destiny, the gesture that will tell it to rise and grow on
dry land, the very first plant in all the earth." (pl. V)
The theory of the great winds was attacked by some of the leading
paleontologists and biologists of the time with no lack of irony. Their doubts
were perhaps exacerbated by the excessive simplification of the ideas of
Morgentsen, and by the lyrical tone of the paper, which at that time was
considered in bad taste at a scientific conference. But the younger delegates
greeted it as a revelation. Among the Norwegian scientist's most enthusiastic
supporters was Spinder, who had attended Morgentsen's courses at Palen and
was even then only thirty years of age. Building upon his teacher's ideas he
developed his theory of the permanence of form, in which he attempted to show
that all plants now extant are derived in some manner from the basic form of the
Lepelara. According to this theory, exact analogies of outline with those of the
original form, the Urform, provided confirmation that there was one single
morphological scheme within which all the earth's flora gave evidence of its
evolutionary link with the Lepelara. In support of this, Spinder wrote a book
listing and comparing 128 varieties of plant, which he illustrates with meticulous
realism in a series of drawings of such beauty that they alone would be a
sufficient justification for the book. The theory was bold and original, but in
spite of the ample documentation he provided it was not convincing and met
with no more success than the work which had inspired it. Spinder himself
recently rejected it as too arbitrary, and a mere "youthful caprice." But two years
ago the Swiss scientist published a detailed study of the Tiefenau finds,
culminating in a most meticulous reconstruction of the alga Lepelara, now
recognized as the legitimate forebear of all plant life.
(pl. VI ) The Tiefenau fossils, which are provisionally displayed in a small room
in the Hochstadt1 Town Hall, are seven in number. Six of them are about twenty
centimeters high while one, the so-called Lepelara Morgentsenii, is bigger, about
seventy-two centimeters. Of the six smaller specimens only one bears the
complete imprint of the alga, while two are unfortunately in such bad condition
that the form can scarcely be recognized. The L. Morgentsenii is broken into
three parts, but the imprint of the plant is complete except for one unimportant
portion of the caudal section (corresponding to the handle of the "spoon"). It is a
tiny magnificent specimen, remarkable for the clarity of its outlines and its
precision of detail. It was the analysis of this fossil that enabled Spinder to
reconstruct the anatomy of the Lepelara in its most minute particulars.
According to the biologist, the "protoplasm" of the Lepelara, which is its living
substance, was contained in a rather thick and extremely tough portion of its
anatomy. This membrane became much thinner toward the end of the "tail,"
where a plasmodesma with an exceptionally large opening enabled the cell to
absorb oxygen, hydrogen, and other nutritive elements by osmosis. Later in its
history the Lepelara developed its first rudimentary root system here.
Unlike the other algae the Lepelara had a proper nucleus, filled with a liquid
called karyolymph, and here the filaments of chromatin wound themselves into a
tangle of nucleoles, the latter also being composed of spiraling filaments pressed
closely together.
We have learned from the most recent biological studies that the Lepelara must
have contained in its DNA spiral not only its own plan for future development
but the entire evolutionary program of plant life on earth. Piero Leonardi writes:
"We are forced to think that these protoorganisms, in their basic makeup, had
tendencies that were not left to the mercy of purely fortuitous circumstances, but
were coordinated ab initio with a view to producing an organic and
interdependent development of all living things, both vegetable and animal."2
Seen in the light of this "law of guided complexities" (Teilhard de Chardin),
according to which all living organisms are responsible for the development and
equilibrium of the biosphere, the Lepelara takes on an importance which neither
Morgentsen nor Spinder could possibly have imagined.
If the Lepelara may be considered the forebear of all plant life on the globe, the
Tirillus, judging from what we may deduce from the fossils discovered in
various parts of the world, is almost certainly the first parallel plant.
PL. V Lepelara terrestris
Fig. 4 Jeanne Helene Bigny
 Fig. 5 The clairvoyant Farah Apsalah Hamid

The startling discovery of an extensive stratum of fossil Tirillus near Ham-el-

Dour in the Luristan desert was made by the French paleobotanist Jeanne Helene
Bigny, wife of the celebrated syndrologist Pierre-Paul Bigny, who for some years
has been carrying out important research at the Sorborne, chiefly into the
hydromagnetic radiations of biomorphic fields. In the background of this
discovery, which after that of the Tiefenau Lepelara is without any doubt the
most important event in the botanical parapaleontology of the century, there is a
curious interweaving of scientific zeal and personal eccentricity that is worth
describing here. The story, which in some of its unusual facets involves
parapsychology and psycholinguistics, was reported by Roger Dadin in a recent
issue of the women's magazine Nous.
Jeanne Helene Bigny, who like her husband teaches at the Sorbonne, is a
scientist known for her personal eccentricities as well as her important
discoveries in paleontology, and while still assistant to Marcel Declerque she
achieved some notoriety. One day she gave voice to an intuition that the
fossilized remains of a large Ankylosaurus were to be found in the neighborhood
of the Madeleine, in the heart of Paris.
 PL.VI Fossil Lepelara from Tiefenau

The young paleontologist, whose uncle Jacob Charbin happened at the time to be
a minister, made such a fuss that she was given permission to make a trial dig
under the sidewalk that flanks the church, right opposite the Restaurant Duval.
Madame Bigny did not find the fossil, but to the astonishment of all present,
including Roger Dadin, then a reporter on the Figaro de Paris, she unearthed
nothing less than the complete skeleton of a Ceratopsius monoclonius, which is
now on view in the Dinosaur Room of the Musee Grignet.
From that time on, apart from the paleontology which was the field in which she
specialized, Madame Bigny began to delve secretly into parapsychology. She
began, occasionally at first, to frequent the famous Persian clairvoyant Farah
Apsalah Hamid, who among her devotees could boast of such persons as Jean-
Roland Bartand, Remi Antinos, Marcel Fouquet, and, so the rumor goes, even
the president of the Chambre des Deputes, Robert-Marie Autrac. But once
Madame Bigni's interest in parallel botany had been stirred by her friend
Gismonde Pascain, director of the Laboratory of the Jardin des Plantes, her visits
to the beautiful Persian medium became more frequent.
It was on the fearful evening of August 14, 1971, remembered by Parisians for
the violent storms that plunged all the arrondissements north of the Seine into
total darkness and brought the entire Metro system to a standstill, that Jeanne
Helene Bigny, obsessed by strange presentiments, was sitting at the little round
table opposite Madame Hamid. Flashes of lightning, filtered through curtains
that flapped wildly in the half-open windows like torn shreds of sails, fell
intermittently on the faces of the two women, causing them to float for an instant
in the heavy darkness of the room. In spite of the continual rumble of the
thunder, and apparently ignoring the frayed nerves of her client, the medium
ceaselessly poured forth words, disconnected and incomprehensible. Her fingers,
covered with gold rings laden with emeralds and amethysts, vaguely caressed the
sinister object that stood with its sharp claws dug firmly into the thick red velvet
tablecloth. It was a stuffed salamander whose crystal eyes, unnaturally large and
protruding, blazed into life at every flash of lightning.
The scientist sought in vain for some logical connection between the
clairvoyant's words, broken as they were by crashes of thunder, and in the end
left the apartment in a state of anguish and confusion. It was some days later, in
the quiet of her study in the Avenue des Ardennes, that those vague and
disconnected phrases suddenly began to drift back into her mind, and the names
of Ham-el-Dour, Sarab Bainah, and Tihir El emerged perfectly clear and precise.
Madame Bigny had not the least idea what places or people these names might
refer to, and yet they had come into her memory with all the solidity of things of
our childhood which we have long forgotten and then happen to find in some
dusty old trunk.
For days on end she searched for some explanation of the three names, which
were clearly of Arabic or Persian origin. She appealed to Madame Hamid more
than once, but the medium was unable to shed any light on their meaning; in
fact, she denied ever having pronounced the names. But one day, to her
amazement, Madame Bigny found them by chance in m old Guide Bleu to the
Middle East.
Sarab Bainah turned out to be in area in the great desert zone of Ham-el-Dour in
eastern Luristan, and Tihir El corresponded almost exactly to the name of a
village in that area, the center of an oasis at the meeting point of the three great
caravan routes that cross the desert. Research at the Institute of Middle Eastern
Geology revealed that it was near this village that Iranian archaeologists, in
collaboration with a team from the University of Pennsylvania, had discovered a
necropolis formed of extremely deep burial shafts, in which the successive levels
of the tombs indicated a historical continuity of nearly four millennia.
Madame Bigny set off for the desert, sure of having been chosen to make a
sensational discovery. She reached the dig at Tihir El at the end of November,
and was there able to study a number of very primitive artifacts that had been
found at the bottom level of the shaft provisionally designated by the letter F.
Among the finds were some fragments of limestone tearing imprints resembling
the protocuneiform script of the famous "Gar Tablets," which had been found a
few years earlier in the necropolis of Dum Gar Pachinah, only a few hundred
kilometers from Tihir El. But while the archaeologists, struck by this surprising
analogy, began to point out the significant connections between the two burial
places, Madame Bigny at once recognized the clearly fossil origin of the
fragments. It was the discovery of these fossils (Fig. 6), in fact, which prompted
her to undertake the research that led to the discovery of the famous fossiliferous
layer now known as the Bigny Layer.
Many hypotheses have been put forward to explain the mystery of why the name
of the desert village of Tihir El so closely resembles that of the fossilized plants
found underground in its vicinity. Roger Moseley went into the matter quite
recently, and published the results of his research in the Review of
Psycholinguistics. Moseley's main thesis is concerned with the unusual
relationship between the parallel plant and its name, which is unique in the
history of semeiotics because, as he says, it lacks one of the elements of the
Bodenbach-Kordobsky triangle: name-thing-thing.
 Fig. 6 Fossil tirils from the Bigny Layer

Elsewhere we have seen how in certain parallel plants the name preceeds the
physical existence of the plant itself. According to Moseley, in the case of the
tiril the name exists independently of the thing named, almost as if it were a
reality in itself, with a substance of its own instead of a mere symbolic function-
the very substance which the plant has been denied. Moseley calls this process
"intuitive codification," and as a case in point he cites the name of the village of
Tihir El, founded at the time of Darius, when the Bigny Layer had for millions of
years already lain at what was then an inaccessible depth.
Domenico Fantero, who has been responsible for a number of excavations in the
area, makes the objection that the tiril was known of at the time of Darius in
places not far from Tihir El, so that it is by no means out of the question that
there were fields of tirils in the neighborhood of the village at the time it was
founded. But Moseley quite justly points out that the tiril is never found
superimposed on its own earlier beds: "For the tiril to replace its own dead
would be an unimaginable compromise with time." He also observes that neither
the name Tihir El nor its variant Ti-Hirel has any meaning in the languages and
dialects of the largely nomadic peoples who have lived at various times in the
Ham-el-Dour desert. Nor, says Moseley, can we suppose for one moment that
the name commemorates some historical or divine personage, for in all local
religious beliefs earlier than the age of Darius it was "forbidden to transfer the
names of kings or gods to the common things of the earth."
With regard to this, Moseley draws attention to the onomatoclastic edict of
Aktur,3 which forbade the use of all proper names of persons or places except
that of the Emperor himself. This edict resulted in such confusion that the
administration of the Empire completely collapsed. Moseley, incidentally, went
to Paris and closely questioned the medium Madame Hamid, who assured him
that the name had simply "popped out of her mouth," that she could not have
known of the existence of the village, and that apart from everything else she
had never heard of the Sarab Bainah desert.
Moseley later found out that Madame Hamid was not even Persian, but was born
at Arles, in Provence of a Basque father and a French mother. In her youth she
had been on the stage, but with scant success. Moseley noticed that on the wall
of her room she had a portrait of Sarah Bernhardt, and thus he struck upon the
almost incredible similarity between the name of the great actress and that of the
Luristan desert of Sarab Bainah. In this writings he often cites this as a typical
example of intuitive codification.
In his article in the Review of Psycholinguistics, Moseley traces the history of the
name tiril through its many transformations, pointing out a number of
evolutionary hiatuses that suggest the existence of what he calls "word islands."
He explains that in spite of the total absence of cultural links, for certain kinds of
things these "islands" develop analogous terminologies, thus defying any kind of
traceable etymological evolution. They tend to confirm the theory that the name
existed earlier, and independent of any link with things or ideas. Among the
projections of the word tiril in a number of word islands, Moseley quotes the
extreme case of the Tabongo of the Mogo. Without having the least knowledge
of the plant they use the expression ti-r-hil as a sort of generalized utterance, an
exclamation which has no reference to anything whatever, a perfectly abstract
swearword.
The Bigny Layer is the most important evidence we have regarding parallel life
in prehistory. The size of the bed has not yet been accurately assessed, but it
quite possibly extends to three or four hectares. By an odd coincidence other
fossil tirils were brought to light in various parts of the world only a few months
after the discovery at Tihir El. Though of less importance than the Bigny Layer,
they have nonetheless contributed to our knowledge of the plant, chiefly with
regard to its very widespread geographical distribution and its survival under the
most heterogeneous geological and climatic conditions. A very useful little book
published by the Tirillus Society of America, The Fossil Tirillus, lists and
describes all the sites where fossil remains of the plants have been found,
examining their paleontological characteristics and listing the museums,
institutes, and private collections in which the fossils are preserved.
While paleontology has provided fossil evidence of the origin of vegetation on
the earth and of the first parallel plants, our knowledge of the gradual or sudden
dematerialization of particular plants is still rather sketchy. We know that the two
botanies are branches of the same original "tree," but when and how the split
took place is for the moment the subject of vague hypotheses based on a few
somewhat mysterious discoveries.
On November 28, 1972, exactly a year after the great find at Tihir El, Boris
Chersky and Johann von Wandelungen of the University of Freibourg were
working not far from the Tiefenau Valley when they unearthed some fossils
which might represent the stage of development immediately preceding the
mysterious mutation by which the Tirillus vulgaris became the first parallel
plant. (pl. VII) The fossils portray a plant rather like an onion, but which is
almost certainly a tiril with a large bulbous root. The bigger of the two fossils
bears the imprint of a single Tirillus bulbosus, as it is now called, while the
smaller one, the famous "Hochstadt fragment" quite clearly shows a somewhat
elongated bulb from which sprout two common tirils.
The discovery of a single-stemmed plant with a bulbous root and dating from the
Erocene era would in any case have been an exceptionally interesting item of
scientific news. What made the discovery absolutely sensational was the fact that
the tirils have all the features of parallel plants while the bulbs are clearly to be
assigned to normal botany.
The studies later carried out by Spinder into the nature of the cellular tissue, the
physiognomy of the single cells preserved in a very thin layer of carbon, as well
as the analysis of the remains of cellulose filament, leave no doubt as to the
normal plantness of the bulbs. But the fragments of tiril are absolutely identical
with those of the Ham-el-Dour desert. They give no sign of any organic quality
whatever, and in spite of the perfection of the imprint they betray not the
slightest alteration which might be attributed to the normal vital functions of an
ordinary plant. They are totally lacking not only in organs but in any kind of
cytological structure. Their substance, if one can use such a term, must have
been an immobile continuum, even in the subatomic state, and insensitive to
impulses of any kind. Spinder has no hesitation in regarding these two fossils as
paleontological evidence of the moment when parallel and normal botany went
their different ways.
However, there are many unanswered questions, and exactly what internal
mutation or external conditioning could possibly have caused such a strange
evolutionary anomaly is destined to remain a disquieting enigma for some time
to come. If we are now in a position to analyze matter and measure time even in
the earliest

PL.VII Fossils of the bulbous tiril

dawn of the history of our planet, we unfortunately do not possess the means of
analyzing non-matter and measuring non-time. One of the great unknowns of
parallel paleobotany involves the dating of specimens. The fact that, in a sense,
the plants are themselves fossils would surely seem to make it easier to assign
them to particular geological periods. But unfortunately this is not the case.
Normal fossils are dated by examining objects found in the same environment
and by comparing them with the fossils of neighboring organisms. But parallel
plants represent a case of substitution, a metamorphosis that at the moment of its
coming into being obliterates the previous existence without trace. Scientists
generally support the hypothesis that the first parallel plants appeared, give or
take a few millions of years, at the beginning of the second half of the post-
Plantain era. But we know that plants which came within the normal botanical
repertory of our forefathers have undergone parallelizing mutations, and there
are even some who speak of processes of dissubstantialization going on at this
very moment. As we see, the period of time in which the phenomenon takes
place is a very lengthy one and for the time being does not allow us to
generalize.
Theoretically, the only certain method of dating a parallel plant would be a
radioactive analysis under conditions of thermic saturation, but so far the
matterlessness of the plants has proved an insurmountable obstacle. The results
obtained by Boris Kalinowski from his carbon 16 test seem to raise hope that in
the not too distant future we will have a reliable system for dating all species of
parallel plant. The success of the method would also be an important step
forward in the study of normal botany. After all, a parallel plant is nothing but
the reconcretion of a normal plant at the instant of the sudden and final stoppage
of its ontogenesis.
The fossil tirils and those from Tiefenau are the only true fossils which parallel
botany has to its credit. They do not seem much, but when one thinks of the
unsurmountable obstacle which matterlessness must present to the normal
processes of fossilization, their discovery seems little less than a miracle.
Concretions of parallel plants have been found in various parts of the world, but
though these objects are doubtless of great importance they are not to be
considered real fossils.
In the southern Urals a team of Russian speleologists recently discovered an
important stratum in a cave at a depth of 820 meters.
It is said to be rich in fossils of the Erocene era. According to a statement issued
by the Paleontological Laboratory at Briskonov, where the specimens are being
studied, these include two fossils of the woodland tweezers in a perfect state of
preservation. Both Morgentsen and Spinder are of the opinion that these are
simply bifurcated forms of Apsiturum bracconensis, but they have postponed
any definitive judgment until the Soviet government has given them permission
to examine the specimens themselves.

1. A small mining town in West Germany. The castle commands a view of the
picturesque valley of Tiefenau. Apart from its important collection of fossils,
Hochstadt is famous for the little Hochstadterhof, a hotel where paleontologists
from all over the world have left signed photographs in the Fossilien Stube.

2. Piero Leonardi, "La Vita si evtive," in L'Uomo, l'Universo, la Scienza

(Edindustria Editoriale, Rome [no date]).

3. Aktur (2680-2615 b.c.) was Emperor of the Anamids. In spite of his insane
sadism he reigned for nearly thirty years. He was eventually killed by one of his
120 wives in a harem conspiracy. The episode was immortalized many centuries
later by the Persian poet Hayem Ajaf Nazirim.

MORPHOLOGY
The difficulties of applying traditional methods of research to the study of
parallel botany stem chiefly from the matterlessness of the plants. Deprived as
they are of any real organs or tissues, their character would be completely
indefinable if it were not for the fact that parallel botany is nonetheless botany,
and as such it reflects, even if somewhat distantly, many of the most evident
features of normal plants. These features or qualities must be seen in the light of
the concept of botanicity ("plantness"). For parallel plants, which often possess
no other reality than mere appearance, plantness is one thing that enables us to
recognize and describe them, and, to some extent, to study their behavior.
What, then, do we mean by plantness?
In substance it is the ideative gestalt, the aggregate of those morphological
characteristics which make plants instantly recognizable and placeable within
one single kingdom. In other words, it consists of those recognitive elements that
make us say of a thing, "It is a plant," or "It looks like a plant," or even "Look,
what a strange plant!" This last exclamation, incidentally, gives some idea of
how strongly identifiable are the formal characteristics that distinguish plants
from all other things on earth. But the process, which seems so elementary, is in
reality rather a complicated one. It involves not only the morphological
characteristics of the plants and our own possibilities of perception, but also the
whole of our complex and ambiguous relationship with nature. Plantness is in
fact no more than a particular aspect of the larger concept of organicity, a basic
quality common to everything in nature, and the one that usually sets an
immediate and unmistakable stamp on outward appearance.
C. H. Waddington, former director of the Institute of Animal Genetics at
Edinburgh University, is one of the few scientists who have attempted to
describe the formal difference between the products of man and those of nature,
relying for evidence not only on the Aulonia hexagona, a singe-celled organism,
but also on the sculptures of Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. In an essay on
the nature of biological form he pits the problem this way:

If one found oneself walking along the strand of some unknown sea, littered
with the debris of broken shells, isolated bones, and old lumps of coral of
some unfamiliar fauna, mingled with the jetsam from the wrecks of strange
vessels, one feels that one would hardly make any mistakes in
distinguishing the natural from the man-made objects. Unless the churning
of the waves had too much corroded them, the odd screws, valves, radio
terminals, and miscellaneous fitments even if fabricated out of bone or
some other calcareous shell-like material, would bear the unmistakable
impress of a human artificer and fail to make good a claim to a natural
origin. What is this character, which the naturally organic possesses and
the artificial usually lacks? It has something, certainly, to do with growth.
Organic forms develop. The flow of time is an essential component of their
full nature."1

At first sight the growth factor mentioned by Waddington would seem to be a

valid touchstone, but in actual fact it does not really explain our instant ability to
tell natural things from human ones. Growth is a vital process, of course, but it
takes place over long periods of time, and the morphological changes involved
are at the subcellular level, invisible to the naked eye. We do not see growth, we
simply know from previous experience stored in our memories that something
has grown.
The Hungarian biophilosopher Kormosh Maremsh, in his critique of
Waddington's theory, observes that if growth is in fact a touchstone for
differentiating between the things of nature and those of man, we are going to
find it hard to explain decrease. In a particularly brilliant passage, he compares a
pebble to a billiard ball and underlines the paradox that while both have reached
their final form by a gradual reduction of volume and the simplification of their
original forms, the pebble (made of inert material) is still recognizable as a thing
of nature while the ball (made of ivory, a living substance) is quite clearly an
artifact.
What then is the perceptive process by which, without a moment's hesitation, we
tell natural things from the things made by man? What exactly is this quality of
organicity that we attribute to the first and deny to the second?
In 1778 Ebenfass (The Living Machine) was the first to introduce the word
organisch when referring to living organisms. For the German philosopher the
term had in absolutely precise function: to describe a complex of organs
arranged harmoniously. But little by little, by analogy of semantic shift, the word
took on other and always broader meanings which became increasingly difficult
to define. Nowadays we do not think twice about using it to describe the style of
a house, the quality of a line, the shape of a swimming pool. But in general we
might say that organicity is the quality which typifies the forms of nature and
which is lacking in the products of man.
The problem of comparing nature with artifact was already recognized and
discussed, though rather superficially and always within the sphere of aesthetics,
by a number of Greek philosophers. But it was only many centuries later, with
the Enlightenment, that the emergence of a rudimentary scientific technology
enabled it to become the object of a more thorough analysis. That it was a topic
of the moment in the early nineteenth century is clearly shown, if only by
implication, by an Eskimo legend retold by the Canadian ethnologist Philip
Welles (Men and Myths of the Northwest, Vancouver, 1842).
Welles, who lived for many years with the Inklit and Tawaida Eskimos,
describes the legend as 'a modern fairy tale inspired by contact with the
Canadian merchants offering manufactured goods such as balls, glasses, beads,
mechanical toys and even watches in exchange for skins, ivory and whale oil."
The legend was told to him by the shaman of the village of Foipu, at the foot of
the Kwapuna mountains. Here it is;

When the god Kanaak wished to create life on earth the first things he
invented were sickness and death, then the ferns, the holm oak and the other
trees. Then he invented the bear, the whale, the snow cricket, the beaver and
the other animals. Finally he invented man, and he taught him to make
things, and to make them in his own image, imperfect. And man made
things in this way, and they served him most perfectly. He made the kayak
like the pod of the Took tree, and with bones and the fibers of plants he
made fish hooks, harpoons and nets. He dressed in the skins of the white
wolf and from the claws and teeth of the bear he made necklaces and belts.
But one day man discovered that by rubbing one stone against another he
could imitate the song of the snow cricket; and he did so. But one of the
stones was harder than the other, and after he had been rubbing for e. while
 man realized that he had made a perfect sphere. When he saw it, man
realized that he had sinned against the god Kanaak; and he was afraid. He
got up guiltily and tried to hide the sphere in the hollow trunk of the tree
which he was leaning against, but it slipped out of his hand and started to
roll away. The man ran after it, faster and faster. Kanaak saw it, but did not
stop it. As a punishment he made man run after it until he disappeared into
the endless darkness of the Kwapuna mountains.

"And he is still running after the perfect sphere," was the ironic comment of
Welles, anticipating by a century our own objections to an industrial-consumer
society.
The first to contrast the notions of nature and artifice, not simply from the
conceptual, intellective and moral standpoints, but chiefly from the
phenomenological point of view, was Kormosh Maremsh. In his study of
organicity, Perception and Nature, a work of fundamental importance to both the
study of biology and the understanding of art, he arrives at the following
definition of organicity by means of a long and meticulous analysis of
technology in which he traces its whole evolution: "the continual struggle of man
to dominate the chaotic fatality of nature, to make it comprehensible and
foreseeable." Starting from the day on which a man for the first time picked up a
stone to keep and use ("the first real human gesture"), he describes the course
and the gradual transformation of primitive tools and household objects into the
industrial and consumeristic equipment of our own days. He sees in the
development of manufactured objects the slow penetration of a language which
little by little alters their function, producing more and more abstract forms.
While the things of nature have no function other than to exist in themselves,
one which they express morphologically by their unity of appearance
(Portmann's "self-presentation"2), manufactured things need two efficiency
factors, one mechanical, the other symbolic. "On a par with mechanical
functionality," writes Maremsh, "man always tends to choose for the things he
makes the solution that is richest in message, the most loaded with meaning.
And thus the language of objects has undergone a development comparable with
that of the language of words: it already has its own grammar, syntax and
rhetoric." And again: "The history of technology shows us the gradual
transformation of things of use into objects of possession, of utensils that are
eloquently mechanical into ritual and abstractly linguistic instruments."
While Maremsh sees this evolution as the result of economic and political
struggles, the psychologist Wolfgang Keller thinks he can perceive in it some of
the psychological causes inherent in the ideative process. He speaks in particular
of what he calls "the geometric impulse," which is in fact the title of a recently
published book of his.3 Drawing the distinction between instinct and impulse,
the German psychologist writes: "While certain animals possess a rudimentary
geometric instinct, usually concerned with the standardized production of a
single object (spider's web, honeycomb), only man, gifted with imagination,
possesses the capacity to project, to verify, and the irresistible impulse to realize
things in concrete terms."
He goes on to explain that "the vision of the imagined thing is as a rule primarily
an interpolation, stylized and gestaltic. Its forms appear in the mind not by the
gradual and systematic addition of one part at a time, but by the simultaneous
emergence of a whole. This ideative process is characterized by an alternation of
propositions which is bound to culminate in the choice of the form which, in
opposition to the chaos of the real world, best represents a clearly discernible
order such as that of geometry.
" The 'design,' which is a proposal to render imagined objects concrete, tends to
choose out of all imagined forms the one that is most easily perceptible as
gestalt, as an organized geometric whole. This impulse toward geometry, already
institutionalized in the profession of 'designer,' is responsible for the proliferation
of ever more abstract objects, increasingly in contrast with natural forms."
Keller then observes that the geometric impulse is not confined to the creation of
objects but also seems to dominate our interpretation of everything round us,
including nature. Unable to accept the chaos which is characteristic of free forms
of nature, man imprisons them in definable and measurable schemes, his own
body being no exception to the rule.
The result of a lifetime devoted to the measurement of nature, D'Arcy
Thompson's vast and comprehensive 1100-page volume On Growth and Form4
gives us all possible and imaginable aspects of mathematics and geometry as
applied to living forms, from the growth of Belgian children to that of herrings,
from the curves of horns, teeth, and claws to the parabola described by a hopping
flea, from the shape of a water drop to the arrangement of leaves on a stem.
Designs, diagrams, outlines, and simplifications transform living things into
models of the most rigorous symmetry.
In his excellent little volume Natura e geometria, Aldo Montu confesses: "The
observation of facts leads to an instinctive rebellion against a geometric
simplification and unification that does not make allowance for single events-but
in reality there is order in the whole and a great liberty of variation in the
particulars, and this determines the harmony of all relations."5 But then, not
making allowance for single events, Montu goes on to circumscribe and
imprison the free forms of shells, flowers, and leaves in squares, circles,
rectangles, triangles, ellipses, and hexagons. Beneath the geometrical figures,
however, the photos reveal the chaotic outlines, the chance distribution of spots,
the rebellious excrescences, the veins of irregular size and spacing, all of which
not only characterize individuality but comprise its sine qua non, that impetuous
disorder which eludes measurable generalizations, as do the things of nature.
It is obvious that when we are dealing with the appearances of things and our
perception of them, diagrams are just as useless as words. After even the most
effective geometric analysis or verbal description the images we seek to evoke
remain nebulous and unstable, likely to be deformed by the least touch of
interpretation.
Aware of these difficulties, Maremsh has supported his observations with
figurative examples of theoretical but real situations from which, by means of
the direct comparison of natural and manufactured objects, the meaning of
organicity emerges with the greatest clarity.
While recognizing that "it is not possible to teach anyone to read organicity, but
luckily we read it as naturally as we walk," the Hungarian philosopher involves
us directly in the reading of particular cases in which different levels and degrees
of organicity are put face to face. From an examination of the examples, some of
which are here reproduced, the concept of organicity gains solidity, free from the
restrictive exigencies and misunderstandings of verbal definitions.
Taking Waddington's theory as his point of departure, Maremsh imagines
himself on a beach, looking at pebbles. Although the action of the water has
blunted the points and worn down any sharp edges, the shapes remain clearly
organic and not susceptible to any easy geometrical definition (Fig. 7a). Even in
a group of exceptionally regular pebbles, a perfectly spherical object
immediately leaps to view as a man-made thing. Any child would recognize a
billiard ball as a billiard ball, even if it had been worked on by the action of the
sun and the waves, the salt and the grinding sand (Fig. 7b). In the same way, we
will have no difficulty in recognizing a pebble in the midst of a group of billiard
ball, (Fig. 7c). But Maremsh points out that if one of the balls were split in two
we would know it as a billiard ball only "by association." Among the pebbles
this split ball would be hard to distinguish as a man-made object because of the
aggressive "organicity" of the fracture. "Continual wear," observes Maremsh,
"gives human products a certain degree of organicity."
(a)

(b)

(c)

Fig. 7 From Perception and Nature by Kormosh Maremsh

 Fig. 8 From Perception and Nature by Kormosh Maremsh

Three versions of a branch with a fruit hanging on it (Fig. 8) form what is

perhaps the Hungarian philosopher’s most noted demonstration. The illustrations
clearly show how eloquently both organicity and inorganicity survive the most
anomalous contexts. In the first version the situation is completely natural.
Although it is not possible to make out the species of plant, and although it is
only a fragment of the whole plant, the branch and the twig and the fruit do
nevertheless compose a whole which indubitably possesses organicity
(plantness). The branch in the second illustration, however, is immediately read
as a stick to which a real twig and real fruit have been inexplicably attached. The
third illustration is a man-made object which we interpret as a stylized
representation of a branch bearing a fruit.
Here (Fig. 9) are some of the famous leaves with which, as in the example
above, Maremsh not only shows the characteristics that mark off the organicity
of things of nature from the inorganicity of human products but also clearly
demonstrates some of the most typical features of plantness. Maremsh here
illustrates several of the salient points in the theory he developed in his study
The Pathology of the Object, especially regarding the destructive action of man
and nature on natural and man-made things respectively. The leaves in these
examples are immediately recognizable either as organic or as artifacts (or as we
usually say, "true" or "false"). Of this series of illustrations the most interesting
are those which show the results of human action on a "real" leaf and that of
nature on a man-made leaf: both are situations which, in spite of their patent
absurdity, reveal how easy it is to distinguish between organic and inorganic
forms.
Kormosh Maremsh used the example of the bagel to show that in spite of
considerable alterations in the direction of organicity produced by the action of
yeast and fire, the manufactured object loses little of its evident human origin
(Fig. 10). There are obviously cases in which the effect of natural forces is so
violent that it obliterates the original forms of man-made objects, while in the
same way human manipulation can end by completely destroying organic forms
(as, for example, in the transformation of raw materials ).
Fig. 9 Maremsh's leaves
 Fig. 10 Maremsh's bagel

Turning to aesthetic problems, in which the word "organic" has taken on

particular significance, Maremsh gives us the example of four lines (Fig. 11), of
which the first was drawn mechanically by man and is clearly inorganic. The
second line is disturbed by a fact of organic origin (tremor, error, failure of the
machine). The third line is a characteristic detail from a drawing by the
American artist Ben Shahn. Many art critics use the term organic to indicate the
artist's intention to approach an autonomous organicity in his drawing by means
of deliberate hesitations, errors, and imperfections. It is an exceptional and very
complex situation in which the artist expresses our ambiguous relation to nature,
and in fact sets out to "replace" nature. In the fourth figure we are shown the
lines formed by the cracks in an asphalt pavement. According to Maremsh these
lines represent "the reacquisition by the soil beneath the pavement of the
organicity which man has attempted to suppress."
 Fig. 11 Maremsh's lines

The examples given by Maremsh refer as much to the formal as to the textural
qualities, but in spite of the ingenious efficacy of his method they can provide
only partial answers to the basic questions. When we look at the illustrations
given by Maremsh we often have reactions or make choices that are not
explicable except in terms of the knowledge and experience that have
accumulated in our memories. The associations, direct or taught, which we had
with the world of nature (or of men) during our early childhood have left us with
so much intellective and perceptive information that they alone would enable us
to find our way in the intricate landscape in which we live.
But this inadequately explains our ability to distinguish not only natural things
from manufactured ones, but also pebbles from shells, birds from fish, men from
monkeys, and plants from all the other things on earth. Although our world is
infinitely more complex than the world of animals, we cannot attribute our gift
for generalization simply to our human characteristics. "It is not difficult,"
concludes Maremsh, 'to perceive the difference between the organicity of natural
things and of man-made objects. But we must at the same time admit that neither
my dog Fidel nor my goat Caroline has ever made a mistakes."
Taking the work of Maremsh as his starting point, the morphologist Adolf
Boehmen has made organicity in botany his chief concern. "Plantness," he
explains, "Is nothing but the generalization of those particular organic qualities
which plants have in common." He goes on to list these aspects as immobility,
verticality, color, and texture, and he examines their nature and meaning in great
detail in his book Notes Toward a Vegetable Semantics. Boehmen goes
particularly deeply into the examination of textures, which in some cases provide
a determining key to perception. Especially well-known is his experiment in the
interpretation of pictures of a lemon, described in the book and illustrated with
the original photos used in the test. The experiment consisted of naming a certain
fruit represented in several very clear photographs. One of these was an accurate
color reproduction of a lemon, seen from the side. Another showed the same
fruit in black and white. In the third the lemon was colored orange, while the
fourth showed an orange colored lemon yellow. Obviously the reading of the
first photo presented no difficulties, while the picture in black and white
produced similar results (97 percent of those interviewed recognized it as a
lemon). But the orange-colored lemon was interpreted by 86 percent as an
orange, and the lemon-colored orange by 91 percent as a lemon.
From this particular case Boehmen deduced that in our assessment of plantness
we give priority to color (which can easily deceive us) and only in its absence do
we turn our attention to form and texture, which either by analogy or by previous
experience will reveal the object specifically as a lemon, less specifically as a
fruit, and generically as belonging to the vegetable kingdom.
The experiments of the Austrian morphologist are of particular importance to the
understanding of parallel botany, which in the vast majority of cases presents
only form and texture as identifying characteristics. Its recent discovery
precludes the possibility that our immediate recognition of it as part of the
vegetable kingdom was in any way conditioned by previous direct experience.
The absence of color, the frequently disquieting contexts, and the morphological
oddities of the separate parts might well obscure our reading of it. In spite of
this, the plantness of the whole and of its textural qualities is so evident as to
leave no doubt that the parallel plants belong with the other flora of the earth;
and only a more detailed study of them will reveal them as parallel.
Among the specific cases examined by Boehmen is one of particular interest,
possessing the morphological characteristics of both parallel flora and human
artifacts. This is the Solea preserved in the little museum at Backstone,
Massachusetts. The plant is a reconstruction dating from the end of the
eighteenth century and attributed to a certain Franco Casoni, an Italian
immigrant of Ligurian origin, who established himself and his family at
Backstone in somewhat obscure circumstances. There he worked as a wood
carver, making a good reputation in his profession, especially for the decorative
carvings of flower motifs which still adorn the interiors of the white aristocratic
houses of the little New England town. His model of the Solea was made under
the direction of an Irish seaman, Dominic McPerry, who declared that he had
seen the original plant on an island in the Carades Archipelago. This Solea, of
which the Laboratorio delle Campora possesses a plaster cast, is one of the most
perfect known to us. Its plantness is exemplary, in the sense that it expresses all
the most characteristic features of plantness to perfection: the utter verticality,
the immobility so extreme that it seems to place it outside time, the organic
quality of the protuberances and excrescences, even the marks of disease and the
wounds (an interesting case of paramimesis) all contribute, in spite of a strange
inadequacy of term, to stamp it unequivocally as a parallel plant, typically
lacking in any kind of function or meaning. Although in fact it is made by a man,
its presence-so clearly an end in itself-has that mysterious quality of self-
presentation that Boehmen terms "Selbstsein."
The Backstone Solea is mounted on a base of darker wood, also in all probability
the work of Casoni. It speaks as eloquently of its man-madeness as the sculpture
it supports speaks of its plantness. It is what an accessory should be, in the sense
that it serves to complement another object in a clear functional relationship.
This base is round and stands on three spherical knobs, to avoid possible damage
from insects or damp, while at the same time guaranteeing the maximum of
stability. Three concentric circles, equally spaced, with no function other than
the purely aesthetic, give the whole thing a modest pretension that in the context
of a small-town museum qualify it at once as a "museum piece." If the
Solearepresents nothing other than itself, the forms of the base clearly portray
the usual functions of the human artifact. Plant and base together are an eloquent
symbol of the conflict between the two kinds of thing which populate our world.
An organicity of the botanical type is the most obvious and the most general
aspect of parallel flora. The absence of organs, functions, matter, and growth
prevents us from describing parallel plants analytically. While treatises on
normal botany have long chapters on evolution, cytology, nutrition,
reproduction, and the growth of plants, parallel botany, matterless by nature,
gives us nothing we can analyze except its morphology. But as we have observed
elsewhere, the known species are few, and the specimens rare and difficult of
access. In the same way a systematic morphology, based on a sufficient number
of separate observations to arrive at statistically valid findings, is not possible.
Unfortunately we have to be content with the reports and the observations
recorded in scientific journals, and even these are sporadic and not always
reliable.
Regarding the size of the plants there is not much to add to what is known of
botany in general. As for normal plants, there is great variety even within a
single species. Naturally enough there are no variations due to growth: growth
does not occur in parallel botany, its plants being the result of a permanent
stoppage in time. The size of known and documented plants varies from that of
the Ninnola preciosa, which never exceeds three millimeters in height, to the
Fontanasa Stalinska, which Muyansky describes as "taller than the

PL. VIII Kumode plants

famous oak in Pushkin Park." There are Giraluna ten centimeters high, while the
tallest Giraluna gigas in the Lady Isobel Middleton group measures nearly four
meters in height. While the Solea does not in general exceed a meter and a half,
we do know of a Solea argentea (the one from Amendipur) which reaches three
meters. Within the same species the greatest variation in size is met with in the
parallel pseudofungus Protorbis, which ranges from the few centimeters of the
Indian P. minor to the twenty-two meters and more of the Protorbis which
compete in bulk with the mesas of Colorado and New Mexico.
One unusual and rather disturbing case is that of the dimensions of the Anaclea
discovered by Kamikochi Kiyomasa of Osaka University. About fifteen
kilometers from Nara, the ancient capital of Japan, famous for its temples and
monuments, among which is the gigantic statue of the Buddha called Daibutsu,
there is a picturesque valley from the floor of which, like a large island, rise
seven hills which are vaguely reminiscent of the arrangement and proportions of
the seven hills of Rome. The collective name for these hills is Kumosan, from
the plant called kumode, similar to the myrtle, (pl. VIII) which covers almost
their entire surface. In the late spring the kumode puts forth a violet flower with
seven petals, the wonderfully sweet smell of which attracts millions of bees from
every corner of Yamashima province. The famous honey called gokumodemono
gets its special flavor from these flowers. In the procession with which the
picturesque celebrations of Ura Matsuri begin, the gokumodemono is borne aloft
in a bronze vessel dating from the eighth century and then poured out onto the
feet of the Daibutsu, to the sound of sacred hymns and prayers.
Kamikochi, one of the most renowned Japanese biologists, was born at Nara. A
devout Buddhist, he goes back each year to Nara for the Ura Matsuri festivities,
and he often retires to a rush cabin in the valley of Higashitani, near the hills of
Kumosan, for a week of spiritual exercises. It was during his retreat in 1970 that
Kamikochi made his spectacular discovery. While he was out for a walk his eye
happened to fall on a cluster of unusual flowers on a hilltop, nestled among the
kumode. They were about a hundred meters from where he was standing. He
was unable to make out their color because they appeared as black silhouettes
against the bright sky, but their shape seemed very strange. He found it hard to
estimate their size because, apart from the surrounding kumode, he had nothing
to compare them with.
Kamikochi decided to take a closer look at the flowers and started walking
toward the hilltop. On the way he realized that something very bizarre was
taking place. Unlike what usually happens when we approach an object we have
seen from a distance- which gradually appears larger until, when we are near
enough to touch it, it assumes its proper dimensions-these plants did not seem to
get bigger as the biologist approached them. When Kamikochi reached the
hilltop they turned out to be just as small as they had appeared from a hundred
meters away.
At first he was inclined to attribute this phenomenon to the long hours of
meditation which he had practiced before his walk. But when he repeated the
experiment the result was identical. He did it a third time, taking care not to lose
sight of the plants for an instant, and after that he was quite certain that as he
drew nearer the plants their apparent size did not alter in the least.
A few weeks later Kamikochi returned with a number of his pupils to study the
problem, which he called "metrostasis" and which he described in a paper at the
botany congress held in Tsuchimachi in 1974. He said that the flowers were of
the species (pl. IX) Anaclea taludensis, and measured at the most fifteen
centimeters in height. They are completely black, and there is not the remotest
doubt that they belong to parallel botany. It is impossible to pick them, as they
vaporize instantly on contact with a hand or any other object that is not part of
their normal ecological environment.
Kamikochi, though admitting that he was unable to give a scientifically
satisfactory explanation of the phenomenon, attributes it to the immobility in
time characteristic of parallel plants, and quotes Leibschmidt's law to the effect
that "for every immobility in time there is a corresponding immobility in space."
"The type of perspective," he explains, "that reduces the image of a distant
object in proportion to its distance from the point of observation presupposes a
normal time-space relationship. A change in the fundamental qualities of one of
the two elements must of necessity imply a change in the other." If at first sight
Kamikochi’s argument appears irreproachable we are led to ask ourselves why it
is that the other parallel plants are not subject to the same phenomenon.
 PL. IX. Anaclea taludensis

A team of neurologists, psychologists, and opticians at the University of Osaka is

now working on the problem of metrostasis. It is by no means impossible that
certain plants might have disturbing effects on human eyesight. Harold
MacLohen, in an article in the Chicago Times, reminds us of how recently in
human history we have come to accept mere image' as reality. "For millions of
spectators," he observes, "the leading personalities of our time-athletes,
statesmen, pop singers, and scientists-are at most ten inches tall. We accept their
rather dubious dimensions without ever being able to verify them in person."
The colors of plants and their morphological characteristics are part of the
language in which they carry on their dialogue with the world. It is by these
means that they transmit important messages regarding personal identity and
survival. The color green, characteristic of the stems and leaves, is a secondary
effect of chlorophyll. It expresses the harmonious functioning of the vital
processes for which chlorophyll, as an intermediary of nutrition, is largely
responsible. When these processes are damaged by pathological conditions or
suspended by the seasonal drying-up of the plant, the color alters and signals
what is happening.
The function of the other colors, particularly that of the flowers, is more
mysterious. While the green informs us of the health of the individual plant, and
is therefore a simple affirmation, the other colors are invocations, invitations,
questions. They have to do not so much with the survival of the individual as
with that of the whole species. As Hamilton puts it: "For plants, by a cruel fate
deprived of motion, colors are a silent language of love, desperate and
passionate, a language which birds and insects, their winged messengers, carry
to distant lovers also ineluctably fastened to the earth."6
This English biologist is of the opinion that for parallel plants, "fixed not in earth
but in an inert time," the problem of survival does not exist. As a result, color as
an instrument or a signal would only be justified as a paramimetic phenomenon,
that is, as a trick to disguise their true nature. "When this happens," he adds, "we
can assume the existence of an exceptional anomaly, because parallel plants are
without any life as it is lived in the flow of time, and they therefore have no need
for color." Hamilton's remarks, which at first seem logical enough, contain two
basic flaws. To begin with, when he asserts that parallel plants have no color
because they do not need it he clearly ignores the recent departure from
traditional evolutionary theories. Portmann has opened our eyes to the fact that
many natural phenomena, traditionally thought to have some functional
significance with regard to survival, are, in fact, entirely gratuitous and
inexplicable in rational terms. Second, if it is true that we cannot speak of a real
color in the case of parallel plants, partly because their surface is just the
external limit of an interior, their visibility must nevertheless be expressible in
chromatic terms. If the variations in their degrees of opacity and the indefinable
nuances of black sometimes seen like a lack of color, a void in the colored world
that surrounds them, in reality these characteristics are positive and typical of
parallel plants, directly connected with their mode of being. It is not easy to
describe and explain these characteristics, for they are as elusive and ambiguous
as the plants themselves. Jean Parottier writes: "While the colors of normal
plants share the hard certainty of sunlight, those of the parallel plants seem to
hang in the dreamlike ambiguity of the darkness of night." And again: "The
colors of these plants aspire to the condition of night. And as it is hard to find a
pure black even on the darkest night, so it is with the parallel plants."
The gamut of blacks in parallel plants ranges from "tete de negre," as warm and
mysterious as a bronze by Rodin, to the cold and hostile black which Delacroix
called "bois brule." But it is the strange sheen of these different nuances of black
that gives the parallel plants their curiously matterless and sometimes almost
spectral appearance. It is like a skin of light within the pigments, causing both
the shadows and the strongly lighted areas to lose their outlines. The surface of
the parallel plants more than anything else resembles the patina found on ancient
bronzes, which is also difficult to describe, not because it has no color but
because the slow wearing away of time has mitigated its arrogant
aggressiveness, that presumptuous self-confidence typical of man's artifacts
when they are new, and of the things of nature when they are young.
The discovery which Theodor Nass made accidentally, and which aroused a
great deal of interest some years ago, has revealed some mysterious and
disquieting aspects of the chromatic features of parallel plants, aspects that may
one day lead us to a fuller understanding of what he calls "parallel black."
During a period of research at the Laboratorio delle Campora, the famous Swiss
scientist inserted part of the Solea fortius, one of the most valuable specimens in
the great Chianti collection, into a block of polyephymerol, a new plastic with as
yet unexplained properties of refraction, for which it is widely used for the
lenses of Bonsen refractometers. If polyephymerol is cut and set at a certain
angle it reveals characteristics similar to those of laser beams. Nass in fact was
using it to make three-dimensional measurements of the growth-spiral visible all
around the Solea, which Nass suspected might show analogies with the DNA
spiral.
When he had inserted part of the Solea into the cube he found to his
astonishment that inside the plastic this plant, normally one of the blackest of all
parallel plants, appeared vividly colored. Nass, completely unable to give a
logical explanation for this, put forward the hypothesis that the dark patina of the
plant could in fact be merely the upper layer of a number of superimposed
colored layers, a kind of screen which usually conceals the pigments and which
with the aid of polyephymerol we are able to penetrate. The Solea with its center
encased in the plastic cube was shown at the Parallel Botany Exhibition arranged
in conjunction with the Offenbach Conference of 1973, where its mysterious
chromatic behavior attracted the attention of the world's press. In an interview
with the Frankfurter Tagesblat, Nass among other things revealed that
polyephymerol contains a derivative of amitocaspolytene, a rare and highly
poisonous substance. This imprudent statement gave rise to an inquiry on the
part of the German authorities, which is still going on. The chairman of
S.I.M.A., producers of polyephymerol, gave a press conference in which he
assured journalists that all due precautions had been taken to protect the health
of workers and laboratory staff, and that the final product was perfectly inert and
harmless. By way of demonstration he showed a photo of himself standing
beside his three-year-old son Johann, who was holding in his hands a shapeless
lump of polyephymerol. At a second press conference Nass declared that further
tests carried out by him into the toxic nature of the material had shown
completely negative results.
Following the Offenbach Conference, Nass obtained a grant from the Geremia
Pirelli Foundation to enable him to continue his experiments, extending them to
other parallel plants and even to species of normal botany. The first results,
though varying greatly in intensity, were similar to those obtained with Solea
fortius. With normal plants, on the other hand the phenomenon did not occur at
all. Only one part of the stem of a Princess Grace rose under the plastic showed a
slight bluish tinge which, according to Nass, might be the beginning of a
mutation, the prelude to a possible parallelization of all roses. This strange
phenomenon, which is now known as the Nass chromation, has not yet been
satisfactorily explained. Nass carries out his experiments in great secrecy, and is
retiring and evasive even with his colleagues in the laboratory. There has also
been no explanation of how professor Vanni,7 director of the famous Italian
laboratory, who has a reputation as a prudent scientist and a meticulous
administrator, could have allowed Nass to experiment on the rarest and most
precious of his whole collection of Solea, thereby risking its total disintegration.
Maybe these and other questions will be answered at the forthcoming conference
on parallel philosophy, due to be held in Tokyo in 1978. Both Nass and Vanni
will be among the speakers on that occasion.

1. C. H. Waddington, "The Character of Biological Form," in Aspects of Form: A

Symposium on Form in Nature and in Art, edited by Lancelot Law Whyte
(Pellegrini and Cudahy, New York, 1951).

2. Adolf Portmann uses the term "self-presentation" (in Le forme viventi,

Adelphi, Milan, 1969) to mean the sum total of the external characteristics of
living organisms and their "coming to light." He explains: "It is composed not
only of the optical, acoustic and olfactory characteristics of the individual in a
state of repose, but also of all those manifestations of himself in time and space
which go beyond the functions of preservation, selection and immediate utility."

3. Wolfgang Keller, Erscheinungflehre (Institut fur Geometrische Forschungen,

Dusseldorf, 1970).

4. D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, On Growth and Form (The Syndics of the

Cambridge University Press, 1917)

5. Aldo Montu, Natura e geometries (Melocchi Editore, Milan, 1970).

6. Eric Hamilton, “Parallel Color” in Biological Research, A Symposium

(Hartman and Coyle Ltd., London, 1969).

7. Marcello Vanni has been director of the famous Laboratory of Parallel Botany
at Le Campora, Radda-in-Chiaiti, since 1969. He graduated from the University
of Vienna, where he studied under Hermann von Kranenbogen. At Holtsville
University in 1964 he gave a series of lectures on "Diagonality in Botany" which
were the prelude to his present activities. He has recently been specializing in
studies on the Solea and processes of transhabitation.

CONTENTS
PART ONE: INTRODUCTION 1
General Introduction 3
Origins 20
Morphology 35

PART TWO: THE PLANTS 57

The Tirillus 59
Tirillus oniricus 62
Tirillus mimeticus 64
Tirillus parasiticus 67
Tirillus odoratus 68
Tirillus silvador 70
 The Woodland Tweezers 73
The Tubolara 78
The Camporana 80
The Protorbis 86
The Labirintiana 95
The Artisia 100
The Germinants 112
The Stranglers 117
The Giraluna 119
Giraluna gigas 134
Giraluna minor 1 43
The Solea 145
The Sigurya 162

PART THREE: EPILOGUE 171

The Gift of Thaumas 173
Notes 178
 PART TWO
THE PLANTS
THE TIRILLUS
The vast majority of parallel plants are found in isolation or in small groups that
rarely exceed a dozen in number. The tirils, like the woodland sugartongs, are by
nature gregarious and live in dense groups that sometimes cover large areas.
Examples of this are found especially in the tundras of Ackerman's Land, not far
from the Borioff Straits, where endless fields of tirils stretch as far as the eye can
see, disappearing only into the frozen mist of the Arctic horizon.
Of all parallel flora the tiril has the widest and most varied (pl. X ) geographical
distribution. From the Arctic tundras to the Peruvian Andes, from the Siberian
steppes to the mesas of Patalonia, from the Omar Delta to the shores of the Gulf
of Good Friends, scholars and travelers interested in botany have recorded the
presence of Tirillus vulgaris and of its more aristocratic varieties: T. major, T.
tigrinus (Fig. 12), and T. tihirlus extinctus (fossil variety).
Its modest form, as elemental as that of our grass, has been known since time
immemorial, and was recorded as long as three thousand years ago on the
petroglyphs of the Moqui Indians who lived on the Fremont River in Utih.
Theocrastus mentions it in his "Rural Discourse" and a Mannonite manuscript
cites the tiril as an example of perfect and peaceful communal life.
The Tirillus vulgaris or common tiril is the prototype of the species, measuring
from 18 to 26 centimeters in height and approximately a centimeter thick. It lives
in dense groups, sometimes with as many as four thousand individual plants to
the square meter. Often the plants are so closely packed together that in
preparallel conditions the sick plants found it impossible to wilt, and died in an
erect posture, supported by their neighbors.
In parallel botany the tiril is the only species in which normal examples can be
found next to petrified or fossilized specimens. At Ampu-Chichi in Peru, about
ninety kilometers from the highest point of the Chimu-Pichu, the paleobotanist
Edward H. Kinsington has discovered whole fields of fossilized tirils which
apparently perished in some epidemic; all are in a perfect state of preservation,
and all in a vertical position. "They look like fields of breadsticks," writes the
Australian paleontologist, who as a young man lived for a while in Turin,
attending Onofrio Pennisi's famous university courses in myopaleontology. He
was therefore familiar with the Piedmontese grissini of that time, though in fact
it was during the First World War, when flour was not of the best quality.
The "black" of the tiril is among the most colorful of all parallel plants. In the
few tests that have been made with the Fersen chromometer, readings in F-
vibrations from 82° F. to 112° F. have been obtained, which is a fairly
considerable range if we come to think that the color of black plants is, basically,
one and one only. These readings are not much lower than those obtained from
the leaf of Frenemona taliensa, the most highly colored of all the parallel plants.
It may well be asked why we are not in possession of more accurate data on the
color of a plant with such wide geographical distribution. There are many
reasons for this: the bulk and weight of the chromometer, the uncontrollable
variations in atmospheric pressure, the fluctuations of ozonoferous density. But
the main reason, mentioned earlier, is the impossibility of moving the plants
from one place to another. This difficulty exists not only for tirils, but for all
parallel plants.
The Laboratorio delle Campora has carried out numerous experiments in the
transport of these plants, but unfortunately none has yet met with success.
However, Marcello Vanni, director of the laboratory, with the help of Valerio
Tarquini, is at present perfecting a new type of pressurized equipment which it is
hoped will produce positive results in the foreseeable future.
As regards the obstacles to habitat-exchange, we ought perhaps to repeat a few
general observations. As a direct result of their matterlessness, parallel plants
submit fairly gracefully to verbal description but are decidedly hostile to any
method of documentation that threatens to duplicate what in them is mere
appearance, especially through the medium of a false "reality" such as
photography.
PLATE X. Tirilis
 Fig. 12 Tirillus tigrinus and Tirillus bifurcatus

There have been innumerable unsuccessful attempts to photograph apparently

accessible plants, even though the use of the most refined equipment seemed
practically to guarantee success. Thus, except for these inclusions and s. few
presumably direct casts, our chief sources of information are unfortunately
verbal reports and three-dimensional reconstructions modeled either from
memory or from drawings done from life.
All the same, the tiril is the best documented of all the parallel plants. Since
1972 the Tirillus Society of America has been informed of as many as eleven
newly discovered beds, six of them in Central and South America, thanks to the
expeditions of Kinsington and of Roger Lamont-Paquit of the Parabiology
Institute of Cataras. Of the remainder, three are in Africa and two are in Siberia.
With the exception of T. bifurcatus (Fig. 12) of Jakruzia and the anomalous,
autoparasitic specimens found by Karovsky on the Arkistan Plateau, all known
varieties of tiril possess similar morphological characteristics. If they differ from
the prototype T. vulgaris, it is more in behavior than in form. There is, it is true,
the dwarf variety that is found on be edge of the Great African Rift, near Lake
Kivu in Ruanda, but it is possible that we cannot perceive its true dimensions
and that its behavior is similar to that of the Anaclea taludensis observed and
studied by the Japanese biologist Kamikochi.
We here list the fourteen varieties of the prototype Tirillus vulgaris, together
with the location where they were found (reprinted from the yearbook of the
Tirillus Society of America).

T. odoratus Mexico Sierra Madre

T. silvador Peru Ampu-Chichi
T. oniricus Ecuador Cordillera Real
T. mimeticus Brazil Carima
T. tigrinus Argentina Quequa
T. parasiticus Brazil Rio Samona
T. tirillus Siberia Jakruzia
T. tundrosus Alaska Helmutland
T. major Pacific Western Patagonia
T. omarensis Asia Omar Delta
T. tihirlus extinctus Iran Sarab Bainah
T. minimus Ruanda Lake Kivu
T. bifurcatus Siberia Jakruzia
T. bulbosus Germany Bavaria

Tirillus oniricus
T. oniricus was first discovered in Ecuador by the American poet John Kerry
("Solitary John")1, who passed on the information to his biologist friend Roger
Lamont-Paquit2 when he learned about the research which the latter was
carrying out in the field of parallel botany. It is to this French scientist that we
owe all our documentation of this strange plant, the fruit of long and patient
study during his expeditions along the Cordillera Real. On the Cucuta Plateau, at
the foot of the great volcano Chimborazo, he found the little colonies of tirils
described by Kerry, hidden amidst the endless stretches of Ostunia fluensis
(theboho of the Javaros Indians). Theboho produces the black and perfectly
triangular seeds which Indian children use for playing salari, a game which in
recent years has become quite popular in Scandinavia in a colored plastic version

Fig. 13 The Ostunia fluensis and its seeds (above) and the game of Skaap-Skaap

called Skaap-Skaap (Fig. 13). Lamont-Paquit tried to photograph the tirils of

Ecuador with a special Roemsen lens from a distance of one kilometer, but
unfortunately where the tirils should be the photo shows only a white blur.
T. oniricus seems to all appearances a normal tiril, no taller or more robust than
its more common and accessible brethren. The disquieting feature of this plant is
that its image apparently lodges in some yet unknown corner of the memory,
where at irregular intervals it makes its presence felt. After Lamont-Paquit first
saw a field of these tirils he suffered from a strange malaise that he at first put
down to the effect of the altitude. He sat down on a boulder, expecting to
recover, but the image of the plants continued to recur, to flood into his mind in
an almost stroboscopic sequence, but at unpredictable intervals. When he
succeeded in directing his thoughts to other memories, even in the distant past,
everything became normal again and the strange feeling suddenly vanished.
Gradually he learned to control the phenomenon, forcing himself to think first of
the tirils and then of something else, thus controlling also the sensation of slight
dizziness that always accompanied the appearance of the mental image of the
plants.
The neurologist Theodor Kinderstein, noted for his experiments with
hallucinogenic substances, worked for some time with Lamont-Paquit. In his
opinion, the phenomenon is similar to that produced by the bombardment of the
retina with the rays of a flame obtained by burning Toxcaline. It seems that T.
oniricus has this characteristic, fortunately rare in nature, caused by occasional
fractures in the light waves that emanate indirectly from its surface. The
resulting intermittent appearance of the image in the memory has not so far been
satisfactorily explained. Lamont-Paquit, who has undergone numerous
neurocephalic tests it the Institute of Neurology at Lyons, has learned not to
remember the Tirillus oniricus which he discovered, for strictly preestablished
periods of time. In this he has been greatly aided by the Indian guru Ajit
Barahanji, who has given him exercises in mental deconcentration and selective
dethinking.

Tirillus mimeticus
As parallel plants-unlike their sisters on this side of the hedge -(we resort to
Dulieu's memorable phrase)-are not cursed with conflicts and struggles for
survival, it is difficult to understand how it came about that on Carima island in
the estuary of the Rio de las Almas there should be a tiril so perfectly
camouflaged that to all intents and purposes it is invisible. Lamont-Paquit, who
discovered T. oniricus in Ecuador, describes T. mimeticus as slightly shorter than
the average for normal tirils (about twelve centimeters), but having the same
diameter. It is regular in form, without scent, and has a smooth mat surface. It
lives in small family groups of not more than sixteen individuals, maintaining a
constant distance of three centimeters from its nearest relatives. Lamont-Paquit
gives us this information as pure deduction, because the plant is so perfectly
camouflaged in its habitat of black volcanic pebbles that it is not discernible by
normal visual means.

Fig. 14 Tirillus mimeticus and stones

Lamont-Paquit was told about this tiril by the Indians of Quahac, not far from
Carima and the only island of the archipelago still inhabited. Late one summer
afternoon he was taken to Carima by the shaman and a number of young Indians,
and there he was shown a group of tirils which in the red light of the sunset
ought to have revealed some vestiges of form. But the biologist saw nothing.
With the help of the Indians he thought he succeeded in touching a few plants,
which surprised him very much, in view of the well-known vulnerability of all
parallel plants to the human touch. He took a vast number of photographs using
different lenses and types of film, and unlike that of his photographic
misadventures in Ecuador the result was, in a sense, positive. In the
enlargements one can clearly see every detail of the rounded stones and of what
must be the T. mimeticus, though so far it has not proved possible to tell the one
from the other (Fig. 34).
In reply to Lamont-Paquit's questions on the matter, the Indians provided a
mythological explanation of the phenomenon. When a shaman dies, they said,
his soul lives into the waters of the estuary and swims under water to the islet of
Carima. There it emerges and stands invisible among the stones, watching the
actions of its living brethren; When an Okono is tempted to commit a sin of
violence, the soul-tiril (Tu'i-sa) shoots an arrow that wounds the guilty one,
punishing him with fever, pains, and vomiting. In point of fact the Okono never
confess their bodily pains, for fear that they might be revealing secret desires for
violence. When they are ill these peace-loving Indians hide away and suiter in
silence, and when the breeze is blowing in the direction of Carima they
propitiate the vengeful souls by making little boats out of dried Saklam leaves,
filling them with colored feathers and Cufola seeds, and sailing them off toward
the isle of the tirils. (pl. XI)
During his last visit to the island of Carima, Lamont-Paquit saw a small flotilla
of these tiny boats arrive on the beach. Fearing that a wave of violence or an
epidemic had struck the neighboring island, the scientist packed his bags and left
in a hurry.
 PL.XI Propitiatory leaf-boat of the Okono Indians

Tirillus parasiticus
The parasitic tiril grows on dead tree trunks and branches in certain (pl. XII)
tropical forests. Of normal shape and size, it differs from other kinds of tiril
mainly in the composition of the groups. The plants are in fact arranged in line a
few centimeters one from another, and there is always an odd number in each
group. The groups are therefore symmetrical, and this feature is often
accentuated by the central tiril being taller than the rest.
These tirils are not true parasites. The term parasite is derived from the Greek
para (beside) and sitos (food), and implies the exploitation of the conditions or
qualities of others for one's own survival. This clearly does not apply to plants
whose existence is independent of relations with other organisms or with the
environment, and whose life cycle, if we can use such a term, occurs in a
motionless time which ensures the permanence of their bodily forms.
The name "parasitic tiril" was used to describe these plants by Jacob Scheinbach
of Hanover University, who certainly had no idea of the misunderstanding this
unintentional baptism would create. Scheinbach discovered the plants during an
expedition through the Brazilian forests in the region of the Rio Samona, and in
a letter to his colleague Metzen he used the word parasite to simplify what
would otherwise have been a rather lengthy description: "Yesterday I saw a plant
rather like an asparagus, smooth and of an indefinite dark color with bronze
lights. It was growing, apparently, on the bark of fallen trunks and large dead
branches. It is clearly a type of parasitic tiril. Not being able for obvious reasons
to touch the plants, I made a few drawings which I've sent to Jack for
publication. These tirils look perfectly normal to me, but my dear Metzen, how
on earth are we to explain their presence on what is the biodegradable base par
excellence, a trunk that in a tropical forest is bound to be rotted by damp and
insect damage within a matter of months? What happens when a parallel plant,
by nature indifferent to the passing of time, entrusts its destiny to such
precarious conditions? The credibility of all our scientific work over the last five
years is in jeopardy unless we can find a clear answer to this disturbing
question."
On his return from Brazil, Scheinbach started a series of experiments to find
plausible connections not only between the two botanies but between the kinds
of time that in such totally different ways condition the existence of parallel
plants and common plants. These experiments are still going on, but it is
generally agreed that they have small hopes of success.
 PL. XII Parasitic tirils

Tirillus odoratus
We know that the luster of parallel plants is often increased by the adherence to
them of a kind of wax, a colorless substance known as emyphyllene. This
substance is usually without scent, but exceptions to this rule occur in the case of
certain varieties of Giraluna and in that of the Tirillus odoratus of the Mexican
Sierra Madre. The Machole Indians think this property is responsible for the
hallucinatory effects that have recently been studied by a team of neurologists
led by Carlos Manchez.
T. odoratus is found in the mountains of the northern part of the Sierra Madre. It
is a rare plant, especially as its habitat is among the exposed roots of Olindus
presiitanus, a tree well on its way to extinction throughout the American
continent. The tiril is quite small, scarcely ever over twelve centimeters in
height, and is almost black. As it is always found in shadow, it is practically
invisible. In the first ten days of April the infinitesimally fine layer of
emyphyllene develops a strong sour-sweet smell which has an aphrodisiac effect
on the young Macholes, producing violent reactions which have now become
completely ritualized.
The Macholes bear a close physical and cultural resemblance to the Huicholes,
who live on the eastern slopes of the Sierra. It is thought that the two tribes were
originally a single group and that they came to be divided by the misfortunes of
war at the time of the Spanish Conquest. The Huicholes are known for the march
of the peyoteros, an annual ritual the purpose of which is to gather peyote, a
mushroom rich in mescaline. It is not improbable that the march of the Macholes
to gather the T. odoratus has its origins in the famous march of the peyoteros, or
vice versa; the latter, incidentally, is the coveted goal of certain foreign devotees,
who arrive from all parts of the world during the short peyote season.
Some scholars are of the opinion that the behavior of the Macholes is not due to
emyphyllene at all, but rather to a phenomenon of collective suggestion arising
from cultural motives that assign a symbolic and almost tantric value and
meaning to the perfumed tiril. But Manchez, though admitting that the wax does
not appear to contain any known hallucinatory substances, not only attributes the
powerful aphrodisiac effect to it but also thinks that it provides the explanation
of a particular conundrum facing students of this plant: I refer to the fact that the
tirils allow themselves to be picked and carried away, even though during a very
brief period each year.
Be this as it may, on the first day of April the Macholes from the scattered
mountain communities, scarcely more than a hundred of them, gather in the
village of Taichatlpec-which consists of a dozen wretched hovels roughly
constructed of mud and cane-and there the march begins. The young women,
who have also come in from the other settlements, retire into the great
ceremonial hut known as the cheptol. This primicive gynaeceum, which is taboo
for men, is usually reserved for menstruants, women about to deliver, and the
young girls of the tribe for their initiation ceremonies. It stands about three
hundred meters from the cluster of hovels that is Taichatlpec. For this occasion
the young girls decorate the cheptol with tissue-paper streamers of many colors,
while the old women, in a ceremony that goes on for most of the night, shut the
door of the great hut and seal it from the outside with the gummy resin of the
manteca (buttertree). The Machole women remain sealed up in the cheptol for
three days, during the whole of the march of the tirilleros, and for all this time
they neither sleep nor eat. They sing in low voices almost ceaselessly and anoint
their bodies with the oily and pleasant-scented juice of the tlac fruit, a large
earthenware jar of which stands in the middle of the hut, which otherwise is
completely empty.
As soon as the first tiril is found in the shadow of an Olindus, the tirillerosbegin
a kind of march-cum-dance which gradually mounts to a frenetic rhythm and is
keat up nonstop for three days and nights. As the plants are picked they are
handed from one tirillero to another so that everyone can inhale the scent deeply.
At midday on the second day, when sexual excitement has reached a peak of
erotic hysteria, the men begin their journey back, still dancing, singing, and
calling on the god Aktapetl.
Holding the tirils high above their heads, they gather in front of the cheptol. At a
sign from the shaman, who alone has the divine authority to break the taboo, six
tirilleros known as "tlocoles" hack down the frail rush door with machetes, and
the horde of tirilleros pours into the cheptol. The orgy that follows may well last
as long as the march, for two or three days. It has been described by John
Meesters, perhaps the only traveler who has been present at this extraordinary
event, though even he observed it only through a chink in the back wall of the
cheptol.
Meesters arrived at Taichatlpec by chance, just as the tlocoles were on the point
of breaking down the door of the cheptol. He was accompanied by a young
Huichol Indian guide. Taking advantage of the excitement of the mob in front of
the cabin, Meesters succeeded in tethering his horses in a nearly wood and
hiding, with his young guide, at the back of the building. There they stayed for
most of the night, then made off before dawn for fear of being discovered. Until
sunset they could make out what was going on inside, if only rather vaguely,
since there was no light except the sunlight that came in through the small
doorway. Later on they were able only to hear the noise of body movements,
groans, and every now and then a collective chant.
The young Huichol, who had studied at the Indian Affairs Center at Guadalajara,
was later able to explain to the ethnologist the meaning of what he had
witnessed. He told him that the Macholes have a generally quiet family and
community life based, surprisingly enough, on monogamy but not on patriarchal
power. The function of the orgy caused by the Tirillus odoratus is that of
institutionalizing an occasion of total sexual promiscuity, and in such a way that
the children conceived during those days are not attributable to a specific father.
Instead, they grow up without the dominance of a father-owner end are lovingly
cared for by the whole community. In the Machole tribe this system has
eliminated not only the well-known neuroses due to father-son relationships, but
also inheritance and private property. This has happened also among the
Huicholes, but for quite different reasons.

Tirillus silvador
South of Lake Titicaca on the plateau of the western Cordilleras of Peru, where
our own domestic potato first grew, there are a number of plants which thrive in
spite of the altitude and are of prime importance to the diet of the Indians. Such
are the oca (Oxalis tuberosa), the ullucu (Ullucus tuberosus), and the quinoa
(Chenopodium quinoa). In the barren areas some hundreds of meters above the
natural limits of these plants there are patches of tirils, of the variety T. silvador,
which on account of their strange behavior have been attracting the attention of
scientists for some years.
In general appearance these Andean tirils are not very different from other
varieties recorded here and there in the remoter regions of the earth. Averaging
some twenty centimeters in height, they live pressed together in dense colonies.
Their color is that of the classic tiril: dark gray with bronze lights. They are
without scent and have not changed their distribution or habitat within human
memory. For some unknown atavistic reason the Indians do not touch them, and
even the llamas passing near them on their way from one pasture to another are
very careful not to step on them.
The extraordinary and so far unexplained feature of these little plants is that on
clear nights in January and February some of them seem to emit shrill whistling
sounds that are perfectly audible two or three hundred meters away. The sound is
similar to that of the song cricket native to the Cordilleras, and many Indians
believe that the crickets hide among the tirils. Their belief is strengthened by the
fact that, like the crickets song, the whistle of the tiril stops as soon as anyone
approaches the place where it seems to be coming from. But experiments have
shown that the cricket could not survive above 3,500 meters, while the tirils are
located at 5,000 meters above sea level, or even more. Jose Torres Lasuego of
the University of Chaluco, who has made a number of expeditions into the area,
has studied the problem thoroughly without being able to give any proper
explanation. Thousands of plants have been examined, but none has revealed
any morphological anomaly that might in any way allow for the production of
sound. The hypothesis of "draft strips," intermittent gusts of wind that cause
certain strategically placed plants to vibrate, seemed at first to have some
plausible basis, but careful experiments have shown it to be as unfounded as all
others. Torres put forward the idea that certain individual plants were gifted with
the ability to produce sound, and that this had the specific defensive function of
keeping the llamas away. He did in fact notice that when a llama approaches the
plants the whistling sound increases in pitch, while the animals, though skirting
the very edge of a bed of tirils, appear to take great care not to step on them.
However, it was later discovered that there was no connection between the two
phenomena. The length of the sound wave of the whistle of T. silvador was
found to be 12,000 melodin (A.S.I. system), while we know that the llama, like
others of the camel family, cannot pick up vibrations above 9,000 melodin.
Torres's team installed a series of minimicrophones along the edge of several tiril
beds and made many hours of recordings, which unfortunately have only
documentary value. However, this capable Peruvian scientist is said to be row
completing work on an instrument able to fix the exact point of emission of the
mysterious whistling sounds. He hopes that this may lead to the identification of
the plants responsible for the sounds, which is a necessary first step toward any
adequate explanation of the phenomenon.
The Aymara Indians, who are native to the Sierra, have numerous fables and
legends in which these whistling tirils figure as heroes. One of these in particular
is known throughout Peru in the form of a corrido (popular song), the origins of
which go back to the Spanish Conquest. Until a few years ago the words of the
song were attributed to Manuel Gonzales Prada (1848-99), the poet, essayist, and
radical philosopher, but the musicologist Jose Manuel Segura has traced a
manuscript dating from 1830, only six years after the Battle of Ayacucho
(December 1824) in which Captain Sucre, with the aid of Bolivar, ensured the
independence of Peru from the Spanish crown. The corrido tells the story of a
patrol of Spanish soldiers, under the command of the notorious Captain Malegro,
engaged in a search for Manolo Perchuc, a young Indian accused of having
killed a dozen conquistadores with his cachupote. The young man had hidden in
a cabin in the high Sierra, but he was betrayed by a jealous woman. One night
the Spanish patrol advanced cautiously upon the cabin, which happened to be
surrounded by patches of T. silvador. Suddenly, from every direction, came
piercing whistles. The Spaniards thought they had been caught in an ambush and
ran. Believing that the girl had betrayed them, they condemned her to death.

1. An American poet of the school gravitating around the City Lights Bookshop
in San Francisco. He has traveled widely in Central and South America
collecting drug-bearing plants. He has published a collection of poems and
stories (Pot and Peyote') and a short autobiographical novel (Who? Me?).

2. Roger Lamont-Paquit, French botanist, formerly lecturer in tropical botany at

Lyons University. Since 1971 he has devoted himself entirely to the discovery
and identification of parallel plants in South America.

THE WOODLAND TWEEZERS

The woodland tweezers, like the tirils, are social plants. They live in the shade of
the Manengo trees in the jungles of Indonesia, under the Kieselbaume of the
Black Forest and between the roots of the ben trees of Tetsugaharajima, in
colonies which sometimes exceed a hundred individual plants. The most casual
glance at these plants leaves no doubt as to how they got their name. (pl. XIII)
Two winglike leaves, much like those of the crassulae species of Sugartongs, are
symmetrically opposed in a gesture of rare elegance. With few exceptions, their
slightly rounded tips always curl outward. Less basic then the tirils, the
woodland tweezers are nevertheless fairly simple plants which in form have a
good deal in common with normal plants growing in the underbrush, and it is
only recently that botanists have become aware of their existence. As with many
other parallel plants, they cannot be moved from one place to another. They turn
to dust at the least contact with any object not native to their normal ecological
surroundings, and only in a few cases has it proved possible to encase them in
instant-drying polyephymerol. They are deep, dull black in color, rather like the
tirils, and in the underbrush they are often hard to see against the shadows of the
tree trunks. Sometimes this color is relieved by faint bronze lights due to the coat
of wax that veils the outer surface of the leaves.
Professor Uchigaki Sutekichi, who holds the chair of sociobotany at Tokyo
University, has published a number of papers on the supposed sociability of the
woodland tweezers and the tirils, putting forward ideas that at first might appear
arbitrary or even fantastic, but which are in fact worth serious consideration.
Uchigaki thinks that the distribution of the tweezers as we see it today is the
final result of an intricate series of maneuvers aimed at the conquest of territory,
and that these maneuvers bear the most extraordinary resemblance to the moves
of the game of Go. He says that the woodland tweezers were originally sprouts
from a complex rootstock that was interwoven with the roots of the ben tree, a
huge sper-matophyte which grows only in the forests of the island of
Tetsugaharajima. This rootstock was lice a subterranean mind, planning and
storing the program for the gradual future distribution of the shoots, putting the
program into action, and controlling its various phases. Strategic decisions which
obeyed exact orthogenetic laws, but which simulated a fierce struggle for
survival, led in the end to a kind of status quo, without winners or losers. Having
abandoned the illusion of self-determination and relinquished their fake
weapons, the individual plants ended by living a monotonous community life,
like aged veterans. It is in this last phase of the game that Uchigaki thinks he can
detect the moment of mutation to parallel botany. The exhaustion of the energies
which once promised to wrest from time and space some existential meaning for
the individual was consecrated in a collective immobilization. The fragile system
that had seemed to derive its ephemeral modes from the inevitably mistaken
answers to meaningless questions was thus replaced by the timeless certainties
which only a parallel condition could promise. Uchigaki traces what he takes to
be the history of a specific colony of tweezers, drawing a parallel with a famous
game of Go played many years ago by the two celebrated champions Sharaku
and Ugome.
Uchigaki's ingenious tour de force produced much excitement in Japanese
scientific circles, but do not fail to cause some perplexity among his Western
colleagues.
The game of Go was introduced into Japan by the Chinese legate Yen Ta-yao
during the Heiryu period, and more specifically in the reign of the Emperor
Shohei. It was soon taken up with enthusiasm by the Japanese aristocracy, and in
the course of time became the Japanese national game. Go is thought to be the
world's most ancient game, the invention of which is usually credited to the
Chinese emperor Shu, who reigned at the beginning of the third millennium
before Christ. It is said that he thought it up to stimulate the mind of his eldest
son Wing Wen, but it is a good deal more likely that the old monarch, by
studying the moves of the ishi, was attempting to give a form to the precepts of
the cult of Hsu-ch'uan,
 PL. XIII Woodland tweezers

of which he was a devoted adherent. According to the Hsu-ch'uan doctrine,

every action in life should consciously tend toward a moment of final stasis, the
so-called Ta-heng, which in the ritual wrestling known as Shou-hsi represents the
ultimate inextricable mutual immobilization of the wrestlers, the impasse at
which the resignation of the potential winner is in perfect balance with that of
the probable loser.
The Ta-heng can be arrived at by a process of meditation called Chen-szu-liang,
in which thought is represented by a pendulum which swings from question to
answer and from this, reformulated as a question, to a further answer or else to a
paralyzing series of choices of priority in the everyday acts of life. It was to shed
light on this second process, called Ta-ztang-hsi, that the emperor Shu is
supposed to have invented the rules of Go, in which Uchigaki thinks he has been
able to detect the sociobotanical structure of the colonies of woodland tweezers.
The game in fact consists of a number of strategic choices of position (moku),
the aim of which is to conquer territory on the Go board and to prevent one's
opponent from doing so. With incredible determination and patience, Uchigaki
compared the arrangement of the tweezers found by Sugino Kinichi a few years
previously in the forest of Owari with the final position, the Ta-heng, in a game
of Go, and by working backward went on to establish every move in the game.
Thus following the course of the game he was able to trace the sequence in
which the plants of the group had sprouted and to demonstrate that it had obeyed
precise rules which were very similar to those of Go and had a development
which, as he had suspected, was practically identical with the memorable match
played by Sharaku and Ugome (Figs. 15 and 16).
Uchigaki's insistence on the comparison between the distribution of the shoots in
the Owari group aid the moves in a particular game of Go clearly shows leanings
toward mystical and aesthetic aspirations which are quite alien to the Western
scientific mind. All the same, we are bound to admit that the idea of a generating
rootstock that creates and executes genetic programs has at least the merit of
originality. Further weight is added to the theory by the consideration, mentioned
by Uchigaki, that because plants cannot move around like animals their choice
of location is always definitive and must be the result of a strategy in which all
individual struggles have collective immobility as their final aim.
 Fig. 15 The Ta-heng position in a game of Go played by Sharaku and Ugome

A bronze facsimile of the Owari group of woodland tweezers may be seen in the
Imperial Natural History Museum in Tokyo. It forms the centerpiece in the
largest room in the new wing entirely devoted to parallel botany. Around it are
eight go ban made of icho (Salisburia adiantifolia): low tables with legs
fashioned in imitation of the fruit of the kuchinashi. Now, kuchinashi is the name
for Gardenia floribunda, but in Japanese it also means "mouthless," and is a
warning to the spectators to remain silent while the games of Go are in progress.
It is in the Tweezers Room in the Museum that the National Go Championships
have been played for the last few years, and it is by no means rare to see players,
dressed in the traditional kimono, repeating move for move the game that was
played thousands of years ago under the giant ben tree, and that in a final
botanical Ta-heng was miraculously preserved intact down to our own times.
 Fig. 16 The distribution of woodland tweezers at Owari

THE TUBOLARA
I have often mentioned the matterlessness of parallel plants, drawing attention
not only to their entire lack of organs but, also to the fact that they have no real
interior. Oskar Halbstein extends this notion, typical of parallel botany, to
everything in the world, observing that the interior of material objects is nothing
but a mental image, an idea. He pours out that when we cut something in two we
do not reveal its interior, as we set out to do, but rather two visible exteriors
which did not exist before. Repeating the action an infinite number of times, we
would merely produce an endless series of new exteriors. For Halbstein the
inside of things does not exist. It is a theoretical construct, a hypothesis which
we are forbidden to verify.
The interior of parallel plants, moreover, eludes even theoretical definition. As
we are concerned with a substance that is totally "other," that cannot be found in
nature, it is literally unthinkable. Halbstein speaks of it as being of a "blind
color," but to me it seems arbitrary and scientifically risky to draw even the most
openly poetic comparisons with the normal world. (pl. XIV)
The Tubolara, which for the most part are found on the Central Plateau of
Talistan in India, put the problem of the interior of parallel plants in a new and
rather different light. It concerns not so much their matterlessness as their form,
not so much the solid interior of their ambiguous substance as the hollow
exterior- which, in a sense, is the external limit of the interior of the plant.
Here then is the paradox of the Tubolara: two interiors, one of which in normal
terms would be its substance and which at bottom is responsible for its presence,
is imperceptible, while the one we

PL. XIX Tubolara

would normally be inclined to think of as nonexistent, the void contained by the

plant, is visible. The paradox is even greater when we think that the void within
the tube, the visible interior, has a very precise function: that of containing, like a
fragment of its own habitat, part of the environment in which the plant itself is
contained.
In the Tantra the Tubolara represents the coexistence in time and space of the
feminine and masculine principles.1 It is lingam (male organ) and yoni (vulva),
and as the physical union of man and woman it symbolizes the essence of
created things. In the temples of Talistan, along with the statues of Krishna and
Vishnu, we often see stylized representations of the Tubolara carved out of
stone. Before the great temple of Shalampur there is one that is seven meters
high, and as no one had ever been able to look at it from above it had for many
years been taken for a lingam. It was only recently that some workmen who had
climbed up to repair the temple roof were amazed to fine that the pillar was
hollow. As a result of this discovery, the ceremony of Kalata, which takes place
before the sowing of the seed and used to culminate in the decoration of the
supposed lingam, has had to be radically altered. At the end of the puja the
officiating guru now climbs a shaky bamboo ladder and drops rice and flowers
into the immense stone tube, the biggest Tubolara in the world.
In the jungles of Tampur in northern Rajastan there is a variety of
Tubolaraconsiderably smaller than that of Talistan. For the local inhabitants it is
taboo. Ramesh Sishtra thinks that this taboo originated in the belief that the
darkness inside the plants represents the dark night of death, populated by white
bats which seize the bodies of the dead in order to devour their intestines. This
talented Indian ethnologist supports his theory by pointing out that the Tubolara
of Tampur are favorite haunts of Qidoptera fenestralis, a tiny white moth which
can be vaguely seen fluttering in the darkness of the plants, transforming them
into an "other world" that is no less threatening for being so small.

1. Note suppressed.

THE CAMPORANA
The Camporana or kite-plant is known in different parts of the world under a
variety of names. In Ecuador it is called cuavenco, like the kite-hero of the
Aymol legend. In Haiti it is the leaf taihaque, a name of African origin. In
Dahomey and the Upper Volta, where it must have grown in great profusion until
the vast migrations of the Okuna (at which time it became parallel on pl. xv the
very verge of extinction), the Camporana is known in Fon and Korumba
mythology by the name of tiale.
The Camporana is a monofoliate plant consisting of two main parts: the
sheathed fustis and the limb. Two varieties are known, C. erecta and C.
reclinatus. The former stand upright in the earth, supported by the sheath around
the long stem, while the latter lie on the ground like a fallen leaf. In both types
the central vein of the leaf is simply a continuation of the stem, a large pedicel
which penetrates the limb, divides into two or three branches, and tapers away to
nothing toward the edge of the leaf. In the case of C. reclinatus it is especially
pronounced where the leaf rests on the earth, often presenting protuberances
known as "root bosses" which are, in fact, probably rudimentary roots. The limb
of the Camporana is usually reniform and is small in comparison with the stem.
From some distance away, the plant sometimes reminds us of the ceremonial
fans (flabella) which used to be placed on either side of the thrones of Eastern
potentates and that even today flank the Pope's gestatorial chair. The leaf itself is
thin only at the edges, which are often indented. It swells to considerable
thickness toward the middle, but thins down again in the immediate vicinity of
the central vein. James Forbes is of the opinion that before its parallelization the
swelling of the Camporana leaf contained a complete system of internal veins.
According to this English ethnologist, to whom we owe much of our knowledge
of the Camporana, the small excrescences visible on the leaf bear witness to an
unsuccessful attempt by the vein system to become external.
 PL. XV Camporana

The overall height of the Camporana varies from 35 to 190 centimeters, but
specimens of C. Reclinatus seldom exceed a meter. During an expedition in the
Upper Volta, Forbes succeeded in photographing one 135 centimeters high in
which the outlines of a face had been cut. The plant was at least seven hundred
years old, and from the local Korumba tribe Forbes heard several legends that
appeared to confirm his hypothesis that it exercised a totemistic function.
Of particular interest is the cosmogenetic myth of the tiale which tells of a tree
that grew near the source of the River Dwon. This tree had thirty-seven huge
leaves, and belonged to the Leopard. Now there was nothing more precious in
the whole world, for the Leopard had only to touch one of the leaves with his
tongue and whatever he wished for would appear by magic. Over the years the
Leopard had wished for Moibu, the snake who is coiled round all the islands,
and the clouds that give rain, and the turtles of the earth, and even Keple the
great spider. But the Leopard was old, and one day he felt death approaching.
What was he to do with his tree? He went to ask advice from Tok the Hare, who
could talk better than other animals because of the split in his lip. "What should I
do with the tiale?" he asked. Tok advised the Leopard to give it to his sons
before he died. But the Leopard asked: "How can I divide the leaves between my
twelve sons?" "Kill one of your sons, or two or three," replied Tok, "until you
can divide the leaves equally among those that remain." But the Leopard redized
that this was not possible: he did not succeed in dividing the thirty-seven leaves
by any number whatsoever. He asked advice from the Ant, but the Ant could not
find an answer. He asked the Turtle, and Twembo the Serpent, and even the God
Nawaki, but none of them could find an answer. Then the Leopard went to Tso
the Caterpillar, and Tso said: "Take me to the tree tiale." He climbed onto the
Leopard's tail and was carried there. He set to work at once and ate one leaf.1
Now the Leopard could give three leaves to each of his sons and die in peace.
Tso the Caterpillar went down to the River Dwon and there he excreted the
remains of the tiale leaf. When the river saw the excretion it licked it with a
wavelet, and lo, in the midst of the waters there was a canoe, and in the canoe
were Kwep and Lamu, and from them sprang all the sons of the Korumba
people.
James Forbes, whose great love is botany but who is by profession an
ethnologist, has made an interesting observation on this myth, which is the origin
of the totem tiale. "It is no mere coincidence," he says, "that the myth is based
on a prime number, which is a fairly sophisticated concept. Of all African
peoples, the Korumba are the best versed in arithmetic, as can be seen from their
game of twam-ha-rd, which is played with a hundred and eight pebbles, each
with a different numerical value."
African mythology has survived in the voodoo cults of the black tribes of
Central America and Brazil. In Haiti and elsewhere in the West Indies, where the
myths of the Ivory Coast have been preserved with greater purity, the tree
taihaque figures as the divine instrument for the creation of all living things.
According to legend, this immense tree stood on the cloud called Waiko and
bore fruit containing the plants and animals, the fishes and the birds, the turtles,
and also man and woman. When the God Nyambe had finished making the great
ocean, and all the islands that float in it, according to the Haitian legend, he
shook the taihaque with mighty strength and the ripe fruits fell to earth and split
open, setting free the creatures who had matured inside them. When all the fruits
had fallen, Nyambe took it into his head to send the angels to inspect the results
of his work. He put each of them on a leaf and shook the tree once more. The
leaves fluttered earthward like so many butterflies. The angels made sure that all
was well, but when they were about to return into the heavens men begged
Nyambe to let the angels stay with them. The God allowed the twelve angels to
remain on earth and watch over the happiness of men. The angels planted their
leaves stem downwards in the earth, to keep them alive in case Nyambe should
ever recall them to heaven. When white men came with guns and forced the
Wafonga people into slavery, Nyambe recalled the angels to his side. On Mount
Wabika in Dahomey there are twelve holes: they were left by the angels when
they tore up the taihaque leaves from the ground.
In his book on African myths published more than thirty years before the
discovery of parallel botany, Vobenius sees the taihaque leaf as a huge
monofoliar plant which actually existed in Dahomey and probably became
extinct in the middle of the seventeenth century, at the time of the worst
incirsions of the French slave-traders.
He could not have known the true nature of the plant, but he guessed at its
exceptional importance, and thought it possible that the voodoo version of the
ancient myth represented, in its conclusion, the destruction of the African cult
objects by the French. Uncertain whether to accept the hypothesis of a real plant
or that of a cult object, the great German ethnologist unknowingly touched the
fringes of the new botany and even appeared, though only in an ethnological
context, to recognize the Camporana africana.
 Fig. 17 The behin of Fra Girolimo di Gusme, from a contemporary print

The distribution of the "root bosses" on the leaf of the Camporana was studied
by medieval alchemists and sorcerers. It is from their writings, which are
sometimes extremely enigmatic, that we learn of the existence of the plant in not
so remote times. In the Ziharmi we read: "All things come to pass down there as
they do up here. The figures formed by stars and planets reveal things hidden
and mysteries most profound. In the selfsame way on the skin of the behin leaf
there are bosses which are the stars of the plant." The sorcerers examined
thousands and thousands of leaves in the hope of prophetic signs, and wandered
endlessly through the forests in search of the legendary leaf. Fra Girolamo di
Gusme, alchemist and teacher of celestial sciences, left us a series of diagrams
illustrating the spots of the leopard and the distribution of moles on the human
body. Among them, however, is a drawing of a leaf that is without the least
doubt a Camporana (Fig. 17). In it the position of the bosses is shown in relation
to the heavens and to the signs of the Zodiac. "He who finds the behin may learn
his own fate," declares Fra Girolamo, adding that according to whether the
bosses are on the right or the left of the leaf they refer to good and lucky events
or to bad and unlucky ones. What the worthy Friar neglected to tell us is which
is the front of the leaf and which is the back, so that we can never be sure of
knowing the right from the left. A further complication is that when the
woodcuts were printed from the original drawings they were in ill probability
reversed, though we are not one hundred percent certain of this. It therefore
comes about that in the unlikely event of anyone stumbling across a behin leaf in
some distant forest, we can at least be sure that knowledge of his fate and future
would fortunately be denied him.
In the Jardins Publiques of Ouagadougou, capital of the one-time French colony
of Upper Volta, there is a marvelous little octagonal cast-iron conservatory
attributed to Eiffel. The decoration was added later, during the art nouveau
period, and the intricate floral motifs so typical of this style interweave with the
real plants visible through the dusty panes of glass.
 PL. XVI Camporana menorea

In this conservatory are all sorts of plants typical of the hinterland of the Ivory
Coast, and especially those which grow along the three upper branches of the
River Volta-the Black, the Red and White, and the Oti. In one corner there is a
group of bronzes donated to the colony in 1908 by Jean Philippe Audois,
governor of the territories which now form the state of Togo. Audois, who like
many French bureaucrats of the time was also a naturalist and a fairly good
minor poet, wrote of the "anciennes audaces de plantes solitaires / negres
botaniques d'herbaires silencieux / noyes dans le temps d'un fleuve phantom."
The words ancient, solitary, black, silent, and phantom form a verbal chain
which leaves no doubt that the plants he was describing were parallel plants
which centuries before had flourished along the banks of the great African river.
The bronzes on show in the conservatory are nine in number. Five of them
represent Camporana, found in the region, known to the indigenous tribes as
tiale or keletia. Of the other four, three are plants belonging to normal botany
while the fourth cannot with certainty be assigned to either realm. Some experts
think that this fourth plant is a Sigurya, but the specimen does not have a
sufficient number of pendulants to justify this hypothesis. At the same time the
plant does present a number of features which would be decidedly abnormal in
the general run of tropical plants. The five Camporana represent all the erect
varieties known to us. Two of them are nearly two meters tall, and have a rather
irregular distribution of the bosses. One of them is simply a miniature variety of
the larger ones, with almost identical proportions. Of the remaining two bronzes
one represents C. menorea, the name of which derives (pl. XVI) partly from its
smaller size (Lat. minus less) and partly from its marked resemblance to the
menorah, the seven-branched candlestick used in Jewish worship (the name was
in fact conferred on it by the Israeli naturalist Ismael Brodsky).2 The other
bronze is a typical specimen of the small Camporana "For Grace Received,"
thus baptized by the sisters of the Tuogoho Mission, on account of its
approximate heart shape. The good sisters, who did not think twice about
compromising with the animistic cults of the local population, invented a story
which culminated in a miracle worked by San Trino of Montassano, whose
prayers succeeded in changing a poisonous plant responsible for the deaths of
thirty children-the terrible Fuahamec3-into a harmless plant which by dint of the
miracle took on the form of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

1. The number of leaves left on the tiale (36) and its multiples figure widely in
the magic and mythology of ancient and primitive peoples. Thirty-six is the
number of "Cosmic Solidarity," it is the "Grand Total" of the Chinese and the
"Divine Year" of the Hindus. The numbers 36, 72 and 108 are favorites with
secret societies, 36 being the number of the sky, 72 of the earth and 108 of man.
There are 108 columns in the Temple of Ourga and 108 towers in Pnom
Bakheng and Angkor. It is one of the symbolic numbers of Tantrism. According
to Maspero, 72 and 108 divided by two give the astronomical coordinates of
Loyang, the ancient Chinese Imperial capital.
2. Unlike the ritual candlestick, the seven "arms" of C. menorea are joined
together to form one body, while at the top of each there is a small depression
holding a paramimetic "seed" similar to those of the Giraluna.

3. A deadly poisonous plant similar to Tahana fremens. The Tuogoho fear its
traitorous perfume, which if inhaled even briefly can cause death. They call it
the Flower of Hua. In their mythology Hua is a devil with a thousand heads, and
in each head a different cnel thought.

THE PROTORBIS
Above an Empire chaise lounge in the Gilded Room of the Chateau Nouilly at
Vincennes there is a large painting by Gerard Melies, a hack painter, cousin of
the great film-maker, who enjoyed a certain notoriety in Parisian artistic circles
at the end of the last century. It is a portrait of the grandmother of the present
Countess AmanAine. While the figure of the lady herself is painted realistically,
in a manner faintly reminiscent of the style of David, the background reveals a
temperament which perhaps at certain other times in the history of taste might
have found expression in a certain lyrical plan. It shows a vast sweep of
landscape, with bleak mountains huddled fearfully beneath the gathering storm
clouds. In the narrow valleys there are black cypresses, while here and there on
the rugged horizon is the silhouette of a distorted oak tree.
But in fact this is not the landscape it appears to be at first sight. Instead it is a
still life, a heap of unusual plant shapes, forms intermediate between a
mushroom and a potato, from which sprout a few leaves like those of parsley or
celery.
The type of ambiguous play; the gambit that enables the spectator to transform
the landscape into a still life and vice versa, takes one completely by surprise: it
reveals that hereditary stroke of genius that like a leaf of an unimagined color
buds forth from time to time on the family tree of the Melies'. But if the
importance of this extraordinary picture stopped here we might be justified in
taking it for the mere whim of a gifted but somewhat bizarre temperament. Its
importance lies elsewhere, and it is only recently that we have been able to
perceive its true extent.
The mushrooms lying scattered on the outspread green cloth, which in the
"landscape" we see as an undulating green meadow in the midst of bleak
mountains, are in fact a number of Protorbis foetida which Melies, a restless
soul and tireless traveler, brought back from Asia Minor where he had gone on
an expedition with his biologist friend Jean Entigas. Melies was a man of
revolutionary tendencies who did not hesitate to accept commissions from the
richer echelons of the Parisian bourgeoisie, people who while not wishing in the
least to accept any ideological discipline were fond of adorning their evenings
with some of the more eccentric members of the intellectual elite. It was perhaps
to unburden a certain sense of guilt that the painter invented this trompe Voeil,
being absolutely certain that the plants were so rare that no one would ever
realize his act of provocation, which in any case was in poor taste and of small
political significance.
And so things stood until 1935, when Professor Pierre-Paul Dumasque, a
childhood friend of the Nouilly family, recognized that fantastic landscape as an
important group of parallel plants. The circumstances leading up to the discovery
of these Protorbis in Persia are not altogether clear, nor do we know why they
remained in the possession of Melies. The fact that Jean Entigas was a keen
collector of his friend's work suggests that the mysterious tubers might have
been given to the painter in exchange for one of his pictures. We have since
learned that Melies kept them in a transparent case, like a fish tank covered with
a sheet of glass, along with a thousand other useless trifles he had brought back
from his travels, and which lay piled and stacked on the shelves and all other
available surfaces in his studio.
After the death of Melies his sister Melinde inherited all this bric-a-brac.
Dumasque, spurred on by his discovery of the meaning of the picture, made
tireless investigations which led him eventually to a son of Melinde's, a doctor in
Arbieres (Indre-et-Loire) who had in his turn inherited this weird collection. It
was not hard to persuade the doctor to donate the fish tank and its mysterious
inhabitants, which in all these years had not shown the least sign of
deterioration, to the Parallel Botany Laboratory of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris,
where both Dumasque and Gismonde Pascain were able to study them at their
leisure. The results of their researches were later published in a special issue of
The Journal of Parallel Botany (October 1974) under the rather gimmicky title,
"Protorbis -a parallel mushroom?"
If we are today in possession of those basic items of knowledge that enable us to
carry on our study of parallel phenomena, we owe this in good part to the chance
discovery of this picture by Melies. But more important in the long run was the
wise and patient research which enabled the two French scientists to define the
true nature of Protorbis, which is indeed anomalous and bizarre in the extreme.
(pl. XVII)
The Protorbis, of which P. foetida is only one variety, has doubtless some points
of resemblance to the mushroom family. These include form, color, and opacity.
What distinguishes Protorbis from its cousins on the other side of the hedge is
the irregularity of its outlines and the very massiveness of the testula which is
less like the cap of a mushroom than like some vast black truffle. The
importance of Protorbis lies in its lack of precise dimensions. It can be of any
size, from the infinitely small to the infinitely large, a respect in which it reminds
us of the first flora ever to exist, which in its perfect transparency was absolutely
invisible and therefore not subject in any way to the concept of dimension. It is
generally thought, in fact, that Protorbis, along with the tiril, is among the
earliest of parallel plants. Certain specimens in the deserts of New Mexico and
Arizona, referred to by Entigas, are as big as the nearby mesas, and are indeed
often mistaken for these hills, with their flat tops, in spite of the differences in
form and matter. Protorbis is in fact composed of a substance which has only
superficially the aspect of stone. If it is struck with a normal geological hammer
it emits a high-pitched metallic sound totally at variance with its heavy and
opaque appearance. The matterlessness which is attributed to the greater number
of parallel plants must in the case of Protorbis be seen in a different light and
completely redefined. In the sense of a material without any verifiable interior,
of regular density and lacking any measurable specific gravity, we can still speak
of matterlessness or nonsubstantiality. But at the same time anyone not versed in
the ways of parallel botany might see or touch the plant and pronounce it-
according to its size-to be a large hill or a virtually shapeless metal object.
Apart from P. minor, which disintegrates instantly at the least touch of a hand
into the merest pinch of white powder, all specimens of Protorbis may be
transported (size permitting), while their conservation requires no special
techniques or environmental conditions.
 PL. XVII Protorbis

Dumasque lists seven varieties of Protorbis, divided chiefly by difference in

size. These are: the Colorado Protorbis; P. foetida; P. minor; the Katachek
Protorbis; P.bisecta; P. inopsa; and P. torbis. This classification, which is now
accepted by all scholars, was initially much criticized. And it seems to me that
the critics had a good point. How can a plant which has no fixed dimensions, for
which any size at all is theoretically possible, be divided into seven varieties by a
criterion based primarily on size? Except for P. minor, a special case owing to its
unique properties, this arbitrary division seems to conceal the most salient
feature of the species: the way it varies from one plant to another, so that each
individual is practically a species of its own, a never-to-be-repeated freak.
Furthermore the shape of the Protorbis is less constant and conforming than that
of other plants, a fact which in itself makes a general description more difficult.
Such plant has not only its own individual size, but also a shape of its own.
Some of the Protorbis of Colorado and New Mexico, which stand in the desert
shoulder to shoulder with the mesas, have trunks nearly as broad as the testula
itself. In shape they are virtually cylindrical, and quite indistinguishable from the
surrounding hills. In other cases, such as the Protorbis of Kamanchistan,
discovered by Kowolski's son, the trunk is no bigger than that of an oak.
In nearly all known specimens the testula is rounded and smooth. It is in fact
rather like the top of a human skull, or reminiscent of the cap of a mushroom
except in respect to its size and color. In the tundra of Katachek, in the course of
a journey through Siberia and in the vicinity of the Chinese frontier, Dumasque
came across a specimen of Protorbis with a testula covered with protuberances
similar to tirils. At first sight he took these for parasitic growths, but closer
examination revealed that they were integral parts of the plant, "almost as if by
this morphological anomaly it wished to voice a protest against its leaden
immobility, a rebellion against its own amorphous and blutish appearance, by
making a desperate attempt at flight toward the lightness and elegance of aerial
things."1 Now known as fee Katachek Protorbis, it has entered the catalogue of
parallel botany as an anomalous variety, but it is not impossible that it is the only
known example of a different species altogether, with only a few tenuous
analogies with Protorbis. (pl. XVIII)
The Indian P. minor, which exists in relative abundance in the jungles of Jandur
and on the Tampala Mountains, is no bigger than a mushroom. It was the
Middleton expedition which first used steophytirol to encase these plants, which
are usually untouchable. Those they brought back are now on display in their
little plastic cubes in the Parallel Botany room of the Birmingham Natural
History Museum. Some might express surprise that Birmingham, one of the
major industrial centers of Great Britain but certainly no intellectual Mecca, has
one of the most important and complete collections of parallel plants in the
world. However, we must bear in mind that the coal beds of the area long ago
made Birmingham a great steel town, and it is only logical that economic interest
in the natural resources that lay just under the surface of the earth should involve
those sciences which were also developing dramatically during the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries and were closely linked with the impetuous advance of
technology during the Industrial Revolution. The discovery of important beds of
fossils encouraged paleontological research in the region, and these in turn
attracted zoologists, botanists, and, ultimately, students of parabotany such as
Wells and Joseph Middleton. The cultural development of the city, of course, did
not stop there, and Birmingham acquired a great university, municipal art
gallery; and symphony orchestra.
Even in early days a number of rich industrialists became aware that their
economic wonders, performed at the expense of the working (or rather, toiling)
classes, were causing increasing resentment, and they realized that among the
intellectual elite of the country their persons were looked upon with no great
sympathy. They therefore sought for ways to attach their names to enterprises of
high cultural and moral prestige which at the same time were not too remote
from their immediate sphere of interest.
The idea of an important museum of natural history specializing in the
subterranean sciences was suggested in 1896 by Sir Oswald Otterton at a historic
meeting of the Carbon Club, and a few years later it was an established fad.
Generous bequests were remembered by a supposedly grateful public on the
commemorative plaques that line the entrances to each room. The Parallel
Botany Room was originally financed by Sir Jonathan Hoverley, and he is duly
immortalized on a vast sheet of black marble.
 Табл. XVIII Катачекский Protorbis

The room is appropriately grand, measuring about ten meters by five; on one
side are two great windows overlooking the park, where trees of every known
species, each bearing its name and title, are frozen as if on a grass-covered stage
in the midst of a botanical comedy by Samuel Beckett. In comparison, the
parallel plants arranged along the other walls and in the three central showcases
seem, by some magical chance, to have found their natural environment. Perhaps
this is because the context is so obviously that of a museum, slightly outside of
time and isolated from the vulgar bustle of the world. Outstanding in size are the
great Camporana leaf, three meters high, which dominates the room from the
center of the long wall; the model of Giraluna gigas, a bronze copy of the
smallest plant in the Lady Isobel Middleton group, which was donated to the
museum by Maessens, who directed the reconstruction of the group (now in the
British Museum); and the three so-called trunk Solea, on loan from the
Laboratorio delle Campora.
The showcase nearest the entrance contains a heterogeneous collection of
important documents, including the famous letter of Jacopo della Barcaccia
(donated by the Italian government), Malguena's notes on the Sigurya, the
camera with the polyephymerol lens that enabled Norton to photograph the
Tampala Giraluna, and a small sculpture by Arp which is identical with the
plaster model of the Artisia on display beside it. The showcase at the far end
contains fragments of fossils, concretions and impressions, as well as a small
collection of seeds, fruits, fragments of pseudo-bark and other paramimetic
objects donated by Sir John Everston.
The central showcase, larger than the others, houses no less a treasure than the
Protorbis minor from the Middleton expedition. It is equipped with a special
lighting system designed to display the three-dimensionality of the plants, for in
normal lighting, stuck in their plastic cubes, they tend to lose that appearance of
weightiness characteristic of all the Protorbis varieties. The collection consists
of twelve very similar specimens, nearly all in a perfect state of inclusion.
A particularly beautiful specimen is the one which Lady Isobel Middleton
christened "Beginner's Luck," because it was the first she found. The overall
height is eight centimeters and the testula is rather irregular, with a diameter
roughly equal to the height of the plant. Its black color is definitely blacker than
that of any of the other specimens in the showcase. The plant gives the
impression of hugging blackness to it, like the night which once hid it and which
still clings to it like an opaque skin
This indefinable blackness of the Protorbis, and especially of the Birmingham P.
minor, provided one of the most interesting and original features of a lecture
given by Norton at the Carbon Club and published in part in the annual
Proceedings of the Club. For Norton, the black of P. minor is the ne plus ultra of
the color of parallel plants. To perceive it in its fullness and to glimpse the
significance of it we must look closely at our whole relationship with the inside
of things. "We deny," said Norton, "that there is a difference between internal
and external landscape, and we tend to transfer to the inside of things their solar
skin, just as it is, without change, absurdly illuminated by a nonexistent light.
Thus we imagine the inside of our bodies: a many-colored landscape in which
blood-red and bile-green mingle on a palette that is only too familiar. We have
only to suspect that there might be a black organ to realize that Satan has
possessed us and that only the most strenuous exorcism will ever bring the light
of day back into our vitals. While anyone who sees the inside of things as an
impenetrable darkness runs the risk of being diagnosed as an incurable
depressive, if anything, our real neurosis consists in our lack of ability to see and
accept things as they actually are."
Norton goes on to tell how when he was in India he learned to think of the inside
of things without doing violence to their integrity, just as he managed to think of
his own most precious organs, lungs, heart and liver, as black flesh immersed in
the utter blackness of his body, and to derive no feelings of discomfort from the
thought. And then, one day, he suddenly understood the blackness of Protorbis.
"It is logical enough," he wrote, "that plants which have no real and proper
internal substance, but only an existential continuum circumscribed by its own
formal exhaustion, should not have an exterior like that of the other things of the
earth. The outside which we see in their case is not a kind of wrapper that
contains, conceals and protects nonexistent lights and colors, but merely the
visible limit of their internal darkness. They present themselves to us in all their
utter nakedness, showing us exactly what they really are."
The Amished people of Tampala are perfectly familiar with P. minor, which they
call bahan. An English officer stationed in the area not long after the First World
War, a certain Major James Ronaldson, became interested in their ethnological
problems and has left us an enlightening document on a number of local legends
in which the bahan figures explicitly. In those days no European had ever seen
the plant, and even Ronaldson was convinced that it was an imaginary plant, the
fruit of the folk imagination. But many years later he happened to stumple across
the Proceedings of the Carbon Club, and had no difficulty in identifying the
plant described by Norton as the legendary bahan. Although by then over eighty,
Major Ronaldson got in touch with the well-known botanist-photographer and
sent him his account of the legends of Tampala. The two later met at Bensington
in Kent, and fragments of the conversation that took place in the cottage garden
under the great weeping willow which Major Ronaldson, an inveterate punster,
liked to refer to as his "weeping widow," were published as a long appendix to
the Annals of the Birmingham Museum of Natural History in 1974.
Of the legends recounted by Ronaldson, the most interesting is the one most
explicitly concerned with P. minor. Here it is in full:
 NANDI AND THE NIGHT

Every spring Lord Krishna used to come down from the mountains to graze
his calf Nandi2 in the green meadows of the Andrapati valley. But one day,
though the sun shone hot in the sky, he found the meadows still covered
with snow. When night fell Nandi wept and said to Krishna: "My lord, I am
hungry. Make the snow melt and the grass grow so that I may eat, and grow
strong, and be happy."
So Krishna went to visit the Night, and said: "Nandi is hungry. Make the
snow melt and the grass grow." But the Night answered: "Krishna, I am
only the Night. I cannot melt the snow." Then Krishna said, "Tell the sun to
melt the snow." But the Night answered, "I am only the Night. I cannot
command the sun." When Krishna heard these words he grew angry and
said, "Then I will take a piece of you to feed Nandi, who is hungry." And so
he did. He brandished his great sword in the sky and a piece of the Night
fell broken at his feet. Lord Krishna gathered up the bits and took them to
Nandi. Nandi ate what Krishna had brought him, and when he was satisfied
looked up at the sky and said, "Lord Krishna, you have made a hole in the
heavens." And Krishna answered and told him, "It is the moon." So Nandi
slept. When he awoke at dawn the snow had melted and the fields were
green. For three days Krishna grazed his calf in the valley. Then the bird
Vardatur came and carried Krishna and Nandi away. The crumbs from the
piece of the Night remained, scattered under the great genensa trees. They
are called "bahan" and they cannot be touched, for they are the food of
Nandi the sacred calf of Krishna. If they chance to be touched by hand they
will turn back into sky and fill the hole in the Night, and in this way the
moon will disappear forever.

This legend is the clearest proof that the bahan of the Amished tribesmen is
nothing other than the Protorbis minor discovered by Lady Middleton. The
mention of the valley of the Andrapati and the forest of genensa trees, the
description of the black-as-night color of the plants and their curious refusal to
be touched, all these leave us in absolutely no doubt about it. It remains for us to
find out when the legend originated. Ramesh Drapavati, Professor of Sanskrit at
the University of Baroda, and a specialist in the Vadrahana, attributes the story
in its present form to the Pachinah period, but does not rule out that it might be
much older, perhaps even dating from the age of Akda. Such an attribution
would confirm the hypothesis put forward by Maessens, according to which the
Protorbis, along with the humble tiril, is amonig the first parallel plants of the
earth.
The compact rudimentary form of both these species displays a fairly low level
of plantness which nevertheless, in its bewildering immobility charged with
frustrated violence, formed a prelude to the vegetable kingdom that thousands of
years later was to alight softly on the black soil of our consciousness.

1. Pierre-Paul Dumasque, "La Protorbis de Katachek" (Journal des Sciences

Biologiques, December 1969).

2. In official Hindu mythology, unlike what we find in this legend, Nandi is

Shiva's bullock.

CONTENTS
PART ONE: INTRODUCTION 1
General Introduction 3
Origins 20
Morphology 35

PART TWO: THE PLANTS 57

The Tirillus 59
Tirillus oniricus 62
Tirillus mimeticus 64
Tirillus parasiticus 67
Tirillus odoratus 68
Tirillus silvador 70
The Woodland Tweezers 73
The Tubolara 78
The Camporana 80
The Protorbis 86
The Labirintiana 95
The Artisia 100
The Germinants 112
The Stranglers 117
The Giraluna 119
Giraluna gigas 134
Giraluna minor 1 43
 The Solea 145
The Sigurya 162

PART THREE: EPILOGUE 171

The Gift of Thaumas 173
Notes 178
THE LABIRINTIANA
Divided as it is into trunk, branches, and leaves, the Labirintiana labirintiana is,
one of the few parallel plants to resemble a tree. The trunk and branches are
covered with paramimetic bark, and to the untrained eye present nothing of
interest but the vaporous layer that surrounds them. This layer is only a few
millimeters thick and is scarcely visible at all in full daylight, though it can be
discerned easily enough at dusk and dawn. It has been studied by Hermann
Thalenblatt, who has found that it contains a small percentage of halomycilin in
atrostatic suspension. This gas is harmless to human beings, but might initially
have had some toxic effects, either destroying or discouraging the insects and
small rodents that at one time threatened the bark of the plant. This halomycilin,
which in itself is not visible to the naked eye, can in some circumstances
increase the visibility of the aqueous vapor in which it is suspended, making it
denser, more opaque, and more inclined to adhere to the objects which it
surrounds. Thalenblatt has been able to establish that if the vapor layer is
removed from the trunk and branches of L. labirintiana, these show no visible
sign of change and even the degree of external humidity does not register any
noteworthy variation.
L. labirintiana is not the only parallel plant which has vaporized parts. The
Salense paludosis, for example, is completely enclosed in a pale violet-colored
vapor, while certain Tubolara have a gas inside the tubola itself. This gas is
similar in composition to halomycilin, but its toxic count is zero.
(pl. XIX) L. labirintiana is of scientific interest chiefly because of the particular
morphology of the leaves and the ecological consequences that derive from it.
This small tree seldom exceeds two meters in height, and takes its name from the
characteristic design of the large, rather elongated hstaloform leaves. The
structure of the veins is not symmetrical, as in the other Labirintiana, but is in
the form of a maze. This odd feature, unique in either branch of botany, has
precise ecological functions, and in parallel flora as a whole constitutes a rare
case of morphological development quite distinct from the function of self-
presentation. The maze possesses the quality almost of an external organ, even
though in fact it is only a particular arrangement of the veins.
The studies carried out by Mastolitz seem to suggest that before parallelization
the maze on the leaves of L. labirintiana acted to keep down the population of
antaphid ants, a race of herbivorous ants of the late Erocene era. At that time the
Labirintiana was distributed fairly widely in Central Africa, and these ants
threatened to destroy not only this plant but all African plant life. The antaphid,
now luckily extinct, had a practically insatiable appetite, and was capable of
devouring vegetable matter at the rate of a hundred and twenty times its own
body weight each day. If we add to this the fact that its fertility rate was among
the highest ever recorded, it is not hard to understand how the plants were
forced, by means of rapid adaptive mutations, to invent efficient defensive
measures. The mutation that altered the leaves of Labirintiana could be said to
have saved plant life in the dark continent at the eleventh hour.
The features that this plant developed were two in number: a scent which proved
an irresistible attraction to the ants, luring them away from other and frailer
species, and the maze itself, which in the course of a few centuries succeeded in
completely reversing the birth-death ratio of these voracious and prolific insects.
The antaphid ant, which has survived in some parts of Africa in a few innocuous
varieties which bear the strongest resemblance to normal ants (Prenolepis
imparis), lived in vast communities with highly evolved social structures. The
various functions required for survival (the building of enornous nests,
procreation, nutrition, etc.) were carried on by clearly differentiated castes.
 PL. XIX Leaf of Labirintiana labirintiana

The builder ants (Fig. 18c), larger than the others, but with a relatively small
abdomen, built extraordinary "forts" up to fifteen meters high which were in fact
nests with circular bases (Fig. 18d). Five or six of these prodigious structures
would usually be grouped together. Inside these nests the tunnels and "halls"
formed a topology of the greatest intricacy. In Mali there still exist several
groups of these forts, now inhabited by wasps of the family Aligastorae. Because
of the rounded rooftops which can be seen above the trees they are often
mistaken for Dogon villages. Hard as stone, they have resisted the ravages of
time. The builder ants, in fact, had a gland which secreted a gummy liquid,
known as cementine, which on contact with the silicates of the earth produced a
cement-like substance of great cohesion, practically indestructible.
The copulator ants (Fig. 18a) were similar to the builders, but were without even
the most rudimentary organs of sight. However, they were equipped with sexual
organs capable of an uninterrupted flow of spermatazoa. They lived in round
chambers with slightly "vaulted" roofs in the "halls" of the nest, together with
the queen ants (Fig. 18a), of which there could be as many as a thousand for
each community. Continually stimulated and fertilized by the copulator ants, the
queens alternated between copulation and the laying of eggs, which in the course
of a single day could run into millions.
In proportion to the rest of their bodies the queens had an enormous abdomen
which, like those of various termites, often reached a length of some thirty
centimeters and a diameter of five centimeters,1 and frequently lay coiled around
the walls of the "halls." When emptied of eggs, this enormous organ partly
shrank, leaving a long tube capable of peristaltic movement which conducted the
sperm of the copulators to the inside of the reproductive apparatus properly so
called.
But the most interesting caste among the antaphids was surely the eater ants
(Fig. 18b). They were equipped with incredibly strong mandibles capable of
chewing the vegetable matter on which they fed at a speed unequaled anywhere
in the animal kingdom. They had two digestive systems, one of which was
normal, of modest size and complexity, for their own nutrition, while a second,
lateral system had the function of transforming the original nutritive substances
into others readily absorbed by the builders, copulators, and queens. The eater
ants were particularly fond of the tender fat leaves of the Labirintiana so that the
monstrous voracity and prodigious increase in population of these insects put the
survival of the plant in serious jeopardy. This led to the ingenious and rather
quick mutation of the veining on the huge leaves of the Labirintiana, which thus
changed its normal bilateral symmetry to the form of a maze.
 Fig. 18 Antaphid ants: (a) queen and copulator; (b) eater; (c)
builder; (d) ant "forts"

In the center of the leaf there developed an "alluring" organ which gave off a
sweetish odor designed to attract the ants and stimulate their already insatiable
appetites.
The antaphids, who like all ants moved along routes generally dictated by
environmental conditions, attempted frantically to reach the source of
enticement. Running up and down the grooves between the veins they became
increasingly neurotic as this apparently simple task came to seem impossible.
Every leaf was black with ants thrusting each other aside, climbing over each
other, and often killing each other in the grip of a collective frenzy. But what
really saved the plants was the fact that the eater ants, in their useless race to
gain the middle of the leaf, ate less and less. It thus happened that the builders,
and even more the copulators and the queens, who depended on the eaters for all
their nourishment, grew weaker little by little and lost the urge for reproduction.
In the course of a few decades, mortality began to exceed the birth rate, and in a
few centuries the antaphid was extinct. Mastolitz thinks that it was not long after
this, and maybe on account of its dramatic victory in the fight for survival, with
its competitive drive exhausted by the bitter struggle of evolution, that the plant
stood still in time to join that parallel vegetable kingdom in which, with neither
growth nor decay, it could maintain its ingenious morphological solutions intact.
In Mali, especially near the villages of Tieple and Foulan, it is not hard to find
fossils of the leaves of L. labirintiana. Anyone who has traveled in that region
will remember how the roads through the tropical forest of Dangma ere lined
with Dogon boys selling what they call libi labiliu to the occasional passersby.
Usually these are rough clay copies of a number of impressions taken a few
years ago by Tassan and Molheim, and left behind when they went home. The
Dogon tribe use the design of L. labirintiana for a game, which they call labi-
labi. They trace the shape, much enlarged, on the sand, using a stick with a
rounded point. Then they take turns in hitting balls of beetle dung along the
grooves. The objective, of course, is to reach the middle with the least number of
shots, although the players know perfectly well that to reach the middle is quite
impossible. The game in fact has no winners or losers, but the Dogon play it for
hours at a time, without ever quarreling.

1. Cf. Eugene N. Marais, L’Anima della formica bianca (Adelphi, Milan, 1968).

THE ARTISIA
For those who have followed the history of the new botany with a certain degree
of skepticism, the parallel plants which caused the most perplexity are without
any doubt the Artisia. (pl. XX) This is understandable when we come to think
that in the two botanies, normal and parallel, the Artisia occupy a very special
position, ambiguous because they often seem unbotanical, even nonorganic, and
very likely of human origin: this is their dominant feature. When Chabanceau
first saw an Artisia he is said to have exclaimed: "Ah, enfin une fleur humaine!"
The ambiguous nature of the plant is reflected in its name, which was bestowed
on it by the amateur philosopher and botanist Theo van Schamen. It is taken
from the gilded inscription which adorns the portal of the Amsterdam Zoological
Gardens: "Artis Natura Magistra" (Nature is the teacher of the Arts). Whoever it
was who coined this phrase a century ago, when all educated men were still
Latinophiles, could scarcely have foreseen that the Dutch would in turn use it to
coin a nicmame, and call their zoo "Artis." However, it was in homage to this
absurdity that van Schamen proposed the name Artisia to the Antwerp
Conference. He said: "It is not yet clear whether, in its dichotomy of
artifice/nature, the plant expresses the influence of nature on art, or that of art on
nature."
We know, of course, that it does neither one nor the other, and that apart from its
parallelism the Artisia belongs totally to nature. But how are we to explain the
mastery of those obviously "artistic" forms that in certain specimens we feel
must surely be artifacts, copied indeed from the decorative whirligigs of the
eighteenth-century baroque?
 PL. XX Artisia

This phenomenon has been described as "Nature imitating Art," and in the Art
News section of the Aurore de Paris of January 17, 1973, there was a short
article bearing this very title. It ran as follows:

Anyone who laments the new wave of abstract expressionism which seems
to be sweeping through the galleries of Saint-Germain ought to take a look
at the small exhibition now set up in the atrium of the Jardin des Plantes. It
consists of a recently discovered group of extremely interesting parallel
plants. Some specimens can be seen in bronze versions cast directly from
 the originals by the method known as plante perdue, invented by the
Veronese foundryman Fausto Bonvicini, and which is simply a new version
of the traditional cire perdue or lost wax method. Others are displayed with
their roots enclosed in plastic cubes of the most crystalline transparency.
Others again appear in a segment of their own natural habitat.
Professor Gismonde Pascain, who has been in charge of the parallel section
of the Jardin for the last few months, told us that all the plants on show
were of exceptional scientific interest. When we asked her which, in her
opinion, was the most interesting of all, the young scientist, who was
wearing a blue linen dress of decidedly Chinese cut, pointed without
hesitation to a group of plants called "Artisia," and went on to explain their
salient features. To tell the truth, these Artisia did not seem to be plants at
all, except insofar as they had perfectly real and visible roots. They
appeared rather to be worn fragments of baroque chandeliers or of
eighteenth-century cornices or frames, picked up for a song, no doubt, at
the flea market. Whatever the case may be, they certainly represent a
somewhat disconcerting phenomenon which we, who know nothing of the
true facts, must attribute to an insane impulse on the part of Nature to
imitate Art.

Gismonde Pascain, who has made a thorough study of the Artisia, has come to
very different conclusions. These are derived from questions which at first sight
seem to have more to do with philosophy than biology, and to reflect her
connections with thinkers such as Gaston Bachelari and Roland Barthes before
she took up the study of biology. She starts by observing that man in his totality
is not just in nature but part of nature. And "totality," for Gismonde Pascain,
includes the important element of his spirituality. "Everything that today is
characteristic of man, including his spirituality," she writes, "is the evolutionary
result of a series of chance mutations. But in the complex play of infinities these
mutations should theoretically be repeuable, just as a royal straight flush at poker
is theoretically possible at any moment."
Baldheim's theory that man, rather than being descended from a single source, as
is generally held, might have come from a number of sources at various times, is
known to be based on these premises. In his book. Many Adams,1 this ingenious
American scientist puts forward a great number of interesting theories including
the one developed by Gismonde Pascain, which he calls "partial evolution." He
thinks that man is the present, transitory result of a series of mutations that in
different combinations of order and time might have produced other, different
autonomous organisms and living entities. In other words, Baldheim sees man as
a mosaic, the elements (tesserae) of which might just as well have formed an
infinite variety of other images. The theory stems in a sense from post-
Darwinian notions of evolution, ideas which, oddly enough, are very ancient in
origin. It was in fact Empedocles who stated the first rudimentary principles,
using a number of curious images which vaguely recall the physiognomy of
several of the lower organisms. "In the beginning," he writes, "there were eyes,
and hair, and arms, and fingers. Later on these parts came together, though
clumsily at first. Some creatures had eyes in their arms and ears on their hands,
while their heads were attached to their legs. Such strange unnatural creatures
could by no means survive, and it required an almost infinite number of
combinations before the eventual birth of creatures capable of survival."
Baldheim's theories formed the springboard from which Gismonde Pascain made
her extraordinary leap of the imagination. Why, she asks, should we rule out the
possibility that spirituality might in whole or in part have evolved quite
separately from the human shell in which it is housed? Maybe the songs of the
birds, and even of the crickets, she says, are simply branches that spring by
chance from the great evolutionary trunk that culminates in the music made by
man. Nor is it impossible that the ritual dance of the funbirds and of many
species of wader are not isolated things, characteristic of a particular species and
incapable of further development, but transitory phases in the evolution of dance
in general.
Passing from the animal kingdom to that of plants, Gismonde Pascain expresses
the opinion that certain flowers, such as Aracnea ludens, show some surprising
similarities to the decorative headdresses worn by the people of the Pagunian
Islands, which lie to the east of the New Hebrides, proof perhaps that these
plants represent a phase in the general artistic evolution which has reached its
peak, for the moment, in the artistic products of man. Seen in this light, the
analogies between the forms of nature and those which proceed from the creative
impulses of humanity take on new meanings. The relationship of art to nature
shoud "reflect the principle that art, as a manifestation of the spirituality of man,
does not have an outward and objective relationship to nature but is, like man's
body, an integral part of it."
From here it is only a short step to an explanation of the phenomenon of the
Artisia, which until recently might well have seemed a disturbing coincidence.
Gismonde Pascain assures us that the strange and alluring shapes of the Artisia
are part and parcel of the general evolutionary process of form. They are, so to
speak, a lateral development bound to the development of art by having a
common matrix.
The Artisia on display at the Jardin des Plantes comprise more or less a third of
all specimens which have so far come to light. The Botanical Biology
Laboratory at Palos Verdes (California) has three splendid specimens in habitate.
The Laboratorio delle Campora, where Bonvicini made his first casts by the
plante perdue method, has three plants of the A. candelabra variety, complete
with roots, as well as the famous group known as A. magistra, which was found
in the Australian bush by the zoologist Manuel Smithers.
Smithers teaches comparative zoology at Brisbane University, and is also
president of the Australian "Save the Kangaroo" Society. He has for some years
been leading teams of students into the Australian bush and desert in an attempt
to make a count of the few remaining King Kangaroos. It was during one of
these expeditions that Smithers saw the now famous group of A. magistra in the
shade of a eucalyptus tree. Although this extremely competent scientist had
never seen an Artisia, and indeed was not particularly interested in parallel
botany, he it once had an intuition that these were parallel plants, so he warned
his students not to touch them. He photographed the group and calculated the
exact position. He then sent all his information to his friend Amos Sarno, the
most distinguished Australian botanist of the day, who not only confirmed that
the plants were parallel but identified them without the least shadow of a doubt
as A. magistra. A few weeks later Sarno arrived with the necessary tools and
scientific equipment. He succeeded in solidifying the soil around the plants and
was able to remove the entire group intact, together with half a square meter of
earth.
In May 1974 Sarno went to Europe, and while in Italy he paid a visit to
Professor Vanni at "le Campora." There he much admired the splendid bronze of
a Solea fortius which Vanni had modeled in wax according to the description
found in the diary of Amerigo Mannuccini, a kangaroo hunter who crossed
South Australia from east to west at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Sarno knew that in Australia the Solea had been extinct for some time, and that
all direct evidence of it there had been removed by European collectors. He
therefore took advantage of his visit to suggest to Vanni that they might
exchange the Solea and the group of Artisia magistra. Partly from a sense of
guilt, and partly because he could not resist the temptation to own such an
exceptional group of Artisia, Vanni accepted the offer. The plants were
dispatched in the autumn of the same year, but in spite of all the loving care
spent on packing, the group arrived in three pieces. One of the plants (A. m. 3),
unluckily the finest of all, was badly damaged and needed very careful
restoration. As the plants were so typically eighteenth-century in form, Vanni
quite rightly decided to entrust the delicate task to Giovanna Accame, who has
the reputation of being Florence's best restorer of late Renaissance and post-
Renaissance works. The group now looks perfectly intact, and the restorer's hand
is indiscernible.
The Artisia of the Laboratorio delle Campora group are fairly typical of all the
rococo specimens yet found. Even the most flourishing specimens, if parallel
plants can be said to flourish, are composed of two kinds of leaves which occur
over and over again. Vanni calls them "involuted" and "devoluted." The
involuted leaves curl in upon themselves in a gesture of introspection which
might be felt to be the prelude to some partial rewinding. The devoluted leaves,
on the other hand, curl in the opposite direction, opening out in a gesture of
offering. All the leaves are one of three sizes, and there are no intermediate
dimensions. This is typical of parallel plants, which are not subject to the laws of
growth. What Vanni calls Artisia are in fact colonies of individual leaves, each
one of which, in spite of "belonging" to a group, has an existence of its own and
should be thought of as an Artisia. The leaves do not have roots in common, and
in cases when they lean upon each other they do so without any functional
significance of any kind. We are in fact concerned with an instance of what
Gismonde Pascain calls "urban flora," an expression intended to stress the
independence and at the same time the solitude of individuals within the group.
Other examples of urban flora are the colonies of Protorbis minor. On the other
hand, the tirils and the woodland tweezers are examples of grouping of the type
which Gismonde Pascain calls "collective flora," because they have well-marked
social needs and therefore a genuine relationship of interdependence.
A few months after the group of Artisia was delivered, Vanni received a long
letter from Sarno. Struck by its amazing contents he had it mimeographed and
distributed to several friends and colleagues. The letter consists of eleven
typewritten pages, the most interesting part of which has to do with the
hypothetical origin of the involuted and devoluted curls of the Artisia.

For over two years I have been working with the entomologist Eugene
Hopkins, following aline of inquiry into the curves of the Artisia leaves,
and I must say our researches have led us to some fairly startling
conclusions. If I did not mention this during my first visit to Italy, when I so
much enjoyed your hospitality, it was because I was still waiting for a
definitive reply from Hopkins about a part of his work that he was just
finishing up at that time. I hope you will forgive me for my silence on that
occasion, and now my dear friend it is a great pleasure to share with you the
results of these two years of work. They might even contain the scientific
explanation of phenomena previously considered totally mysterious, things
I remember that we talked about with such enthusiasm in the magnificent
and delightfully Tuscan courtyard of your laboratory.
We have concluded that the leaf-curls are nothing less than the work of a
strange insect, so far unknown to entomologists, which Hopkins has
christened Artisopteron, and which might be termed a zoological equivalent
of parallel botany - a "parallel insect" in fact. A sensational discovery with
unforeseeable consequences!
Artisopteron shows a slight resemblance to certain Coleoptera, but at the
same time it cannot be classified along with any known genus or species of
insect. Like the body of an insect, its body consists of head, thorax and
abdomen, and it has six legs. But it completely lacks spiracles, those minute
holes which normally form part of the breathing apparatus of insects. The
wings, rigid like those of Coleoptera, are rudimentary and barely
perceptible. Although slightly larger than a common ladybug, the insect is
totally invisible to the naked eye.
On January 7, 1973, I decided to carry out a taumascopic examination of
our Artisia, which then included the A. magistra now in your possession,
and for this purpose I asked my colleague Hopkins (whose lab is next door
to mine) if I could borrow his Somer instrument, the only one of its kind in
Australia. On that occasion I found that at the base of the Artisia there were
a number of small insects, clearly visible by the light of the Tauma-rays. I
paid no particular attention, and it was only in the course of a second
taumascopic examination three months later that I discovered that if I
turned the machine on and off, the insects that could clearly be seen by the
Tauma-rays were absolutely invisible without them. I was so amazed that I
called Hopkins, and it was then that we started on our research. We are now
in a position to give the gist of the first positive results, though we are only
too aware that there is still a great deal of work to be done.
Artisopteron lives in the dwarf eucalyptus forests of the bush regions of
Knopenland, in eastern central Australia. Attracted, it seems, by the
sweetish smell of the trees, which is fairly pronounced in the leaves and
secondary roots, Artisopteron forms groups of three or four individuals and
lives underground among the roots of the eucalyptus as well as at the base
of the Artisia. It moves extremely slowly, about two steps at a time, usually
together with the other members of its group. It has no organs of sight, and
as I mentioned earlier it has no real respiratory apparatus. Among the most
disconcerting aspects of this creature is the total absence of reproductive
organs. In point of fact, throughout the entire two years of our research we
have been unable to identify any normal vital processes whatever. At first
we were inclined to think that we were dealing with a form of hibernation,
 but eight seasons have now passed and in the individuals under study we
have not observed even the minutest physical change. We now think that we
are confronted with a physical condition which cannot be defined either as
life or as death. In this respect Artisopteron is very similar to certain parallel
plants, such as Artisia, which are motionless in time.
But the feature that has struck us most is a minute stinger at the bottom of
the abdomen. In the light of the Tauma-rays this shows up with intense
brightness, of a color that varies with the individual from cinnabar red to
emerald green. We thought at first that this was a sexual differentiation, but
further experiments revealed that there is a direct relationship between the
color of the stinger and the shape of the leaf on which Artisopteron lives, in
brief, we found that the insects with the red stingers live on Artisia with
devoluted leaves, while those with green stingers live on the plants that
have involuted leaves. The simplest hypothesis was naturally that the insect
somehow punctured the leaves, thus causing the directional development of
the curls, but in the course of two years of intense study we have been
unable to discern any direct causal relationship beyond the simple fact of
their presence on the leaves. We know from our experience in the field of
parallel botany how powerful the effect of this presence could be, and we
therefore came to think that the curl of the leaves was determined by the
mere existence of either "red" or "green" Artisopteron on the plants. This
naturally does not exclude the possibility that between insects and plants
there might be a mutual attraction, a simple a posteriori selective
relationship.
This is the point we have reached at the present moment, my dear Vanni,
but we intend to continue working on the specimens of Artisia we have in
our possession, which luckily are quite a few, as well as those still hidden in
their original habitat in the shade of the dwarf eucalyptus.
We can hardly be surprised thu Vanni was shaken to the core by this letter.
What is really astonishing is that no one before Sarno had ever seriously
considered the possibility of a parallel fauna, even in the case of insects,
which have such a close symbiotic relationship with plants. It is too early to
make any forecasts, but we cannot help thinking that the latest news from
the Antipodes justifies some expectations heavily loaded with suspense.

The phenomenon of the curling of the Artisia leaves has other interesting facets,
the most curious of which is without doubt the Kaori tattoos. The Kaoris must be
considered the first real settlers or colonizers of the Australian continent. (pl.
XXI) They landed there after the Chinese, between the thirteenth and sixteenth
centuries, but unlike the navigators of the coasts of Asia they pushed on into the
interior and established themselves permanently there. They came from the
islands of Polynesia and brought with them the tradition of tattooing. In their
novel environmental conditions, confronted with natural forms that were new to
them, this tradition of theirs underwent profound modification. The highly
elaborate tattooing of the Kaoris is in effect a marriage between extremely
ancient Polynesian forms and Australian themes of more recent origin. That the
Kaoris knew the Artisia and attributed magical powers to the plant can clearly be
deduced from certain details of the tattoos and from the paintings on bark which
have been meticulously documented by the Department of Anthropology of the
University of Brisbane.
The general purpose of this tattooing is to integrate an individual within a social
group. But it also signifies the symbolic conquest of the things represented. In
the case of the Artisia it is now almost certain that to the Kaoris the plants
represented the annulment of time, and hence eternal life. Thit centuries ago a
primitive people was able, if only intuitively and with the attribution of
supernatural meanings, to discern a phenomenon that is only now being timidly
explored by Western science is indeed a most extraordinary fact.
In a letter to the Anthropological Society of Australia, Professor Anthony
Campbell explained the magic significance that the Artisia have for the Kaori
people and described the tattooing ceremony which takes place-and not by
chance-in a hut built of eucalyptus boughs. The rite is presided over by the
shaman of the tribe, but the act itself is performed by the astok, a kind of
itinerant artist possessed of magic powers and a special skill in tattooing. At one
time there were many of these astok traveling about in the Australian bush, but
today it is a dying profession, kept fitfully alive by subsidies from the
Department of Kaori Affairs.
The ceremony takes place once a year and involves the whole tribe. All the
young who have reached the age of twelve in the course of the year are tattooed,
regardless of sex. Only the face is tattooed at this stage, the rest of the body
being done later.
 PL. XXI Kaori tattoos

The astok begins his work by taking a charred eucalyptus twig and drawing two
Artisia leaves, one on each cheek. Around these he then adds the intricate
designs which follow the form of the face and accentuate its individual character.
Most of the lines are abstract, but they may also be symlolic. Sometimes two
tiny Artisia, one involuted and the other devoluted, are represented on the sides
of the nose. While the astok is at work the elders of the tribe all squat round the
circular wall of the hut, which is about eight meters in diameter and festooned
for the occasion with thousands of bright-colored threads of wool hanging from
the vaulted roof. The men sing a monotonous rhythmic chant, which is in fact
the invocation "Atnas-poka-nama poi" (Great mother of the long night), while
outside groups of young people told hands and dance around the hut to the same
rhythm. Every nov and then they brandish eucalyptus boughs and shout "Poka."
When the drawing on the face is finished, the old men leave the hut and the
astok begins to execute the tattoo itself. This is a painful process, and as the
designs are so extremely intricate it can last for the whole day. At one time the
skin was punctured with the thorns of Solicarnia pendulifloris, but in the early
days of British rule the astok began to use ordinary sewing needles,
manufactured in Birmingham and obtained from English travelers in exchange
for the kangaroo skins then much in fashion in Europe.
As I mentioned above, Artisia also appear occasionally in bark paintings, which
have recently acquired some fame with the growing interest in primitive art. One
such painting on exhibit in Paris at the Musee de l'Homme clearly represents a
large A. major, devoluted in form, between the two figures of a kangaroo and a
hunter.
In a short essay recently published in the Annales of the Musee de l'Homme,
Gismonde Pascain points out that to the Kaoris the two forms (involuted and
devoluted) represent the inner and outer parts of man, that is, body and soul.
When they are represented together, as in the facial tattoos, they stand for this
dichotomy. In the paintings, however, there is nearly always only one Artisia. In
the particular case of the painting in the Musee de l'Homme, she says, the form
is devoluted, expressing more concern for the body than for the soul. Involuted
form, occur seldom in Kaori iconography, according to this leading French
biologist, a fact which bears witness to the sense of realism and excellent mental
health of the natives of Australia.
 Fig. 19 (a) Artisia Arpii and (b) a collage by Jean Arp

Fig. 20 (a) Artsia Calderii and (b) a pendant by Alexander Calter

In dealing with the Artisia we have often had occasion to mention their typically
eighteenth-century forms. It is perhaps only to be expected that a period so rich
in all kinds of representation of flowers should furnish us with easy
comparisons. But we ought to bear in mind that a number of specimens were
known before the eighteenth century, even if their parallel nature was not then
suspected, and also that many Artisia reflect the styles of other epochs. We need
only mention the so-called "Carolingian" Artisia, which bears so great a
resemblance to the magnificent bronze plaques of the doors of San Zeno at
Verona; this plant is now in the little museum at Casteldardo, where it was found
over a century ago at the foot of the age-old eucalyptus whose massive dignity
still dominates the tiny public gardens of this pretty little town. And to turn to
more recent art, we should not forget Artisia Arpii, which owes its name to the
amazing similarity of shape between it and certain collages and pieces of
sculpture by the dada artist Jean Arp (Fig. 19), and Artisia Calderii, whose
motifs irresistibly recall those in the work of the late American sculptor
Alexander Calder (Fig. 20). Indeed Jean Alembert, art critic for Les Jours, has
gone so far as to write that the day will come when a single display of parallel
botany will embrace the whole complex panorama of Western art from its
beginnings down to our own days.

1. Arthur Baldheim, Many Adams (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1957).

THE GERMINANTS
Rather than being plants; the germinants are a combination of heterogeneous
elements of which the really parallel part is perhaps only minor. They have no
proper botanical gestalt, and lack that overall plantness that is one of the most
obvious features of the other parallel plants.
The name germinant was coined by Jacques Inselheim of Strasbourg University.
During a trip to Italy he was considerably struck by a number of plants which he
saw at the Institute Venturi in Cadriano, near Bologna, and as soon as he
returned to France he wrote an article for the Gazette de Strasbourg in which he
described his encounter with this unusual flora. As they had only just been
discovered at that time they had not been given a name, and thus in a moment of
weakness and enthusiasm, certainly questionable from the strictly scientific point
of view, he called them "germinants." How are we to interpret this name? Is the
word transitive or intransitive? Are we concerned with "that which germinates"
or "that which is germinated"? When asked about it at last year's Baden Baden
Conference, Inselheim explained that the ambiguity of the name was the result
of an absolutely intentional choice, and that he was only too glad to take full
responsibility for it. If it is true, he said, that the term germinant refers to
something which germinates buds, it could equally well refer to buds which
germinate. He was struck by the similarity between a verb that, absurdly enough,
can be transitive or intransitive, and a plant that appears to be generated as an
organ by another plant, but which in reality is entirely separate and complete in
itself. 'The germinant," he said, "is beyond doubt the most ambiguous of plants.
And it is only right and proper that it should have the most ambiguous of
names."
PL. XXII The Cadriano germinants
Inselheim saw two of these plants at Cadriano. The first resembles a large squash
standing raised on about twenty scraggly and irregular roots of the type known
as ambulans. From the rough skin of the cucumbra (generating bud) there sprout
a dozen arrogant buds, which are shiny and perfect: the germinants. In the other
specimen the buds (also a group of twelve) spring from an aquatic rhizome about
forty centimeters long which has been successfully enclosed in a block of
polyephymerol. (pl. XXII)
Following his visit to Cadriano, Inselheim bought a single germi-nant from an
amateur botanist in Bologna. This sprouts from what appears to be a bit of
volcanic rock about the size of a clenched fist. So far it has not been identified.
In any case, Inselheim presented it to his alma mater, the University of Padua, in
memory of his old teacher Professor Alfonso delle Serie.
The two groups of germinants in Cadriano are almost identical, even if the
different elements from which they appear to grow display them in very different
contexts. The better known of them, which scholars refer to as the "Cucumbra"
germinants, has aroused endless problems and disputes wherever it has been the
object of study. The special report prepared by the Faculty of Botany in Bologna
is in fact in clean contest to the opinions held at the Cadriano Center. The latter
are based on a premise that seems to us scientifically correct, that in parallel
botany there are no organic connections between the various parts of a plant.
When these parts display an apparently arbitrary relationship, as in the case of
the "cucumbra" germinants, then the only reasonable method of study is to take
the parts separately, without prejudgments, and explain their coexistence as best
we can.
Following this structuralist procedure the Institute has arrived at these
conclusions. The twelve germinants are certainly and unequivocally parallel.
Irrefutable proofs are furnished by the continuity of their internal substance, their
morphological inalterability, their tendency to turn to dust on contact with
foreign bodies, and the strange behavior of their image when recorded on film.
The mother cucumbra, as Inselheim calls it, does not on the other hand seem to
have the qualities that would enable us to call it parallel. The fact that the plant
was discovered in the neighborhood of Ferrara, near the Certosa di Pomona, in a
thick hedge surrounding a field full of summer squash, justifies us in
entertaining reasonable doubts. Furthermore, experiments using minipolarization
have shown that the cucumbra reacts to external agents exactly like any normal
fruit. In theory it would allow itself to be cut into slices and at high temperatures
its substance would undergo considerable alteration. It was these considerations
in the first place that induced Professor Giancarlo Venturi, the founding father of
the institute, to judge the mother cucumbra to be an anomaly belonging to
normal botany.
For the scientists of the University of Bologna, however, the germinants were
originally real buds that sprang from the cucumbra and have now entered a
condition of parallel stasis. The fact that the cucumbra looks like a zucchini and
the circumstances of its discovery are considered to be pure coincidence. They
point out that probes into the interior of the fruit carried out by the Anten-
Abrams method have not revealed the presence of seeds or even the least
variation in the density of the material. What appears to us as the skin from
which the germinants emerge by breaking violently through it, is nothing other
than the external limit of the interior substance. The germinants are firmly
attached to it, so much so as to seem of the very same substance. The surface
irregularities such as protuberances and longitudinal scratches are, according to
the Bologna botanical team, of paramimetic character.
Professor Mario Federici, who drew up the report, taking into account all
combinations in which the germinants figure as a single and distinct parallel
entity, tends to minimize the importance of the buds in favor of the matrix, and
he speaks of the "germinating cucumbra" and the "germinating rhizome." He
describes even the "ambulant" roots of the cucubra as a parallel phenomenon,
although he recognizes that certain features recall the petrified plants in the
Chuhihu Valley.
Venturi, on the other hand, is of the opinion that the roots belong to normal
botany and in the case of the cucumbra are no more than a fortuitous
circumstance. He says that originally the cucumbra lay on the ground like an
ordinary zucchini. Underground roots were attracted by the damp which was to
be found in its shadow, and converged upon it. Then by a slow process of
penetrating antiastasis they ended by raising the cucumbra, detaching themselves
from their original root system and transforming themselves into the ambulant
type by a series of later mutations.
The two theories are equally divergent as regards the aquatic germinants, and
although there are two elements rather than three, the reasons for attributing
them to one botany or the other remain the same. For Venturi the underwater
rhizome is just a rhizome capirens in the process of parallelization, while for
Federici it is part of a single parallel entity. Where the two scientists agree
entirely is over the attribution and hymothesic description of the buds. Both
admire the high level of ambiguity of the plants, and wonder whether it is a case
of a sudden stoppage of development at the moment of parallelization or of a
precise gestaltic intention. This question was discussed at great length at the
Baden Baden Conference, and the majority of the scientists present favored the
second view. The buds, rather like the seeds of Giraluna, would appear to
represent what in human terms would be called an "idea." They are the
programmed and definitive form of a meaning, a "design" by nature, we may
say. This coexistence of a content, a narrative, with the simple phenomenon of
self-presentation, is possible only in parallel botany. The resulting ambiguity is
due to the apparent incompatibility of time, without which an idea cannot exist,
with non-time, which is the conditio site qua non of the plants found on the other
side of the hedge. The germinants, with their seemingly vital impulse which
presupposes a history and suggests a future, are pointed aggressively at the sun,
like missiles programmed to strike at and explode the last (or the first) mystery
of living matter. But their inert matterlessness, their immobility outside of time
and their being only illusorily set in space-these qualities exclude them from
having any part in the growth and development of the biosphere. Theirs is an
existentiality of dreams, in which form and meaning are a single materialized
fiction, suspended between the light of our perception and the darkness of their
own being.
Inselheim holds the view that the germinants are an Italian plant, and he supports
this theory with a great deal of paleontological, geological, meteorological, and
toponomical data. It is true that the only germinants yet discovered have been
found in Italy. After the three specimens already mentioned, other plants have
been seen or obtained from the Gargano, from Castellina in Chianti and from
Rocca di Faggio. The Natural History Museum of Verona has two specimens of
the cucumbra type recently acquired from a small farmer in Caselle. There is
every reason to believe that the germinants are not only a specifically Italian
plant, but that of all parallel plants they might well be the most numerous and
easily accessible. But unfortunately Italy is the only country which still has no
laws to govern and protect parallel plants, and no provisions whatever to
encourage research. As they are not plants in the usual sense and as it is difficult
to define their nature and substance in legally acceptable terms, their continued
existence is seriously threatened by the vandalism of weekend vacationers, as
well as by the selfishness and ignorance of amateurs and speculators.
In the meanwhile. Colonel Di Bonino of the Forestry Police refuses to accept
responsibility for things that do not form a part of the vegetable kingdom.
Under-Secretary De Francisci, who is responsible for ecology within the Institute
per lo Sviluppo Economico (I.S.E.), was appealed to by the University of
Bologna, but replied in extremely vague terms and did his best to make the
problem appear ridiculous. Senator Giuseppe Montaldin, president of the
Committee for the Defense of the Products of the Soil, recognizes the scientific
importance of the germinants but denies that they can be called products of the
soil, while Giovanni Amara of the National Scientific Research Institute
(I.N.R.S.), in a memo to Minister Fratelli which on the whole was sympathetic
and reasonable, lists his reasons for being unable to intervene, including shortage
of funds, lack of qualified personnel, and, above all, the troubles which would
accrue to the institute if it concerned itself with a problem which could not be
explained clearly and simply to the politicians who control its activities.

THE STRANGLERS
Between the two groups of plants which comprise parallel botany as we know it
today there is a mysterious no-man's-land in which vegetable organisms, now
extinct, once lived out an anomalous existence.
The plants are exceptional in form, behavior, and orthogenesis, and cannot be
placed anywhere in the existing classification of parallel botany. They have for
this reason been the object of special study by botanists, paleobotanists,
psychologists, and even poets.
One genus in particular, the so-called "stranglers," exemplifies all the features of
that small group of plants which scientists have christened the "phab" group
(from alpha beta.). (pl. XXIII) The existence of the group was discovered a few
years ago by a team of paleontologists led by Professor Ahmed Primshattia of
the University of Baroda. While working in the hills near the Jain temple of
Mount Abu they came across some fossils of hitherto unknown plants. It seems
that they were examples of a type of tiril, about thirty centimeters high, that must
have been quite common to the north of the Indian subcontinent for some
millennia at the end of the Orthoplantain era. Fossils that came to light in 1971
in the Shetford coal seam, and were assigned to a much more recent period,
show surprising morphological analogies with the Indian specimens. Primshattia
himself agrees with the English paleobotanists Smithen and McCook that they
are "strangler tirils."
These scientists have put forward some original and convincing hypotheses
regarding the life of these plants, which must have been endowed with abnormal
vital urges. Smithen and McCook hold the view that in order to limit their
distribution nature provided them with a curious mechanism of ecological
control, without which in the course of two or three million years they would
have covered whole continents at the expense of all other forms of life.
According to these experts this consisted in a quite exceptional self-destructive
aggressiveness developed during the flaringean phase of growth, which the tirils
expressed by slowly and gradually winding themselves round nearby plants,
even those of their own species. The extinction of one species by reciprocal
strangulation-the process which botanists call eronecria-must have taken place
in the course of a few millennia, but before total destruction some specimens
must, by mutation, have generated a new species also genetically equipped with
the suicidal instinct. And so on and so forth. The last survivor of the long series
of stranglers was probably Tirillus maculatus, which was far less aggressive than
its ancestors must have been. Even today this tiril, destined to outlive all the
other stranglers, covers vast areas of the Alaskan tundra, where it is a favorite
food of the herds of dwarf caribou that sweep down into the peninsula every
spring.
With regard to the stranglers, Von Harne recently published a sensational article
in the Archives of Parabotany. His theory is that in the history of parallel botany
there have been numerous other plants which have disappeared from the face of
the earth, only to reappear at some distant time and place, slightly modified in
form and behavior. He formulates the theory of a vegetal metempsychosis due to
which the processes of life and death remain suspended in the impressions of
capillary roots "burned" by time into petrified veins, clays, and crystals; and that
these transmit generating energies by means of an imperceptible, age-old
osmosis. The genes, freed at last from their long subterranean slumber, pass on
the ancient existential programs to new plants.
Von Harne pays particular attention to the stranglers, tracing a long history
"which like a distant archipelago appears to float in time." The "soul" of these
plants seems to be the agent responsible for the infinitely slow violence which is
their main feature, and according to Von Harne this survives in species such as
the common ivy, thus revealing unsuspected links between the two botanies.
 PL. XXIII Strangler tirils

CONTENTS
PART ONE: INTRODUCTION 1
General Introduction 3
Origins 20
Morphology 35

PART TWO: THE PLANTS 57

The Tirillus 59
 Tirillus oniricus 62
Tirillus mimeticus 64
Tirillus parasiticus 67
Tirillus odoratus 68
Tirillus silvador 70
The Woodland Tweezers 73
The Tubolara 78
The Camporana 80
The Protorbis 86
The Labirintiana 95
The Artisia 100
The Germinants 112
The Stranglers 117
The Giraluna 119
Giraluna gigas 134
Giraluna minor 1 43
The Solea 145
The Sigurya 162

PART THREE: EPILOGUE 171

The Gift of Thaumas 173
Notes 178
THE GIRALUNA
This elusive and capricious plant is the Dream Queen of parallel botany.
Hydendorp, quite rightly, does not hesitate to define it as the "most parallel of
plants, most plantlike of the parallels," and in so doing he stresses not so much
its physiognomic oddnesses as the disconcerting normality of its shape. "If we
were in the jungle," he writes, "and we found one blocking our way, we would
not for an instant hesitate to hack it down with our machetes."1
But it will not be our good fortune to encounter it. If in reconstructions the
Giraluna displays considerable plantness of form and an exact and convincing
solidity, in its natural environment it can be perceived only as a nebulous
interplay of glimmerings and empty spaces which alternate in the darkness and
vaguely suggest where its outlines might be. (pl. XXIV) Its nocturnal presence,
in fact, is manifested almost entirely in terms of the equivocal O'-factor of the
moonbeams, which was discovered and measured a few years ago by Dennis
Dobkin of the Point Paradise Observatory. This factor changes the light-shade
ratio which normally defines volumes into a subtle interplay of lucencies and
opacities, so that our perceptions, our basic sensorial habits conditioned by
thousands of years of daytime life in the "solar key," would need complete
readjustment and indeed reversal in order to come to terms with it. Daylight
isolates objects, bestowing a noisy Meaning on all the odds and ends in the
world. But night takes everything away except the very soul of things: a black
light, a transparent darkness, a secret we cannot grasp.
During the long night of the Erocene era man caught a glimpse of the Giraluna
rising mysteriously in its barren landscape. Presolar man imagined himself the
child of the Moon. In her lap he had known the comfort of the life, silent torpor
of the night, and by her light he had seen silver pearls lie weightlessly upon the
coronas of the first great flowers. But he left us only a few enigmatic signs of all
this: the Feisenburg cave, the petrified bones in the Ahmenstadt tumulus, the
Boergen Cup. Paradoxically enough, all that we do in fact know of his presence
in that landscape comes to us from our study of his nocturnal vegetation,
Around the middle of the Erocene era, when the flowers of night were fading
away in the light of a new dawn, man saw that outlines and colors were slowly
hardening. Thus he discovered the stone-hard world of day, and learned to be the
child of both Sun and Moon, of Amnes and Ra, of Disarm and Karak, of Nemsa
and Taor. The "crawling stones" of Yorkshire, the stele of Tapur, the graffiti of
Klagenstadt, these have preserved for us the nearly obliterated images of the two
divinities who from the center of their temples drew the design of the universe.
But the Sun was not long in attaining absolute power over everything in the
world. "O Ra, o Amno Ra our benefactor, glowing and flaming! Gods and men
bow down before you, for you are their creator and their only Lord." Such was
the prayer of Amresh, High Priest of Egypt. And a new vegetation, outspoken
and exuberant, appeared on the earth, and made the bright leaves dance in the
morning breeze. Night soon became no more than a dark corridor joining one
day to another, a place of visions and memories, a storehouse of words and
images. It became a secret refuge where the vanished flowers could once more
flaunt their coronas to the Moon. And thousands of years later the black flowers
of that distant night-Giraluna, Lunaspora, Solea argentea-were born from seeds
hidden deep in a soil rich with legends and stories.
If our knowledge of the Giraluna is today reasonably complete and detailed this
is due to the industry and scholarship of Professor Johannes Hydendorp of the
University of Honingen, who has collected and collated all known facts and kept
his records abreast of the latest developments. Our historical and geographical
information comes from the most varied sources: legends and folk tales handed
down from generation to generation, accounts given by explorers,
anthropologists, and paleontologists, and of course the more recent testimony of
botanists such as Heinz Hornemann and Pierre Maessens.
 PL. XXIV Giraluna (closeup of avvulta at right)

The iconography of the plant includes the Solingen graffiti, the polychrome bas-
reliefs from the Karno tombs, and the clumsy sculptures made by the natives of
Uranda. But of fundamental importance is the recent discovery of the great
Giraluna of Sommacampagna near Verona, which is fashioned in such a
meticulous manner as to carry the utmost conviction.2 Also important is the
Lady Isobel Middleton group, which we will discuss below at some length.
By interpolating descriptions and representations, Hydendorp was able to draw
up a really detailed morphology of the plant, which now requires only the
confirmation of direct observation. Although his own reconstruction was made a
year before the discovery of the Giraluna at Sommacampagna, it is identical in
every detail with that colossal bronze-fair proof of the accuracy of both.
Hydendorp lists three types of Giraluna: the common variety, G. vulgaris,
typified by the Sommacampagna bronze and which has all the basic
characteristics of the plant; G. gigas, a native of the mountains of Tampala in
India, and which can reach heights of three meters or more; and G. minor, found
in the undergrowth, a plant rather similar to the fungoid Protorbis minor and
occasionally mistaken for it. The three varieties all greatly differ in size and
substance, but they share the pendulous roots and the circular corona with its
spherical seeds that shine with a strange metallic light.
Although the Giraluna is not a social plant, there are groups of the giant variety
consisting of three or more individuals which, as with normal plants, appear to
be connected by means of a common root system. G. minor is sometimes found
in even larger groups (Hydendorp mentions up to forty plants in one square
meter) which would lead us to think, quite erroneously, in terms of a rudimentary
social structure such as that of the tirils or the woodland tweezers. But in fact it
is no more than chance association without any suggestion of interdependence
and due merely to favorable environmental conditions.
In his description of the Giraluna, Hydendorp distinguishes two main parts, the
"trunk" or "column," and the "corona." The trunk corresponds more or less to the
stem or stalk of more delicate plants, but deserves the term arplied to it on
account of its unusually massive bulk in relation to the plant as a whole. A fully
grown Giraluna measuring a meter and a half in height can be as much as forty
centimeters in diameter at the base. The trunk of the Giraluna is composed of
the column proper (Lat. columnar) and a system of aerial roots, the pendulants,
which are collectively known as the avvulta.
As with most of the parallel plants of the Beta group, the column rests on the
earth without in any way being attached to it. In spite of this, the plant stands so
steadily that in the absence of the appropriate technical apparatus it is impossible
to knock it over or to cut it down. Here and there on the surface of the column
there are fragmentary remains of a corklike bark. This is an extreme case of
"parabotanization," a type of camouflage aimed at concealing the parallel nature
of the plant. It has been the subject of a special study by Hydendorp, who
attributes the phenomenon to psychobotanical deviations which probably
resulted from a malfunctioning of the genetic memory. Mutilations of the
mnemonic system or, in plain terms, cases of forgetfulness, would seem to be the
cause of anomalies for which we can find no other explanation. Hydendorp calls
our attention to the theories of Hermann Hoem, according to whom false
messages can be delivered, while mistaken decodification and even genuine
forms of plant neurosis can take place in the evolutionary process at cellular
level. He cites some well-known examples of plants which have undergone
surprising morphological changes by means of rapid mutations caused by
frustrations, inhibitions and obsessive envy. Here ws might mention the clear
impressions of roses to be found on the leaves of ivy of the variety Rosa alienis,
the shapes of flowers and leaves that appear from time to time on the cracked
bark of Pinus adelphis, and finally the numerous "fruit-bearing leaves" which
result from a long series of laboratory experiments carried out by Hoem himself.
The upper part of the column of the Giraluna is much narrower than the base,
and is curved in such a way as to hold the corona at the proper angle, usually
forty decrees. At the very base it swells as if to give the plant more stability, and
in this it is aided by the lowest pendulants, which often extend onto the ground
for ten centimeters or so. In fact, of course, this swelling at the base is also part
of the camouflage game of the Giraluna, which pretends to require physical and
gravitational stability while in fact its remarkable "solidity" proceeds from the
very nature of its matterlessness.
Apart from the fragments of pseudobark the column has the smooth and slightly
viscous surface characteristic of all parallel plants.
 PL. XXV The ebluk procession (Sumerian bas-relief)

Sometimes, like certain varieties of tiril, it is covered with a very thin layer of
faintly scented wax, known as emyphyllene, which is reminiscent of the copaiba
resins of certain normal plants. The men of the post-Erocene era thought that this
substance had aphrodisiac properties. Maessens is of the opinion that the famous
ebluk of the Sumerians, used by the sculptor priests to anoint the block of basalt
from which they were to draw forth the image of the emperor, was nothing other
than the emyphyllene of the Giraluna. In those days the plant grew in some
abundance in the shade of those vast rocks which the Sumerians took to be
pieces of the moon that had fallen into the desert. On nights when the moon was
full long lines of warriors, led by the priests, would scour the desert in search of
the precious balsam, which was heated and poured into a small golden casket.
(pl. XXV)At the climax of a complicated nocturnal ceremony, while the High
Priest delivered rhythmic blows of the hammer upon the holy chisel, the contents
of the casket were poured over the shapeless stone which was to yield the
portrait of the defunct sovereign. The balsam was supposed to give the dead
emperor such virility that in the other world he was able to re-create his entire
people. According to Maessens the stele from the Karno tomb, which shows a
pair of mythical animals, half lion and half bull, supported by a stylized
Giraluna (Fig. 21), also exalts the aphrodisiac properties of the ebluk.
All around the column hang the tubular roots known as pendulants. These are
scarcely visible at the top of the plant, but they become longer and longer toward
the base where, as mentioned above, they often protrude for some little way over
the ground and provide totally fictional support. The pendulants are smooth,
with perfectly rounded ends, and the common variety possesses some hundreds
of them. They are similar to the pendulants of the Sigurya, but while these are
thin, irregular, and likely to appear at any height on the stem, the pendulants of
the Giraluna are very regular in form and distribution. When several layers are
superimposed they form the avvulta, which resembles a kind of skirt.
Hydendorp thinks that the way the pendulants are arranged suggests that the
Giraluna was once entirely independent of the earth. "A plant that has roots
falling toward the earth," he writes, "has certainly not grown upwards from
beneath the surface, as occurs with normal plants. It is probable that before the
beginning of the Metrocene era (the "age of measurement"), when living
organisms were relatively few and without dimensions, the Giraluna was an
aerial plant."
 Fig. 21 The Giraluna of Karno

Hydendorp goes on to remind us that the problem of survival does not apply to
parallel botany, and that therefore these plants have no necessity whatever for
maintaining contact with the earth. "It is not impossible," he writes, "in earlier
times, when the ratio between the gravity of the earth and that of the moon was
not the same as it is today, that the earth rejected certain organisms which at that
critical moment in the formation of the biosphere might have seemed of no use
to the emergence of the new ecological balance. It is possible that great numbers
of parallel plants, like their ancestors the Lepelara, circled the earth while
awaiting mutations that would permit the earth's gravitational force to prevail.
The Giraluna would then have descended to our planet and stretched out its
pendulants like tentacles to help it make a good landing and aid it, at least in the
early stages, to keep its balance."
Maessens pushes Hydendorp's theory to the point of paradox, and even
speculates on the possible selenogenesis of the plant. For him the Giraluna of
Sumerian must have fallen from the moon at the same time as the huge boulders
in the Ahem-Bu Desert. There was an absurd but memorable bickering match
between the two scientists on this very subject at the 1968 Antwerp Conference.
This should scarcely be wondered at, in view of the fact that parallel botany as a
whole, and the Beta group in particular, disobeys the laws of nature and
therefore encourages speculations that sometimes threaten to compete with the
boldest imaginings of science fiction.
If the pendulants reach toward the earth, the corona of the Giraluna is definitely
turned toward the sky. It is a large circular dish full of metallic spheres that are
commonly called seeds, though obviously they are nothing of the kind. The
corona of the common Giraluna is forty centimeters in diameter. Unlike the
varieties G. gigas and G. minor it has a few triangular petals irregularly placed
around its rim. Hydendorp lists this as one of the paramimetic features of the
plant, though he also thinks that this might represent a distant "memory," a
rudimentary vestige of a previous form of corona.
The seeds of the Giraluna, more correctly called "spherostills", differ from one
variety to another: but within each variety they are of fixed and invariable size,
quite independently of the size of the individual plant. Those of the common
Giraluna measure four millimeters in diameter, those of G. minor, two
millimeters, while the spherostills of the G. gigas measure as much as twenty-
four millimeters in diameter. While the plant is matterless and therefore has no
specific gravity, in the case of the spherostills one can speak in terms of an actual
mass. This fact was used by Hydendorp to combat Maessens's theory of lunar
genesis. "In the fall from one gravitational field to another," he said, "the
spherostills, which are not connected to the corona in any way, would have
gotten lost in space." In the reply he made during the famous debate mentioned
above, Maessens drew attention to the fact that in certain well-known instances
the corona is in fact missing a number of seeds, and he declared that the
mysterious atmoliths that damaged the lunar screen of the American Macron II
might well have been Giraluna spherostills which had remained in orbit.
If the fragments of "bark" on the Giraluna, and the pendulants which compose
its avvulta, can be explained by the theory of para-botanization, the so-called
seeds, with their geometrical perfection and brilliant shiny surface, appear to
elude any rational explanation whatever. But the fact that they are there on the
corona leads us to suspect some hidden meaning beyond the scope of any
acceptable hypothesis. In spite of their obvious uselessness and their oddly
mechanical appearance, we are bjund to admit that the spherostills must be in
some measure "organic by association," so that in the context of the "plant
mother" they are instantly interpreted as seeds. The extent to which the context
of the plant is decisive as a semeiotic element has been shown by Anseimo
Geremia of the Natural History Museum of Vicenza, who for some years now
has been working on the strange phenomenon of the "seeds" of parallel plants.
We here give the results of a test carried out by Geremia to ascertain the
recognizability of the spherostills of the great bronze of Sommacampagna:
Removed from the context of the Giraluna and displayed instead on the
workbench of a machine shop, the spherostills were identified as ball bearings
by ninety-eight percent of the people taking part in the test. When the
spherostills were scattered here and there on the soil in a garden the outcome
was more or less the same. But when they were seen in their proper place, on the
corona of the flower, the results were completely reversed: ninety-four percent of
those interviewed took the spheres to be the seeds of the plant, even if in their
comments ball bearings were often used by way of comparison.
But what could possibly be the function of abstract seeds, quite clearly incapable
of generating new plants? What relationship could there be between the
spherostills and the plant mother with which they have not the least trace of a
physical bond? How can we explain the fact that the most "botanized" of the
parallel plants has seeds which can easily be mistaken for a product of advanced
industrial technology? Geremia writes:

It is clear that in their distant past the spherostills cannot have had any true
biological functions. To demand that plants which enjoy timelessness
should take the trouble to ensure the survival of the individual, that they
should possess mechanisms to bring about the preservation of the species,
is a patent and paramount absurdity. Having also rejected the idea of an
extreme form of paramimesis, on account of the mechanical appearance of
the seeds, we are forced to give serious consideration to the hypothesis of a
purely symbolic function similar to that of the brightly colored tail of the
mitlachec, a small bird of prey found on the Carador coast of Bolivia,
which Hayman Harris defines as a "temptation to the dream." As with the
germinants, the highly artificial perfection of the spherostills, in dramatic
contrast to the plantness of the rest of the Giraluna, brings to mind
meanings involving a certain amount of ideality; but ideality implies a
hypothetical future, and the future is conceivable only in terms of constant
temporal motion. It therefore becomes natural to wonder if the spherostills
might not represent a symbolic bridge between the two types of time, the
mobile time of normal botany and the motionless time of parallel botany3.

The poetic question put by Geremia thus translates the mystery of the physical
appearance of the spherostills into new conceptual terms. But what on earth
could be the message that the spherostills are carrying from one time to another,
from one flora to another? Geremia does not tell us. He is wise enough to think
that the answer to such a question must completely elude our logic. Even to ask
the question is rather like trying to jump over one's own shadow.
From the steppes of Yaghuria, from the Novaho Desert, from the tropical forests
of Central Africa, from all those distant places of the earth where man has seen
the seeds of the Giraluna glinting in the night, travelers have brought back
stories of enchantment and magic inspired by the bewitching mysteries of the
plant. Among the most curious of these is a story told by Vladimir Oncharov, a
little-known Russian writer,4 who in 1868 published a volume of children's
stories which has never been translated. One of these stories is called "The
Flower with the Golden Seeds." Oncharov himself admitted that the story was
based on a very old Yaghurian legend, and it stands as proof that even in the
dreary landscape of the Siberian steppes the Giraluna ixust once have offered its
glittering spherostills to the moon.
Although Oncharov was the first to use the name "Giraluna," and although there
is no Russian whs has not read or been told the story as a child, no one ever
dared to advance the idea that the precious flower might really have existed: an
example of how folk tales, so rich in historical, geographical, and scientific
information, still remain largely and inexcusably unexplored.
Here is the text of the Russian story in a translation by Giselle Barnes, to whom
we are also grateful for bringing it to our notice.

The Flower with the Golden Seeds

Ivan Antonovitch was a poor peasant who lived with his wife Katyusha in a
wooden cabin not far from the village of Blansk. What little he earned came
from the milk of his ten goats and from selling the seeds of the sunflowers which
late in the summer droop their heavy heads as if tired of waiting for the sun,
searching the gray earth instead for a reason to live.
One cold and misty September day Ivan Antonovitch decided to reap his
sunflowers, which now were ready to be harvested. He sharpened his amovar
and off he went to the field. He had already cut a few bundles when suddenly he
stopped in his tracks: he stood and stared in amazement at the plant he had just
been on the point of cutting down. It was the only one in the whole field that still
had its face upturned to the sky. It had black petals and seeds that looked like
tiny nuggets of gold. Ivan Antonovitch rubbed his eyes and pinched himself hard
on the nose. Persuaded at last that he was not dreaming, he carefully gathered the
heavy seeds and dropped them into the huge pocket of his smock. He continued
to harvest his sunflowers, but every so often he took a seed from his pocket to
assure himself that it really was gold. Once he nearly broke a tooth when he bit
on one to see how hard it was. He decided to tell no one at all, not even
Katyusha, and before going home he dug a hole in a corner of the field. Into this
hole lie dropped the seeds one by one, counting them with loving care. Then he
covered them up with the gray earth and put a white stone on top.
That night he was too excited to sleep, and he got up before dawn. He went
straight to the field, removed the stone, took out one seed, and refilled the hole.
Then he walked to Blansk with the precious nugget in his pocket. There he
wasted no time in making his way to the shop of Boris Andreyevitch, the only
tradesman and, guess what, the only rich man in the village. "Boris
Andreyevitch," said Ivan Antonovitch, "how much is a nugget of gold worth?"
"That depends on the weight of it," was the reply. "But why should an old beggar
like you wish to know such a thing?"
" That's why!" said the peasant, drawing the lump of gold from his pocket.
Boris Andreyevitch was astonished, but he took the seed and examined it
carefully, rolling it back and forth between his fingers.
" Where did you get it?" he said at last.
'That's my business," said Ivan Antonovitch with a broad wink.
Boris Andreyevitch put the nugget on a small pair of scales, jotted down a lot of
numbers on a scrap of paper, and finally said:
" A hundred and twenty rubles."
" A hundred and fifty," snapped Ivan Antonovitch.
The old tradesman pretended to give this some thought, and said: "As you are a
friend I will give you a hundred and thirty."
Ivan Antonovitch took the money and ran home.
" Katyusha," he cried in excitement. "Just look at this!" And he threw a handful
of gold coins on the table.
" Holy Mother of God!" exclaimed his wife. "Where did you get all that
money?"
"That's my business," said Ivan Antonovitch. But he could not keep his secret for
long, and that same evening he took Katyusha to the sunflower field. There he
lifted the stone and took out the seeds.
" Thirty-six!" he said. "And to think that yesterday there were thirty-seven!"
All night they discussed what was best to do, and decided that instead of selling
any more of the seeds they would plant them. And so they did. They prepared a
small field behind the house, and there they planted the seeds very carefully, in
six rows of six.
The next day Ivan Antonovitch went to the village and asked Boris Andreyevitch
what was thirty-six times thirty-seven. "Next year we will have one thousand
three hundred and thirty-two golden seeds," he told Katyusha when he got home.
"You will have the richest husband in all Russia.'
Then came the autumn rains and a long winter under the snow, and indeed it was
the longest winter of their lives. When at last the spring came and the snow
melted the two of them looked anxiously at the sodden black earth. And sure
enough there were a few little shoots coming up.
In the months that followed the plants grew tall, and there was no doubt about it:
they were real sunflowers. Every morning, as soon as they woke, Ivan and
Katyusha would rush to the field. With bated breath they would gaze at the buds
of the flowers, tight little fists holding all their immense riches. And one day, its
face uplifted to the sky, the first sunflower opened its petals. It was a real
sunflower . . . but alas, its seeds looked like ordinary sunflower seeds. Ivan
Antonovitch pried one out with his fingernails. He crushed it between finger and
thumb. Then all of a sudden he lost his head:
one after another he tore open all the flowers, ripping off the petals. Inside them
he found nothing but young, tender sunflower seeds. Then he grabbed his
amovar ani cut down the flowers in his rage. Katyusha looked on in horror, and
when there was only one flower left she cried "Stop! Stop! Ivan Antonovitch, let
us spare at least this one!" The man and his wife wept for a long time.
It was a sad, sad summer. And then the autumn came and the snow began to fall,
but the sunflower they had spared did not lose its leaves, and its flower remained
intact.
" Is this another miracle?" they wondered.
And one moonlit night they got their answer, for then they looked out and saw
the flower teaming like a golden crown. Running to the plant they found that the
seeds which had been soft and gray in the daytime were now of shining gold.
Ivan and Katyusha wept for joy and hugged each other and danced round and
round the flower. "Better thirty-seven golden seeds than one thousand two . . .
three . . ." In his excitement Ivan Antonovitch quite forgot the huge number the
tradesman had taught him to say. ". . . Than a million golden weds," put in
Katyusha, who was always ready to coin a proverb.
So Ivan did not become the richest man in all Russia, but he was certainly the
luckiest peasant in Blansk. He and Katyusha bought a white horse and four big
cows, and the next year they had a little daughter. They called her Giraluna.
 PL. XXVI Wo'swa, the bride of Pwa'ko

The Giraluna appears as a mythological character in many legends of the North

American Indians. The Xumi, who live in the Great Novaho Desert, are
unfortanately dying out, but the few survivors of this magnificent tribe, which a
couple of centuries ago still numbered two hundred thousand souls, keep the
grand old poetic traditions alive. The episode we give below is part of the long
epic poem "Ik'mia'ko," and among the protagonists is Wo'swa, the
"moonflower." This particular legend is called "The Bride of Pwa'ko," and is one
of the improvised dances for which the Xumi are famous but which now,
deplorably enough, have sunk to the level of a tourist attraction. In the ballet
Wo'swa wears a headdress pl. xxvi of white feathers decorated with seven shiny
spheres, the "seeds" of her corona.
The Xumi language is one of the Kwo'na group, known for its phonetic richness
and vast rhetorical potential, evident even to those who do not understand the
meaning. In view of these qualities we give the episode both in the original (with
a word-by-word translation underneath) and in a free rendering by Wallace M.
Donovan of the Museum of Indian Traditions in Tucson, Arizona.

i'pwa'ko 'shi'opkuno
of Pwako the bride
Pwa'ko'he si'ma'kwe te si'fushi i'yokwu inu'pnai'to mu' kwa'ma an'she
Pwako of Makwe and Fushi hunt Kwama
te'wu nau'sone a'nanamei i'ku mu'etto i'swe lu'too lu'konsiwa i'pwa'ko
seven-color-tail follow Too buffalo Pwako
mu'etto kwa i'kiusha na mu'kwa'ma 'na anwo chu'ettowe ti'la nap'kiu i'tu
follow night Kwama bat distant
pwa'ko'ni ten'okwina tna te'hula ha twa nu'kwa'ma na che'ten'ta a'huyu
Pwako lose help moon
i'pwa'ko 'hie sha ma'kwe te kna si'fushi 'ni'tan'ta sha'mi'li i'si'wo'swa
Pwako of Makwe and Fushi moon send Woswa

kni wunau'kiashe tikiakia ekte'apkman kia'wulwikia eith'ka kiu wo

seven seeds silver skirtserpents roots
an'nochijan twa ne mu'etto ne'pwa'lo mu'etto'swi i'wo'swa tuwo lu'too kwe'i
gazelle-leg
follow Pwako follow Woswa Too
a'wo'swa ne we'atina in'i'pwa'ko twesa ko'leho'li shi'wammina twe lu'konsi
Woswa black Pwako kill most-big-buffalo
i'wo'swa tan'ta tse'ki a'shaw'li pwa'lo'na pish'le kwa u'liuna te tehula
Woswa to moon return Pwako sleep ask
ana tan'ta a'huyu i'pwan'chau te'opluno i'pwa'ko na mu'etto kwa te'opkuno
moon from sky young Pwako follow young
i'pwa'ko 'ite'chu'nia ak'we pish'le anopwa'ko twa ko u'liuna te'opkuno
Pwako sleep Pwako ask young
 te'wo i'kwe'tenoka pa'yatamu tiu kwa tan'ta te'optekuna kwe i'pwa'ko
Who are? Payatamu great feast Pwako
a'pa'yatamu twe shi'optekunawi i'pva'ko ushi'mu'etto twa iu'too
Payatamu bride Pwako lead me Too
i'kiusha'ah twa pwa'ko ne pish'le twa i'kiusha zem'akwiwe a'pwa'ko
darkness Pwako sleep nights twelve Pwako
ha'ova i'pa'yatamu twa mu'etto a'pwa'ko ne u'she'liuna i'mu'tan'ta
waken Payatamu go Pwako call moon
i'nu'pa'yatamu i'pwan'chau kwa te'vo'swa a'nota wo'swa shi'opkuno zwe
Payatamu from sky Woswa your bride
a'pwa'ko an'teyo kwa shi'wo'swa u'liuwa ne twa wunau'kiashe i'nu'chupachi
Pwako strike Woswa fall seven seeds birth
i'etto'chu lu'kon'siweko twa ko'leho'i twa a'nanamei te'winau'sone in'ta
fox rabbit coyote rattlesnake wolf
intwaso ti'yi'ahalo tuwo konwasilu i'swano'kio tzwe zem'akwiwe we'pachichuna
gray turkey eagle cloud-rain twelve days.

The Bride of Pwa'ko (free rendering)

One day the young man Pwako, son of Ma'kwe the tortoise and Fushi the badger,
went out hunting. Kwa'ma the bird with the seven-colored tail approached him.
Kwa'ma said to Pwa'ko: "If you follow me I will lead you to the River Too
where the buffalo go to drink." Kwa'ma flew into the forest and Pwa'ko followed
him. Night came. In the darkness, the bright colors of Kwa'ma's tail could no
longer be seen, and he flew away like a bat. Pwa'ko had no guide now, so he got
lost. He asked the Moon to help him. "I am Pwa'ko," he said, "son of Ma'kwe the
tortoise and Fushi the badger." And the Moon sent him the great flower Wo'swa.
Her seven seeds shone like silver and she wore a skirt of serpents and her roots
were the legs of a gazelle. Wo'swa said to Pwa'ko, "Follow me. I will lead you to
the River Too." Pwa'ko followed the great flower and at dawn they reached the
valley where the river lowed. "Here is the River Too," said Wo'swa, who in the
daylight had become quite black in color. Pwa'ko saw many buffalo. He took
arrow and killed the biggest of them. "I must go back to the Moon," said the
great flower, and vanished. Pwa'ko rested all that morning. Then he wished to
return to his village, but when night fell he got lost again. Then he said to the
Moon: "Send me Wo'swa, your flower." And so, a young woman came down
from the skies. "Follow me," she said. "I will lead you to your village." Pwa'ko
followed the young woman and they walked for a long way. Then Pwa'ko said,
"I am weary. I want to sleep." "Sleep then," said the woman. So Pwa'ko lay
down and she stretched out beside him, and thus they slept for twelve days and
nights. When Pwa'ko awoke the young woman was sleeping in his arms. He
woke her, and asked, "Who are you?" And she answered, "I am Pa'yatamu,
daughter of the Moon." and Pwa'ko said, "I want you as my bride." So they went
to the village, and there was a great feast, and Pwa'ko married Pa'yatamu,
daughter of the Moon.
One day Pwa'ko said to his bride, "I want to go back to the River Too, and you
must lead me." So they went into the forest, and Pwa'ko followed his bride, who
seemed to be made of silver from top to toe. Darkness came, and Pwa'ko said, "I
am weary. Let us sleep." And they lay down and slept for twelve days and
nights. But when Pwa'ko awoke his bride was no longer there. Then Pwa'ko
called to the Moon: "O Moon, where is your daughter?" And the Moon said
nothing, but down from the skies came the flower Wos'wa. "I want Pa'yatamu,
my bride," said Pwa'ko. "I am your bride," said the flower. Then Pwa'ko was
very angry, and he struck the Wo'swa. The seven silver seeds fell to the earth,
and from them were born the fox, the rabbit, the coyote, the rattlesnake, the
wolf, the gray turkey, and the eagle. A great cloud then covered the Moon, and it
rained for twelve days and nights.

The seeds of the Giraluna also figure in the creation myths of certain African
peoples. Typical of these is the Wombasa legend retold by Harold Wittens in his
book Under the Wombasa Sky.5

The Sun and the Moon

Before they lived in the sky the Sun and the Moon dwelt on earth. They were
peasants, and in their gardens they grew all the plants in the world. But one day
the Sun made a flower that watched him wherever he went. When the Moon saw
this flower she was envious, and she wanted it so much that during the night she
stole it and planted it in her own garden. When day came the Sun could not see
his favorite flower anywhere in his garden. He searched and searched; and
during the night he found it in his neighbor's garden. There was a furious quarrel,
and at last the Sun tore the plant from the earth so violently that its seeds flew
right up into the sky. In this way were the stars created. The Moon climbed up on
a cloud to get them back, but the cloud melted away and the Moon was left
hanging in the sky. When day came the Sun planted another sunflower in his
garden, and the plant began to grow. It grew higher and higher, and at last grew
so high that the Sun could not gather the seeds. So he climbed up the stalk. But
when he reached the flower itself the stalk broke, and the Sun was also left
hanging in the sky. Half the seeds fell into his garden and half into the Moon's
garden, and so it came about that there are flowers of the day and flowers of the
night.

Giraluna gigas
Giraluna gigas is so called on account of its unusual height, some specimens
being among the tallest plants known to parallel botany. It normally measures
over two meters in height, but can approach as much as four meters, as in the
case of the biggest of the Lady Isobel Middleton group. This group is in fact
perfectly representative of G. gigas. It consists of three plants which include all
the morphological features of the variety, as well as a number of somewhat
disconcerting anomalies that have not failed to produce some wild theories and
bitter disputes in the worlds of botany and biology.
The sensational discovery of this huge group of flowers in the Tampala
mountains provides a good example of the determination and personal sacrifice
that often lie behind the terse, impassive language of scientific communication.
Luckily for us this discovery was the subject of a monograph by Maessens,
issued in 1972 by the London publisher George Alien Thomas, who was for
many years the close friend and patron of the famous Belgian biologist whose
recent death is a great loss to science.
It was not Maessens who first discovered the group. He was in fact told about it
by his compatriot Paul van Berghen, who in turn had heard it mentioned during a
visit he paid to the London headquarters of the Royal Society for the
Advancement of Parabotany. At a dinner given in his honor he met Sir Joseph
Middleton, who had just returned from an expedition to the mountains of
Tampala in northeastern India, an area particularly rich in parallel flora. The
object of the expedition was to collect specimens of Protorbis minor, a kind of
parallel mushroom which is quite commonly found under the huge genensa trees
of the Landur forests, but which no one had ever managed to transport. Like
many other parallel plants, Protorbis minor is no sooner touched than it
dissolves into a pinch of grayish dust which certain tribes in the region mix with
hallucinatory substances.
Sir Joseph told Van Berghen Iriefly about his expedition, and with tears in his
eyes and a voice half strangled with emotion he recounted its tragic end. The
details were passed on to Maessens a few months later in the course of a long
recorded interview. He then compared this account with other testimony, and
with several documents including the mysterious photographs taken by Marshall
Norton, the news photographer and amateur parabotanist who accompanied the
Middletons on their last adventure in India.
The expedition took place at the end of 1970, and consisted of Sir Joseph and
Lady Isobel, Marshall Norton, and Patrick Hume, a chemical engineer who had
invented a process whereby objects could be instantaneously enclosed in
steophytic plastics. They halted for a while at the village of Banampur to
organize the final phase of the expedition, and decided to spend the whole month
of October in a strategically placed clearing in the Landur jungle. This clearing
was duly marked on their map with the letter M.
On September 27, the small group left Banampur, along with a score of Amished
porters laden with cases of camping equipment, scientific instruments,
medicines, tinned food, and leathern bags full of drinking water.
The expedition reached point M right on time, on September 30. A few days
were required to set up camp and organize the work program, but the prospects
of success looked bright from the start. Indeed as early as the second day Lady
Isobel came across a group of Protorbis minor only a few yards from the camp,
while at the third attempt Hume succeeded in enclosing one in loco within a
block of steophytyrol fifteen by fifteen by fifteen centimeters. This is now the
most perfect inclusion among the seven splendid specimens on view in the
Birmingham Natural History Museum.
During the next three weeks the Middletons collected twenty-four P. minor,
several woodland tweezers which Hume managed to implastify, and a small
Solea fortius with an unusually fine series of protuberances. A discovery of quite
exceptional interest was made in the neighborhood of some caves which showed
signs of having been once inhabited. This was a unique group of stone figures of
the Akda period, rather roughly carved, which depicted erotic scenes in which
Yakanan and Drapanias copulated according to the Thamed rite, while holding in
their hands small Solea argentea whose tips were in the form of a lingam and a
yoni.6
It was Marshall Norton who by a curious concatenation of circumstances
revealed the existence of the group of Giraluna. He personally recounted to
Maessens all the events that led up to this spectacular discovery. For the day of
October 21 the four of them had planned a reconnaissance on horseback toward
the valley of the Andrapati, on the western side of the jungle, but at the last
moment Lady Isobel said she was not feeling well and Sir Joseph decided to stay
behind in camp to keep her company. Patrick Hume, who had had some
technical troubles with his last inclusions, seized the chance offered by this
sudden change of plans to look into the partial failure of his equipment. So it
came about that Norton was left to do this particular trip done. In his knapsack
he packed a bottle of water, a box of biscuits, and a camera, and at about ten
o'clock in the morning he rode off into the dark forest. Luckily the camera he
took was a Japanese Dakon with a polyephymerol lens expressly designed and
made for the chromometric photography of parallel plants. Such a camera is
capable of registering colored pigments that are invisible to the human eye.
Toward the end of the morning Norton arrived at the edge of the jungle, tied his
horse to the branch of a centuries-old genensa tree, and sat down on a large
boulder to admire the view of the wonderful valley where, according to the
Pradahana, Shiva brought the sacred calf Nandi to graze in the spring.
A slight heat haze lay on the grass, and the surrounding mountains were blue-
violet. The River Andrapati (from Sanskrit andra, lazy) lay like a heavy silver
ribbon in the bottom of the broad valley. The immensity of the silence was
accentuated by just a few sounds:
 Fig. 22 Marshall Norton's photograph of the Lady Isobel Middleton group

the rustle of the genensa leave, as the horse tossed his head, the distant and
sporadic cry of the hooting oopoopa, a native of the valley, which from time to
time seemed to be answering the all-too-brief call of the cinnabar cricket.
Norton, enraptured by the beauty of the scene, was suddenly overcome by a
great nostalgia. He had once described this feeling as "nostalgia for the present,
which rouses the desire to fix forever the image of the moment that we are afraid
of losing, and which in fact it seems we have already lost, while in reality it is
still with us." Automatically he took the camera from his knapsack, raised it to
set the focus . . . and realized that he had brought the wrong camera! But
instinctively he went through the routine of taking a photograph, setting the
focus, clicking the shutter, aware all the time that he was performing a series of
useless gestures, a kind of empty ritual. But things did not turn out that way at
all. The photo he took was in all probability the most important revelation of the
whole expedition7 (Fig. 22).
The next day he developed the roll of film in the portable but perfectly equipped
darkroom that had been specially designed for the expedition by Seckton
Brothers of London. He then found that, contrary to his expectations, the
photograph was perfect, that the polyephymerol lens had acted as a polarizing
filter and penetrated the haze, revealing details that had not been visible to the
naked eye. By far the most obvious of these, right in the foreground, was the
strange silhouette of a group of three enormous flowers. They could not have
been more than ten yards from the spot where Norton had been sitting, and he
was absolutely certain that he had not seen them.
Norton was so utterly astonished that in spite of the late hour he rushed to the
Middletons' tent to wake them up and share the discovery with them. But he
found the kerosene lamp still burning, while Sir Joseph and Hume, fully dressed,
were sitting beside Lady Isobel’s camp bed. She seemed to be deeply asleep.
Hume tiptoed out of the tent and told Norton that in the last few hours Lady
Isobel's condition had suddenly worsened. She had a raging fever that neither
antibiotics nor injections of pirianthropophyllin had had the least effect on.
After a sleepless night the party decided to return to Banampur, where there was
a doctor who even spoke a few words of English. It was the end of the
expedition. Lady Isobel lay for two days and nights in a coma before she died,
her body covered with small purplish blotches, in the little white temple of
Banampur dedicated to the paunchy elephant-god Ganesha and transformed for
the occasion into an improvised hospital room. As if by some kind of presage the
temple had been completely rewhitewashed, inside and out, just a few weeks
earlier. Also whitewashed was the only piece of furniture in the place, an English
Victorian chest of drawers which served as an altar. On this was the statue of the
god himself, from whose trunk there now hung the hypodermoclysis which had
been used in the last desperate attempt to save the poor woman's life.
As soon as they learned of the death of Lady Isobel, the men of Banampur built
a pyre on the little beach formed by a loop in the Bahtra River, and at sunset six
Anished youths bore her body down to the beach, wrapped in a white sheet and
placed upon a board which they held high above their heads. When the body had
been arranged upon the pyre the face was unveiled. Sir Joseph came forward
with slow and heavy steps, and into his wife's crossed hands he pressed a little
cube of plastic containing a Protorbis minor. By his own wish, he himself set
light to the pyre.
A few days later the three men started on the return journey. With them, together
with their priceless scientific finds, they carried a small canister containing the
ashes of the great biologist. And one foggy January night Sir Joseph emptied the
ashes into the Thames, in the knowledge that in some very distant place
unknown to man the gray waters of the Thames would mingle with those of the
sacred Ganges, and consecrate the memory of Lady Isobel.
Less moving, perhaps, but a better guarantee of immortality, was the ceremony
which took place a few months later at the Society for the Advancement of
Parabotany On this occasion the group of Giraluna from the Andrapati Valley,
the most important single discovery in parallel botany, was officially given the
name of Lady Isobel Middleton group.
It was then that Maessens decided to study the three Giraluna gigas in person.
On October 1, 1971, he started for the valley, stopping overnight in Banampur,
where he visited the ill-fated temple. A piece of transparent plastic tubing was
still hanging from the trunk of the elephant-god. He called on Dr. San to convey
good wishes from Sir Joseph, and at dawn on October 2, accompanied by one of
the young porters from the Middleton expedition and carefully following the
itinerary mapped out for him by Norton, he set out on the long journey on
horseback.
At sunset he reached the exact spot where the photographer had stopped, and sat
on the very stone that had been described to him. He looked slowly around him,
observing everything, and then he took out the now-famous photograph of the
three Giraluna, which Norton had given him on the day of his departure from
London. Everything fitted precisely. It was as if the landscape, creeping little by
little into his consciousness, emerging like the image of a Polaroid photograph,
came gradually to coincide with the picture he held in his hand. The vastness of
the silence, also, suddenly deprived of the oopoopa's cry, was the very same that
Norton had described with such loving exactitude. Maessens had planned to
spend the night on that stone, beside the huge genensa tree to which he, like
Norton before him, had tethergd the horses. The young Amished squatted down
at the foot of the tree and went to sleep at once, while the scientist sat and sUred
into the dark, waiting for the flowers to appear in the ambiguous light of the full
moon.
He sat there for a long time. At last, at about two o'clock, and exactly where the
photograph showed the silhouettes of the three plants, Maessens began to make
out what at first was a barely discernible transparent shadow. Gradually,
however, it took on more apparent substance, until the three flowers were
perfectly visible.
In his little book An Adventure in Parallel Botany,8 Maessens does not attempt
to conceal the emotion he felt at that moment. "I stayed fixed to that stone as if I
were myself a part of it, holding my breath for fear that the least noise or
movement might break the charm and cancel the image that was in the process
of forming." However, during the next two hours he was able to observe,
measure and record at leisure everything he needed for a complete examination
of the plants. It was when he finally decided to approach the group that their
outlines seemed literally to melt away. They did not return, though Maessens
remained on the spot until dawn, when he rode back exhausted to Banampur,
with his notebook crammed with information. And here in brief are his
observations.
The group consists of three flowers, two more or less equal in height (GA and
GB) and one, GC, which is taller and somewhat different in form. GA and GB
correspond in every detail to the description of Giraluna gigas previously given
by Hydendorp. Their overall height is 2.85 meters, while their abundant vetullae
are composed of about a hundred pendulants, of an average diameter of three
centimeters. The lowest of these extend onto the ground and give a look of
stability to the plants. The column, of which only the upper part was not hidden
by the avvulta, has a diameter of about twenty centimeters and is flecked here
and there with paramimetic bark. The coronas have no petals, but contain
spherostills twenty-five millimeters in diameter which gleam with a yellowish
metallic light vaguely reminiscent of brass. Flower GA has fifty-four
spherostills, while to judge from the empty sockets in its corona flower GB is
missing eighteen. The coronas are forty-eight centimeters in diameter and about
eighteen centimeters thick. The angle between the corona and the column is
about thirty-seven degrees.
Flower GC, both in the description given by Maessens and in Norton's original
photograph, is in many respects different from the other two, and it is about this
third flower that Hydendorp and other scientists have expressed doubts and
reservations. According to Maessens it has an overall height of 3.60 meters,
while the diameter of the column is less than that of the other two. The corona,
which in proportion to its height ought to be well over fifty centimeters in
diameter, is also smaller than those of the others, and is completely without
"seeds." But the oddest feature of this flower is that it has no avvulta. There are a
few very long pendulants which appear to have been crushed against the column
and look like part of it. Although on a completely different scale, of course, they
are a little like the dribbles of wax running down the sides of a candle. Maessens
declares that beside its two sisters GC gives the impression of being dead. "But
for the fact that we are concerned with a parallel plant," he writes, "I would have
no hesitation in describing it as a dead plant. But there can be no death without
life in the proper sense, and this cannot exist without the binomial
time/substance (t/s). Now, as we know, parallel flora owes its entire nature to the
absence of this binomial. It is therefore impossible that the tallest Giraluna of
the Lady Isobel Middleton group could be a dead plant, or to put it another way,
less living than the other two." For this author the plant only has individual
features that are different, and one gets the impression that he is at pains to avoid
the admission of an anomaly.
The publication of his study gave rise to a storm of conjectures and hypotheses.
Some scholars such as Giraudy, even hold the opinion that it is not a Giraluna at
all, and perhaps not even a parallel plant. Deliberately ignoring the selenotropic
existence of the plant, he maintains that chance alone has placed this flower
beside two others of similar form. He thinks that it might even be a petrified
sunflower of the post-Erocene era, and to support his view he points to the
absence of spherostills and of any real pendulants to speak of. But he does not
explain how a fossil plant, concrete and inert, can vanish at the approach of a
man, as the testimony of Maessens expressly states. Hydendorp attacks Giraudy
directly, and puts forward the simple hypothesis of an anomaly. He says that
known examples of parallel plants are now sufficiently numerous to allow us to
generalize and classify. But we have no guarantee that just beyond the limits of
our knowledge there is not some completely baffling anomaly. "If we know of
only two individuals of a species," says Hydendorp, "it is absurd to call one of
them anomalous. If one of them were to be so called, which one would it be? But
if we know of a thousand specimens an anomaly would become possible, and
with ten thousand it would be probable."
But the basic question remains: Is the concept of anomaly possible in the case of
parallel plants? In normal botany anomalies occur due to internal and external
acts and events. Irregularities, fractures, or a wrong distribution of the
anthrosomes in the Olsen chain can certainly cause changes of form (e.g. the
four-leafed clover), of color (September rose), or of surface (scaly plane tree). It
is the same for atmospheric agents, the actions of men and animals, and
ecological changes of all kinds. But in the case of parallel plants, for the
individual as well as for the species, formal characteristics are part of a special
and constant mode of being themselves. If self-presentation is sufficient to
justify the generalization that defines a species, then it will also justify those
particular formal deviations that make each individual different from the others
and recognizable as a separate entity.
In the specific case of flower GC of the Lady Isobel Middleton group we can
only go on waiting for new discoveries and explanations. If Giraudy is wrong,
and chance has not given us a petrified sunflower of the post-Erocene era beside
two Giraluna, then the possibility remains that what we have is an anomalous
specimen of a hitherto unknown plant similar to the Giraluna. Only the future
can tell us for certain.

Giraluna minor
This is a miniature Giraluna that scarcely ever reaches, and never pl. xxvn
exceeds, ten centimeters in height. Its habitat is the undergrowth, and
particularly that of the creeping Anaclea that wreathes itself in a chaotic network
around the knotty roots of the genensa and white tarica trees of tropical forests.
Hidden in the darkness cast by this luxuriant vegetation, G. minor lives alone or
in small groups, offering its tiny gleaming seeds to an invisible moon.
The flower has all the features of the common Giraluna. The differences lie
entirely in its size and proportions. The column is little more than seven
centimeters tall, and is enveloped right up to the corona in a small avvulta
composed of hundreds of pendulants as fine as threads, which sink into the black
moss at the base of the plant. The corona is proportionately quite large, its
diameter often reaching half the total height of the plant, and it has a few
rudimentary petals. The "seeds" are ^.5 millimeters, the same size as the ball
bearings used for bicycles. They are shinier than the spherostills of the common
Giraluna, resembling silver if they can be said to resemble anything. It is hard to
understand how they can shine, buried as they are in the nearly total darkness of
the undergrowth. They impress one as being full of an interior light, like a voice
crying out in protest or desire.
Giraluna minor has sometimes been mistaken for Protorbis minor, which shares
the same environmental conditions. The two plants resemble one another chiefly
in size and in color, but P. minor does not have the spherostils which are such an
outstanding feature of G. minor.
Hydendorp, to whom we owe the detailed description of these minuscule parallel
flowers, has collected a good number of specimens, mostly set in plastic by the
instantaneous in loco method developed by Hume for the preservation of P.
minor. But his collection also includes a few rare specimens which have been
transhabitated along with a sizable chunk of surrounding soil. Unfortunately the
plants were taken to England a few months ago, and they are losing their
substance so rapidly that it is feared they will soon cease to exist altogether. We
may be left with the spherostills and the slice of original habitat, which will be
useful to Hydendorp for his studies in parallel ecology, a branch of science of
which he has only just sketched out the basic principles.9
G. minor has been found in nearly all the tropical rain forests of the world, from
Brazil to New Anantolia. The Indians of the Rio Rojo attribute special powers to
these minute nocturnal plants. They say that the young alligators that infest the
river have an overwhelming craving for them, and as they wander further and
further from the river in their f'antic search, they eventually die of hunger and
thirst. If it were not for this, according to the Indians, the river would be so
overpopulated with alligators that it would become a solid mass of the creatures,
a hard scaly road through the jungle.
 PL. XXVII Giraluna minor in typical habitat

1. Johannes Hydendorp, De Mazndbloem (Nederlandse Uitgeversmaat-schappij,

Honingen, 1973).
2. The so-called Giraluna of Sommacampagna is a bronze which Giacomo
Roselli has dated at the third century b.c. It was discovered while digging the
foundations of a cooperative winery near Caselle di Sommacampagna (Verona).
We do not know if this magnificent piece of sculpture is a copy or a
reconstruction based on tales or old legends. The only other object found during
the same excavations was a tot decorated with small round protuberances the
same size as the spherostills of the Giraluna. These occur at regular intervals
around its rim.

3. Anseimo Geremia, "Un ponte tti. Ie botaniche?" (Quademi Benenton, January

1968). Geremia is Curator of the Parallel Botany Department of the Fabrizio
Benenton Natural History Museum, Verona.

4. Born in Bierskonov in 1820 to a family of impoverished peasants, Oncharov

died in Nizhni Novgorod in 1888. He wrote a number of ambitious but
unsuccessful novels. "The Flower with the Golden Seeds" is one of the stories in
The Perfumed Sky of Biersk, a book for children and the only one of his works to
earn him some repute.

5. Harold Wittens, Under the Wombasa Sky (Simmons and Son, Liverpool,
1937).

6. In Thamed mythology Yakanan and Drapanias represent the

anthromorphization of the lingam and the yoni. During the three days of the
Hamadush the Yakanan on horseback chase the Drapanias, who flee from them
swiftly on winged gazelles. Finally they copulate with them in the Ldhamna
position, holding the symbolic silver whips above their heads.

7. Marshall Norton, “Four American Photographers” (Hyford Gallery, London,

1965).

8. Albert Maessens, An Adventure in Parallel Botany (George Alien Thomas,

London, 1972).

9. Johannes Hydendorp, Parallel Ecology and Plant Behavior (Van der Vos,
Amsterdam, 1974).

THE SOLEA
Of all the parallel plants of the Beta group, the Solea is the most complex in
meanings and suggestions. Luckily for us it is also the one of which we have the
largest number of detailed and convincing reconstructions, and by a process of
repeated comparison we have gained a complete and exact knowledge of its
morphology. The plant is extremely widespread in geographical distribution but
is nevertheless fairly rare, and its origins are lost in the depths of time. Our
knowledge therefore represents a considerable scientific feat.
Unlike other parallel plants, in which the relation between form and meaning is
nearly always tenuous and often concealed, the Solea expresses its existential
problems both directly and dramatically through its physical mode of being. Its
nature and its morphology are inseparable, and they must be examined together
in order to shed light, if possible, on their curious interdependence.
This is not easy, because if, on the one hand, the Solea expresses itself through
its form, on the other, we are faced with the fact that what this form expresses is
the complete inability of the plant to express itself. Paradoxically, its drive to
self-assertion in the complex world of botany culminates in a language which,
though rudimentary, in some way succeeds in embodying the frustrations arising
from not being able to produce leaves, fruit, branches, flowers, and even a real
set of roots. Spinder points out that this implies a form of "vegetal" imagination,
obviously at a subconscious level, an awareness of its limitations, of what it
lacks.
"But," queries Spinder, "what kind of self-image can a plant have?"1 The gradual
realization of a genetic program implies a continual process of proposal and
feedback, in constant reference to a complete and final model. In the course of
growth, any deviations from this program have to be checked and corrected,
while temptations have to be suppressed and anxieties soothed. And what is
more, we have to reckon with the environment, which imposes its inexorable
limitations from without. In normal botany, to bring about the final "presence" of
a plant, to perfect its individual mode of being and its insertion into the general
system of the biosphere, this process is carried out constancy by all the organs,
and by each according to the function proper to it. In other words the genetic
program is the instrument by which the adult plant is formed, while the model,
like a kind of consciousness or self-image, is spread throughout all the parts of
the plant. If the Solea belonged to normal botany, the cause of its pathetic
arrested development might well be found, like a phenomenon of degeneration,
in hostile environmental conditions or in the defective execution of the genetic
program. But this would at the most justify an individual anomaly. The play of
natural forces, utterly devoted to survival, would not permit the evolution of a
variety that was permanently incomplete or crippled. In all probability, mutations
of a defensive type would come into play to bestow on the plant a different
normality and give birth to a new species.
In parallel botany, any such theory, which implies an ontogeny based on the
processes of growth, must obviously be rejected from the start. Its plants,
motionless in time, are foreign to any type of evolutionary change, including
degeneration. They are as they are, impervious to conditions alien to their own
manner of being. What seems to suggest an anomaly, such as the stunted
excrescences of the Solea, must in fact be an integral and permanent part of their
morphology.
All the same, Spinder thinks that even within the limits of a closed and static
system such as parallel botany, the forms of the Solea might have some precise
significance. He compares the plant to a piece of sculpture. "Its meanings," he
says, "do not reveal themselves gradually, as with a normal plant in the course of
growth. They simply are, in the same way as the idea of a piece of sculpture is in
the mind of the artist who creates it. We can only attempt to read them if we
move, as it were, from the outside of time to the inside, thus repeating-albeit in
reverse-the imaginary creative process."
For Spinder it would be absurd to attribute to the Solea impulses or frustrations
that would imply an awareness of its own body. If by means of its rudimentary
forms the body of the plant expresses its incompleteness, its inhibitions, refusals
and failures, this does not for a moment imply that this can be attributed, to
interior exigencies or external conditioning. It is at part of a manner of being, not
a manner of becoming. "It is," writes Spinder, "like a miracle never brought to a
conclusion, suspended at the very climax of its performance. The fascination and
beauty of the melancholy Solea lie in the motionlessness of its becoming, frozen
at the critical moment of evolution."
Jonathan Chase accepts Spinder's theory but refuses to be inhibited by it. "The
theory put forward by our illustrious colleague," he writes in The Journal of
Parallel Botany, "precludes any description that is not a cold mechanical
inventory of the morphological properties of the plant. Without saying so in so
many words, as if he were afraid of the consequences, Spinder implies that the
form of the Solea is purely symbolic, as its very presence is: 'Symbol of itself,
like a piece of sculpture.' But in this case we must have the courage to give free
rein to our imagination. If, as seems likely, we cannot attribute an interior life to
the Solea, then we must invent one for it."
Chase, thus freed from what he calls "the absurdities of dumb man's speech,"
goes on to explain the meaning of the Solea in the following way:

"The Solea does not, like normal plants, possess an awareness of its own
 being and aspirations. It does not live, like its sisters in normal botany,
constantly in reference to a genetically prescribed model. Rather, we think
it is pervaded by a general sensuality, a state of expectation, forever aroused
by the signals it receives but always disappointed by its own responses. The
messages that arrive from the outside and touch the minuscule erogenous
zones distributed all over its body, these are the parallel equivalent of the
normal genetic program. The messages propose leaves and stalks, buds and
flowers, but the Solea, daughter of a different kingdom, is sadly forced to
reject them all. Formless growths, bunches of swellings, branches that cling
to its body like veins, and here and there a crippled wing of a leaf, the
marred prelude to a leaf-bearing branch -these are the melancholy proofs of
its frustrated dream."

The Solea can now be recognized in many ancient legends of the most diverse
ethnic groups, but in Western scientific literature direct references to it are few
and of doubtful veracity. The first mention of "a plant which cannot ripen,
standing upright in the bare soil of the [rubber] plantations" is found in Antonio
Guerrero's classic volume.2 In 1896 an explorer and raconteur from Dijon, a
certain Jacques Pubiennes, wrote an article for the Journal des Families in which
he alluded to "a plant obscene on account of its phallic verticality," a phrase
which cost him his job on the magazine and his secretaryship of the Socete de la
Decouverte, which then had its headquarters in the capital city of snails and
mustard.
In his book Flora South of the Border John Foreman, an American naturalist,
tells of a journey through Patagonia in 1902.3 In the course of it, he writes, "we
saw strange plants in those woods: bare stems completely without leaves, and
even without color, to which the Indians attribute supernatural powers. They say
that these plants, which look like the knotty walking sticks carried by old men,
that in these parts are called paarstoks, have not been seen to grow or to die
within living memory."
More recently the Dutch science magazine Wetenschaap voor ledereen carried
an article in which a certain Jan Van Handel claimed to have attempted to pick
some plants, which from his description bear some resemblance to the Solea, in
a rubber plantation in Sumatra. He writes that in spite of the frail appearance of
the plants, and the fact that they had no roots, it proved impossible to tear them
up. When the dajaks working in the plantation realized what he was doing they
became extremely agitated, but when he tried to ask them about the plants they
fell silent and refused to reply.
We are uncertain about the accuracy of these descriptions. The only Solea
actually gathered, and the only one we have been able to subject to firsthand
examination in spite of its state of semidisintegration, is the specimen of S.
fortus brought back from Tampala by Sir Joseph Middleton. Many scientists,
including Spinder, have expressed doubts as to its attribution, and these doubts
are partly based on the fact that near the top of the plant there are two little
branches, one of which bears what looks like a small trifid leaf.
The Solea is not a selenotropic plant like the Giraluna and, theoretically, ought
to be perfectly visible. But, as in the case of all plants of the Beta group, our
knowledge unfortunately cannot be based on direct observation. The descriptions
we have quoted above are probably ingenuous attempts to take myths and
legends gathered in places where the Solea has existed and pass them off as
firsthand information.

Fig. 23 Marcello Vanni, director of the Campora Laboratory

Luckily, however, and thanks to a grant from the Joachim Rosenbach Foundation
of Milwaukee, the Laboratorio delle Campora has succeeded in putting together
a dozen casts of reconstructions of Solea found in as many collections,
museums, and laboratories (pl. xxviii) throughout the world. This small group of
specimens has in the first place enabled students to establish analogies which in
turn have formed the basis for a first tough morphology of the plant. By
collaborating with other laboratories, Professor Vanni, the director of the
Laboratorio delle Campora has been able not only to enlarge his collection but
also, thanks to the personal generosity of Mrs. Emily Rosenbach, to buy a few
very rare and precious original reconstructions made in loco. The laboratory has
prepared a general inventory, updated to December 1975, of all the Solea in
museums, laboratories, and private collections. So far twenty-eight plants have
been recorded, but it is to be hoped that after the publication of this little
catalogue of Vanni's there will be news of many more plants, now hidden away
in secret or inaccessible places.
The catalogue includes a drawing of a Solea based on the collation of all known
specimens: a theoretical Solea, therefore, incorporating the average forms,
proportions, and features of all the plants studied. Vanni points out that there was
no particular difficulty involved in achieving this generalized model, given the
marked similarity between one specimen and another. As far as size is concerned
the Solea can be divided into two main groups, those about forty centimeters in
height (S. minor) and those which measure about eighty centimeters (S. major).
The two exceptions to this rule are the para-parasitic 'tree-trunk" Solea in the
Birmingham Museum and the great gilded Solea recorded by Woodby, both one
hundred and fifty centimeters in height. The proportions remain more or less
constant in all varieties, and they also have protuberances of similar shape. We
have thus been able to gain a fair degree of knowledge of the most striking
feature of the plant, which is the particular rhythm which seems to involve all its
parts and which appears to be the sane for all known specimens. For some time
Spinder worked with Vanni at the Laboratorio delle Campora, and it is to him
that we owe the interesting account of the calculations that led to the precise
definition of this rhythm. These were based on the study of the "model" Solea,
which is now known to science as Solea Vannii. They tend to confirm the insight
of the great Malguena, who when he first saw the drawing exclaimed: "Parece
una falseta!" It was in fact the Spanish botanist who gave the plant its generic
name, which he took from the flamenco soleares, which the Andalusian gypsies
call soled. As this type of song bears such a marked resemblance to the plant, a
brief explanation of it might help us to understand the latter's basic structure.
"The soleares," writes the flimencologist Donado Malguena, brother of the
famous botanist, 'is one of the matrices of gypsy music, a cante jondo. Its name
is probably a gypsy translation of the Spanish word soledades, subsequently
abbreviated to soled. Like many other flamenco songs the soled is slow and
melancholy. The subject is nearly always desperation, the pangs of a love
despised or betrayed or lost.

Es tu quere como er biento y er mio como la piera que no tiene mobimiento

Yo me voy a gorbe loco porque una bina che tengo la esta bendemiando otro4
 PL. XXVIII Casts of Solea

"The rhythm of the soled, so hard to remember in spite of the heavy

accentuation, is the very one that gives flamenco music that strange mixture of
monotony and vitality which is so great a part of its charm. It consists of twelve
beats with the accents on the third, sixth, eighth, tenth, and twelfth, in the course
of the song and the dance these accents are often marked by clapping the hands
(palmas) or tapping with the heels. The rhythm is called the compos, and it is
performed on the guitar virtually as percussion. It is alternated with short
musical phrases known as falsetas, which fill in the pauses between the verses of
the song. The compos of the falseta, which is also strictly divided into twelve
beats, is often disguised by frequent and prolonged rubati."
The analogies between the topological rhythm of the protuberances on the Solea,
which Spinder describes as "fructescences in the state of intention (Urfruchten),'
and the time-rhythm of the flamenco soled are so great that we are tempted to
see a connection between the two. This is absurd of course. Even so, the fact
remains that S. Vannii can be read like a tablature. The distances between the
twelve rudimentary "bunches" which are found in a spiral round the plant
precisely reflect the sequence and proportions of the compos; 3-6-8-10-12.
Within the bunches themselves the rhythm is much tighter, but it is the same.
The single protuberances, which Jonathan Chase takes as representing a failed
attempt at foliation, occur at intervals of six and twelve beats. All these
excrescences are connected by long undulating filaments which alone or in
groups envelop the plant and occasionally weave patterns. In the context of the
rhythm of the soleares these would be falsetas, sometimes flowing and sad, at
other times nervous and passionate.
In the summer of 1975 Vanni learned that the great guitarist Antonio de los
Rietes was in nearby Siena for a series of lectures and concerts at the Accademia
Chigiana, so he took this opportunity to invite him to the Laboratorio delle
Campora. The tocaor from Jerez was immediately fascinated by the strange
plants, and eagerly consented to take part in the experiments which Vanni
proposed to him. These consisted in "transiting" the spatial rhythms of the plants
into musical terms. And so it came about that for some days de los Rietes was a
guest at the laboratory, and there he "played" twelve Solea in the possession of
the laboratory, as well as the theoretical Vannii. Recorded on tape, these Solea
provide dramatic confirmation of the exactness of Spinder's calculations and the
correctness of his interpretation. The guitarist himself was amazed at the result
of the experiments, which constituted the first musical rendering of any plant,
normal or parallel. The Solea Vanni now forms part of his concert repertoire of
cante jondo, with the title "Camporanas." The music is characterized by long ad
lib passages followed by brusque a tempi, which give it all the sensuality and
melancholy so typical of the soleares. These soleas of de los Rietes do more than
simply confirm the mathematical and topological insights of Spinder: they are
proof of the analogies existing between the various specimens, the same
analogies that made it possible to reconstruct S. Vannii in the first place.
There are only negligible differences between the rhythmic structures of the
thirteen soleares. What gives each song its individual character is the tissue of
the melodic lines, the length of the falsetas, the rubati derived from the shape of
the veins, the protuberances, and the isolated amorphous growths. Nor should we
forget the masterly execution of de los Rietes, that true duende of his that gives
each piece an unmistakable stamp of its own.
A feature that might cause some surprise, on the other hand, is the traditional
rasgueado which ends all these soleares, emphatic and violent but also in a
sense stylized and banal, and not an (pl. xxix) adequate expression of the tips of
the plants which it is attempting to interpret. Evidently the Spanish guitarist did
not succeed in reconciling the typically flamenco rhythmic and melodic
coherence which all the plants share, with the spirit expressed by their tips,
which vary from the festive baroque of No. 3 to the passionate simplicity of No.
19. His inability to find musical terms to generalize such marked differences
spotlights a phenomenon which not even scientists have been able to understand.
"How can it be," asks Spinder, "that a species showing such complex analogies
between one specimen and another can permit each plant to express itself in a
final statement of such utter individuality?" So far neither the Swiss biologist nor
Professor Vanni has thought fit to advance any theories about this phenomenon,
which is unique in parallel botany.( pl. XXIX)
 PL. XXIX Tips of Solea

If we were to join up all the places on the globe where Solea have been seen and
recorded, we would have a necklace as long as a meridian. Stories, myths, and
legends referring directly or indirectly to the plant were once hard to find, but
now they come to our attention quite frequently, and sometimes from the most
unlikely places. This is largely due to the dedication and perseverance of Joseph
Ascott, who has spent three years collecting and editing all available literature
on the Solea. Ascott, who taught for many years at Columbia University, was in
a position to use the vast network of informants and correspondents which
previously enabled him to make New York the richest mine of anthropological
documents in the world. Letters, telegrams, and even phone calls now quite
regularly arrive at the Laboratorio delle Campora, from people who think they
might possibly have Some piece of information that in some way concerns the
Solea. The bibliography of the plant is already fairly extensive, and from it we
have chosen a number of legends that shed some light on the emotional impact
the plant must have had on the vivid imaginations of peoples whose survival
involved direct participation in the mysteries of nature.

The Silver-leafed Tchavo

In the village of Zibersk in Tarzistan they tell the story of the Silver-leafed
Tchavo. Leo Lionni,5 the famous author of books for children, heard it while
traveling in Russia many years ago, and it was on this tale that he based one of
his most celebrated fairy tales, "Tico and the Golden Wings." This American
writer, who has been living for some years near Siena, Italy, is a frequent visitor
at the Laboratorio delle Campora and a personal friend of the director, Professor
Marcello Vanni. Thinking that he recognized the Solea in the generous shrub of
the story, he communicated the fact to Joseph Ascott, who included the fable in
his compendious bibliography of the plant.

Near Zibersk there are some grassy hills where the shepherds graze their sheep
and goats in the summertime. On top of one of these hills there was a small
thicket of Tchavo bushes, which grow to a height of about a meter and have
straight smooth stems and very shiny leaves shaped rather like vine leaves.
In that thicket there was one Tchavo that never managed to grow like the others.
It could only put out a few wretched buds that never burst into flower, but turned
as hard as wood and seemed to die. There among all the flourishing leafy plants
it looked as if it had been stripped bare by goats, although as everyone knows
goats do not eat Tchavo leaves, which are as bitter as gall.
One day a poor shepherd, weary and sad, was sitting beside this miserable plant,
this leafless waity stunted stem, and at a certain moment he burst into tears.
"What am I to do?" he sobbed. "How am I to buy medicines for my little sick
child?" Scarcely had he uttered the last word than one of the hard buds put forth
a little twig bearing two silver leaves. The shepherd could barely believe his
eyes. Very carefully he picked the two silver leaves, and to his astonishment he
saw that their places were taken by two real leaves.
Some days later a young woman was sitting near the thicket, and the air was still
and silent. Between one sigh and the next she said:
" Ah, if only I had the money for a dowry I would get married!" Then she heard
a sudden metallic rustle. A twig had sprouted from the stem, and it bore two
silver leaves. Excitedly she plucked the leaves, and two real leaves grew in their
stead. Then it was the turn of a poor peasant whose horse had just died: he too
received two silver leaves. Then the same thing happened to a miller who had
had all his flour eaten by rats. Each of them vowed to keep their good luck a
secret, but even so the news of ths Silver-leafed Tchavo did not take long to
spread through the village. One day it reached the ears of Szabit, a rich
moneylender. He hurried to the top of the hill as fast as his legs would carry him,
and there he sat down beside the Tchavo and began to moan: "Alas, what am I to
do, now that I am the poorest and most wretched man in all Russia?" Then he
looked anxiously at the plant. Yes, a twig sprang out with two leaves, and then
another, and another, until it was the tallest and finest plant in the whole thicket.
But the leaves were not silver. They were real leaves, green and tender, that
rustled in the wind.

Waa'ku-ni Creates Words

One of the most interesting legends of the Paraguayan Pa'nu'ra Indians, who live
on the Rio Rojo, is the one which tells of the creation of words. It is a perfect
example of the oral literature of South America, and was recorded by the French
biologist Lamont-Paquit. It bears eloquent witness to the extraordinary gifts of
wisdom, imagination and poetic instinct of this tribe, which ethnological
textbooks seldom hesitate to describe as the most primitive in the entire
American continent.

When Waa'ku-ni had created the earth he scratched ten furrows in it with his
fingers and sown the ten sounds of words. When spring came every furrow
bloomed with red, blue and yellow flowers, and black flowers and white flowers;
and Waa'ku-ni called them Ta-wa-te. But between one Furrow and the next
Waa'ku-ni saw there were small bare stalks, without any flowers or leaves. He
knew that he had not sown them, and he understood at once that they were the
flowers of silence.
He sent his son Wo'ke down to the earth and told him: "Go and cultivate the Ta-
wa-te." So Wo'ke watered the flowers with the rain of his sweat, and the Ta-wa-
te grew tall and strong and put forth many buds. But the plants between one
furrow and the next also grew, and one day, for fear that they should spread into
the furrows, Wo'ke decided to pull them up. But every time he pulled up a flower
of silence, one of the Ta-va-te lost its color. "What should I do?" he asked his
father. "Leave them be," replied Waa'ku-ni, "for every flower of sound must
dwell beside a flower of silence."
When the flowers were as tall as a man Waa'ku-ni said to Wo'ke, "Now make as
many bundles of Ta-wa-te as there are men and women on the earth, and give
one bundle to each of them, and tell them to make words. Then make the same
number of bundles of the flowers of silence, and give them to men and women,
and tell them to make silence." And this Wo'ke did, and men and women were
able to speak together, and to be silent and listen.

The Stake
The Patona Indians who live on the south bank of the Rio de los Almas have a
legend that was recorded by Randolph Reich and quoted in full in his Botanical
Psychogenesis.6

On an island in the delta of the river there is a dense wood of larch trees. In this
wood there lived a wicked white fox called Sipa. To persuade her not to eat their
hens the Indians drove a stake in underneath the larches. Every evening they tied
a toucan to this stake, and every night the fox came and carried off the toucan.
One morning the toucan was still there, and of the fox there was no sign. The
Indians thought that the fox must surely be dead, so they waited for a day and
then ,et the toucan free. But when they tried to remove the stake they found it
was impossible. They asked the shaman of the village for advice, and he said:
"Do not move the stake, for it contains the life of Sipa."
One night a hunter passing near the wood heard the sound of sobbing. He went
nearer, and found it was the stake that was weeping. Then the shaman gathered
together all the people of the village, and they sat round the stake and called
upon the soul of the dead fox. Little by little the stake began to put forth buds
and other small excrescences as hard as wood, and each time it put forth a bud it
stopped weeping for a while. When it was all covered with buds and warts and
excrescences the stake ceased weeping altogether.
Each year since then, the Indians have taken a dead toucan to the stake, and
during the night the stake has devoured the toucan.

The Stone of Truth

The island of Taokee is a great round flat totally bald pebble, one of the
Baratonga Archipelago, which lies in the Pacific between latitudes 19° and 22° S
and longitudes 161° and 165° W. In the few cracks to be found in its surface
there is a very fine gray dust, so heavy that not even the March winds manage to
shift it. When the sea is stormy, the spray mixes with this dust to form a kind of
leaden plaster that little by little fills up the cracks. Within the next few decades
the island will be completely without pores.
Long ago an Espak sparrow, probably lost from a sailing ship that was threading
its way through the archipelago, flew over the island but did not alight there.
However, it left on the island a few drops of its green excrement. At the end of
the last century, Herman von Bockensteil, the only explorer who has dared to set
foot on Taokee, described these tiny sp3ts as being a type of Klapaname lichen-
"the only sign of life on the island."
For the Antona, natives of the nearby islands, Taokee is taboo. They do not come
in close with their canoes even though they know that in the shadow of that great
boulder there are millions of the little trementids that with their sweet flesh are a
favorite prey of the fishermen of the islands.
 PL. XXX The great Stone of Ta

The legend which explains this taboo was recorded by that unpredictable but
conscientious English reporter and helatologist Samuel Doncett, who paid a
visit to the Baratonga group in the summer of 1907. He heard the story from a
native of the nearby island of Tsa-wa, a certain Sep'a-aok. We have transcribed it
from Doncett's original manuscript, now preserved in the library of the
University of Hawaii.
Sep'a-nok put his lips to the great stone* in the midst of the (pl. xxx) village of
Tsa-wa. The Antona do this to show that what they are about to say is the
absolute truth. This kind of kissing-oath is done on one's knees. In fact there is a
smooth hollow in the stone about forty-five inches from the ground, a mute
witness to the many thousands of tales which have been told by generations of
natives. Having taken his vow, Sep'a-nok told me the following story:

"The Great Disk O, father of all living creatures, cast eighteen handfuls of earth
into the sea. Thus he made the eighteen Baratonga islands. With the clay that
stuck to his fingers he made a flat round shape like a pat-la, and this he threw
further away, and it became the island of Taokee. But the soil of Taokee was the
dirt from the hand of the Great Disk, and for this reason it was more fertile than
that of other islands in the group, so that many grasses and trees grew there.
"One day there was a great storm, and Taokee turned upside down. The trees
were left with their tops hanging down in the water, while the surface was
covered with roots which soon died. The ants and the birds tried in vain to walk
upside down with their legs in the air, but they were all drowned. When he saw
all this, O said: "Ak se tikona," and the dead roots were turned to dust. Then he
said: "A'se nare!" and the rains came down and the dust was turned to stone. And
then he said: "Se-na nuaroa!" and a plant began to grow out of a hole that had
been left in the very middle of the island. It had a mighty stem, but however hard
it tried it could not put forth a single bud. Then it began to weep, and the Great
Disk heard its weeping, and he said: "Sua ne poa!" and the plant went to sleep.
In its sleep it dreamt a strange dream. It dreamt that it was surrounded by itself
and was so numerous as to fill the whole island. When O saw the dream he said:
"Anyone who wakes the flower from its dream will be eaten by the dragon He-
Ka." Thus it happened that so as not to wake the plant the island became taboo,
and no one has ever set foot there."

When he had finished I pointed to the distant island and asked Sep'a-nok, "But
do you think that the plant is really there on the island?" The native looked at me
in astonishment and said, "Can't you see that the island is covered with invisible
plants?"
Even today the natives of Tsa-wa sometimes stop their Chevrolets near the spot
where there once stood Ta, the stone of truth, and where there is now a traffic
light. Kissing the iron pillar of the traffic light, they tell their children the legend
of the Solea of Taokee.

The Golden Spear of Tschwama

Bhinaswar is a city in the Indian State of Orissa, to the south of Calcutta. It is
famous for its magnificent twelfth-century temples which rise like a thicket of
red cacti prickly with statues and occupy almost the whole northeast corner of
the city. Inside the temples there is a profusion of very fine bronze and stone
statues of Ganesha, Vishnu, Ramesh, and all the other divinities of the
promiscuous Olympus of the Hindus, while the great doors are embellished by
lingams and yonis of all sizes and materials.
In front of one of the temples, the immensely sacred Tchhimbha, there is a stone
platform bearing a very curious lingam, not smooth and stylized like the others
but as thin as a stick and covered with warty knobs. Unlike the rounded
hemisphere which tops the typical lingam, this comes to a rather misshapen
point. If we were not aware of the phallic symbolism of anything that rises
aggressively erect in the vicinity of a temple, we might be tempted to say that it
was a petrified tree trunk, or at least a model of a tree that has lost all its
branches. And we would not be far from the truth. This piece of sculpture has a
strange history, which seems to originate in a legend in the Pradishana.

One day Dhana, the beautiful young wife of Prince Tschwama, went into the
palace orchard to gather mangoes. The ripest fruit being on the highest branches,
Dhana fetched her husband's golden spear to knock them to the ground. But she
gave one blow that was so hard and awkward that the spear broke in two.
Fearing her husband's anger, Dhana buried the pieces in the soft earth of the
orchard.
When she returned to the palace, she found her husband there and he said:
"Bring me my golden spear. A hundred warriors of Amhadur are besieging the
city." Dhana could not confess to the truth, and she went into the orchard and
wept bitterly. But where her tears fell, there the earth broke open and there grew
a knobbly stem, as tall as a spear. Then Dhana heard a voice, and turning around
in surprise she saw Lord Krishna in the branches of the great mango tree. "Take
that stick," he told her. "It is the spear of Tschwama." Dhana took the stick from
the earth and brought it to her husband. "Lord Krishna told me this is your
spear," she said. Then Tschwama flew into a rage. 'Do you take me for a fool?"
he cried. And he seized the stick and began to beat his wife. But she felt nothing.
Tschwama struck with all his force, but Dhana merely smiled and said: "I feel no
pain." "hen Tschwama was frightened, and dropped the stick on the ground.
Dhana picked up the stick and ran outside. On the green lawn before the palace
Tschwama's horse was quietly grazing. Dhana leaped into the saddle and
galloped off to the hill where the hundred warriors were waiting, brandishing the
stick above her head. When the warriors saw a young woman coming against
them with nothing but a knobbly stick they began to laugh, but Dhana attacked
them one after the other, slaying twenty and putting the rest to flight. Then she
returned to the orchard to put the stick back where she had found it.
But lo, in the earth where the stick had grown there now stood Tschwama's
spear, shining and perfect. Dhana happily plucked it from the earth and put the
stick in its place. Then she hurried to the palace. "Tschwama," she cried, "here is
your spear!" But Tschwama had been informed of his wife's mighty feats, so he
said: "Dhana, I do not want my spear. I want that stick."
Together they went into the orchard, but they found that the stick had grown a
great web of brariches and leaves, in the midst of which there hung two shining
golden mangoes. There was a rustling in the leaves of the great mamo tree, and
looking up they saw Lord Krishna sitting among the branches. "Pick the
mangoes of the Praham," he said. "But first, o Tschwama, you must break your
spear, for you will need it no more."
Tschwama broke the spear and picked the fruit. Then he led Dhana back into the
palace and lay with her. Dhana bore a son and they called him Prahambhai. And
every year on the twenty-seventh of July Tschwama and Dhana and Prahambhai
would go into the palace orchard and pick the golden mangoes, while Lord
Krishna played the flute among the branches.

Strangely enough we come across the dream of the Solea again, with a curious
twist to it, in the memoirs of Bohm and Renner, who some years ago explored
the Amazonian jungle not far from Manaus, and nearer still to the rubber
plantations which at the end of the last century gave the city its moment of
splendor and folly.
Surprised in the jungle by unusually torrential rains, the two Mormon geologists,
who were prospecting for copper on behalf of Anaconda Copper Inc., took
shelter in the communal hut of a village inhabited by Hanochucos Indians.
There, in a pile of ritual objects, they noticed two baked clay tablets
approximately one meter in length and covered with strange writing. They
questioned the Indians about the meaning of this writing but met with a good
deal of reticence. Finally, in return for a number of miraculous Polaroid
photographs, they obtained an account of the two tablets.

Many generations ago, they said, a strange plant would appear from time to time
among the lubber trees. This plant the Indians called the oldika, and the strange
thing was that it was able to dream. Being a plant, the oldika could only dream
about plants, but men being men they were able to dream the dream of the
oldika. One night an Indian who was working as watchman in a plantation went
to sleep beside an oldika and dreamt that he had picked the plant and rolled it
along so as to leave an imprint in the light soil. When he awoke the plant was
still beside him, perfectly intact, but the earth bore the imprint of the dream.
Then the Indian was frightened, and went to the omanashi of the village and told
him what had happened. The omanashi went with the Indian to the place, and
there was the imprint of the dream, perfectly visible.
" You have dreamed the dream of the oldika," said the old man, "but it was not
you who printed it on the earth."
" Who was it then?" asked the Indian.
The omanashi winked. "The oldika is a sleepwalker."

Clearly the autonomous movement of the Solea can only be the fruit of folk
imagination. Nevertheless, we are bound to admit that the clay tablets, now in
the Natural History Museum in Salt Lake City, do quite definitely bear the
imprint of a Solea and go some way to confirm the theory that at one time,
before their parallelization, these plants grew in some abundance along the banks
of the Amazon. There is no doubt whatever that someone did in fact roll a Solea
along in the clay. What remains inexplicable is the fact that if the tablets are held
upright the imprint appears convex or concave according to which direction the
light is coming from. When lit from above the marks are protuberances in relief,
like those of a real Solea, but when the light comes from below they look like
ordinary imprints. This phenomenion, now known as oldicasis, has not been
satisfactorily explained as yet.
The idea that a plant can dream, as happens in the legends of several ethnic
groups in America seems absolutely absurd in the light of our Western logic. But
Solinez puts the following question:

" If we admit that the pre-parallel Solea had some form of imagination
(unimaginable for us but theoretically possible), even though at subcellular
levels where the genetic memories lie in hiding, can we exclude the possibility
of its having an active dream life?"7

* This stone, which the Antonll call Ta, is now in the Anthropological Museum
of Honolulu. [Author's note.]

1. Max Spinder, Die Solea – eine bytanische Unentwicklung(Univerlag,

Hemmungen, 1972).

2. Antonio Guerrero, Flora descorhecida do Rio (Editorial Z, Rio de Janeiro,

1872).
3. John Foreman, Flora South of tha Border (Henderson and Co., Boston, 1906).

4. Soleares (GLM, Paris, 1960).

5. Leo Lionni, not to be confused with the author of the present volume, is the
pseudonym of Pieter Jacob Grossouwski, a name which the celebrated writer and
illustrator abandoned early in his career in favor of one more easily
pronounceable.

6. Randolph Reich, Botanical Psychogenesis (Harper & Row, New York, 1973).

7. Angel Pedro Maria Solinez, "Un sueno vegetal" (Vida, March 1973, Editorial
de Mayo, Buenos Aires).

THE SIGURYA
Although between the earliest descriptions by Heraclitus (530 b.c.) and the
recent reconstruction made by Maanen and Palladino there were only a few
sporadic references to the Sigurya, we have today a fairly exhaustive knowledge
of this plant, thanks chiefly to the patient research carried out by the Botanical
Laboratory of Saragoza.
The name "Sigurya" was given to the plant by the celebrated flamencologist
Donado Malguena, brother of the botanist Juan Domingo Malguena, who for
many years was head of the Faculty of Biology at Saragoza University, and is
still director of the botanical gardens of the city. It was in the Biblioteca Real, so
rich in ancient scientific and pseudoscientific works, that Juan Malguena first
saw a picture of this plant, at that time completely unknown to him. He had
come across a very rare volume, the De Plantarum Mysteriis of Paulus Aversus,
a somewhat fantastical herbarium dating from the fifteenth century, and was
looking slowly through the pages when one of the great woodcuts by Van
Wittens caught his eye. It illustrated a number of monstrous hybrids, half animal
and half plant, but also a few plants which appeared oddly plausible. He had no
trouble in identifying Laudanies umbrosus, Clariola foliata, and Opercus
espinatus, but however much he rummaged in his memory he found no trace of
another plant, the one with the small aerial roots and the strange flower-fruit
covered with warty knobs, which stood out so clearly against the background.
This picture came back to mind the following morning as he was walking down
the great palm avenue toward the administration building of the Botanical
Gardens.
It was then that Juan Malguena determined to find out all he could about that
disconcerting plant that looked so normal and yet clearly belonged to a different
realm of botany. It is largely to the work of this elderly Spanish botanist that we
owe our knowledge of the Sigurya.
Marcello Vanni, in an article published last year in The Annals of Parallel
Botany, tells how he himself received confirmation of the ambiguous
morphological character of the Sigurya, the thing that so powerfully struck the
imagination of Malguena.

"On the basis of indications provided by my assistant Paola Sanaona, who is

responsible for all the visual documentation in my laboratory," he writes, "I had
done some rather detailed and particularly convincing pencil drawings of the
Sigurya. My intention was to take them to Paris and present them to Juan
Malguena, who was to preside over the forthcoming Parallel Botany Conference
at the Jardin des Plantes. As soon as I got to the French capital I phoned my old
friend to make an appointment, and we decided to meet at the Cafe Flore in
Saint-Germam-des-Pres, near where many of the delegates were lodged. When I
got there, I found the old scientist with his wife and a number of mutual friends,
including the well-known Italian photographer Ugo Mulas. In the course of the
conversation it came out that it was Senora Malguena's seventieth birthday. I
took the opportunity to present to her the drawings I had brought for her
husband.
" Everyone present studied the drawings with care, and during the animated
conversation that inevitably followed, Ugo Mulas left the table unnoticed. We
only realized he had been absent about ten minutes later when he reappeared
with a huge bunch of flowers which he presented to the old lady. There was
clapping and cries of "Buen compleano," which a group of young American
tourists joined in, singing "Happy Birthday, dear Senora." In the general uproar,
Mulas handed me a small package wrapped in tissue paper, looking at me
meanwhile with a mysterious air. I opened the package eagerly and could
scarcely believe my eyes: it was a dried flower that lay there, or perhaps a fruit,
practically identical to that of the Sigurya in my drawings. The photographer
explained that when he had seen it at the florist's where he had bought the
flowers for Senora Malguena he had been is thunderstruck as I was.
" After the little impromptu party we all went off to the florist's in the hope of
finding other specimens of this strange flower-fruit. But the shopkeeper said he
had no more of them. When asked the name of the plant he searched for a long
time through old brochures and catalogues, but without success.
" Juan Malguena took on the job of finding out what he could at the small library
attached to the Jardin des Plantes, and when the conference opened the following
day, he handed me a sheet of paper covered with notes. The specimen, the notes
said, seemed to be the fruit of Santilana panamensis, one of the family of
Felinotenis, a native of Panama that now only survives in a few of the Caribbean
islands. The islanders apparently dry the fruits and sell them to dealers as
decorative plants. It seemed to be by no means a rare plant, but strangely
enough, it was unknown to any of us, botanists and biologists alike. While the
flower-cuw-fruit was very like that of the Sigurya, the rest of the plant had really
quite different features. The Santilana is a plant with an endinodal stem of
medium height, bearing large coriolated leaves. The root is a rhizome that
spreads under the ground and produces an average of ten individual plants."

The Greek philosopher Heracltus, founder of the school of Gynos which

flourished in the sixth century b.c. and inventor of the strobological theory of
language: was the first to give a reasonably detailed description of the Sigurya,
which he called Gynopsa. His observations are available to us only in a rather
debased Latin translation, completely lacking in his own incisive style.* The
translation describes the Sigurya as "a plant with a flower that looks like a head
with nothing but noses wearing a skirt like the tasseled ones worn by the vestals
of the oracle of Markos." Of the size of the plant the translation says, "It is as tall
as my ten-year-old son Demoklitus; a goat would have to stretch its neck to eat
the fruit of it."
Heraclitus confuses the fruit with the flower, but gives a surprisingly accurate
description of an encounter with the plant. More banal, but certainly clearer, is
the description by Maanen and Palladino which accompanies the reconstruction
in wood made by the two sculptor-scientists. Maanen and Palladino were already
celebrated for the wooden models in the Oosterman Museum in Nymegen. These
are vastly magnified models of the most minute details of normal plants, such as
the pistil and the chromostene of Colidotima. Particularly well known is their
model of a colony of cells of Folia antrax enlarged 1500 times and clearly
demonstrating the tendencies of perimetric cells in th? process of directional and
selective growth. It was Juan Malguena who aroused their interest in parallel
plants, and particularly in the Sigurya to which he himself had devoted so much
intense effort. The truly wonderful model of Sigurya barbulata which stands in a
glass case in the center of the huge entrance hall of the Botany Laboratory at
Saragoza is the work of these two. It has become a kind of touchstone for all
descriptions of the plant, even though it has a few features outside the usual run
of things.
The model is life-size and reproduces a Sigurya barbulata that had actually been
studied and reconstructed by Malguena, who worked in close collaboration with
Maanen and Palladino. Visitors to the laboratory are presented with a small
brochure containing the following information:

At present we know of six kinds of Sigurya, but over the next few years this
number is expected to grow considerably. In order of size these varieties are: S.
gigas grandiceps (Big-headed Sigurya); S. montalbana; S. barbulata; S. afro-
carpus (Dark-fruited Sigurya); S. murothele (Small-nippled Sigurya); S. minima.
Peter Foreman has furnished evidence of an aquatic variety called S. natans,
found in Ottogonia.

The Saragoza S. barbulata was the first to be found in the West. (pl. xxxi) As it
stands, the plant is sixty-two centimeters tall. Malguena calculated that if one
straightened out the curve in the stem which bears the cephalocarpus, the height
would increase by seventeen centimeters. The stem is known as the "corpus" and
bears some resemblance to the column of the Giraluna, though it is far more
slender. It has three rings of aerial roots which Malguena calls barbules and
which are superimposed upon each other without any apparent order. They are at
most four centimeters in diameter, and are the equivalent of the pendulants of the
Giraluna. The corpus is twenty-two centimeters in diameter at the base and three
centimeters at the highest point, where it curves downward and holds the
cephalocarpus.
This cephalocarpus is the most characteristic feature of the Sigurya. It is a kind
of fruit, totally irregular in shape, with protuberances of various lengths
sprouting from it all around. There are conflicting theories concerning the nature
of the cephalocarpus, which so strongly resembles the fruit of the Santilana
panamensis. Malguena refuses to consider it the parallel equivalent of a real
fruit, although it has all the appearance of a fruit. While they were working on
the reconstruction, his colleagues referred to it as the "head," and this was why
Malguena coined the term cephalocarpus. For him, however, the cephalocarpus
is the plant itself, the remainder (the corpus) being no more than a much-needed
support, like the base of a lamp. His theory receives some measure of
confirmation from the existence of two specimens of Sigurya afro-carpus, where
the corpus is altogether lacking, and of a S. minima discovered by John Harpers
near Opano on Venderas Island. In this latter case there is practically no stem.
Olaf Rasmussen, director of the Parabotanical Research Center at Osloe,
disagreed with Malguena's theory in the paper he read to the Copenhagen
Conference. According to Rasmussen there is in the whole of botany no fruit or
parafruit that is not in some way supported. Even Protorbis minor, he observes,
has a base which serves to keep the most expressive part of the plant off the
ground. For Rasmussen the specimens mentioned by Malguena are only
fragments of broken plants, although the breakage may have occurred either
before or after parallelization. In an open letter published in the Bulletin of the
Osloe Center, he urges his colleagues in Ghana to go back to the Tamo River
where the specimens of Sigurya afrocarpus were found and to search there for
the missing stems.
The unfortunate fact is that information from distant countries, especially that
regarding plants of the Beta group such as the Sigurya, is nearly always
fragmentary and inexact, as well as being at least secondhand. But apart from the
meticulously faithful reconstruction made by Malguena and his colleagues, we
also have information which has reached us due to the generosity of Ricardo
Martlnez, one of the archeologists responsible for the recent excavations near
Oaxaca, Mexico, not far from the site of the famous Tomb No. 7 at Monte
Alban. In a little book called Homage to Gutierrez, Martinez tells how he
discovered a large black clay vessel decorated with Mixtec graffiti and
containing old weapons. It stood
 PL. XXXI Sigurya barbulata

in the narrow entrance to the underground corridor which he supposed would

lead him to the central chamber of Pyramid No. 3 ("la Desnuda"). It was thought
at first that the weapons were Mixtec arms of an unknown type, so the discovery
created quite a sensation. But closer study soon put things in their proper
perspective. Carbon tests showed Martinez that while the vessel was certainly
Mixtec the weapons had been inso-ted later, probably to hide them. But what
was a disappointment to the archeologist was a triumph for Professor Pedro
Gutierrez, the aged honorary director of the School of Botany at Vera Cruz.
Suffering from a serious lung condition, he happened to be on holiday at the
same hotel, the Marques del Valle, where Martinez was staying. The two
scientists had known each other for some years, and in the evening they would
meet on the terrace of the hotel, overlooking the tree-lined square. From the art
nouveau bandstand in the square a group of mariachos would scare clouds of
birds from the trees with each blast of the trumpet, while the Olted boys would
play hide-and-seek around the trunks of the huge flowering jacarandas. It was on
one of those magical evenings, when the sunset seemed to have already lost the
first of its gold-vermilion to the oncoming darkness, that Martinez told Gutierrez
of his perplexity about the weapons he had found in "la Desnuda." He invited his
friend to visit the site.
The following day Gutierrez went out to Monte Alban, where the archeologist
lifted the lid of a huge vessel to show him its disappointing contents. There were
fighting machetes, spear blades engraved with stylized symbols, and other metal
objects. And on top of the pile, attached to a narrow, worn leather belt, was a
bizarre shape vaguely resembling a medieval mace. It was indeed an unusual
thing, apparently slightly dusty, and Gutierrez picked it up with the greatest care
in spite of his evident excitement. The shape was organic, a little larger than a
clenched fist, and completely covered with large knobs and tentacle-like
protuberances of various shapes and sizes. These looked like fingers, or small
pendulants, and there were about thirty of them. For Gutierrez there was no
doubt about it: the shape was that of the cephalocarpus of the Sigurya.
The old botanist's mind was besieged by a swarm of questions. Was it a
coincidence? Or a metalized plant? A copy? A fossil? He had no difficulty in
persuading his friend to give him the loan of the object, which he took back with
him to his room at the Marques del Valle. There, writes Martinez, "Gutierrez
remained incommunicado for three days and nights. In the evening of the fourth
day he appeared at the bar in time for an aperitif before dinner, sprightly and
elegant in his white linen suit. Accompanied by the languorous crooning of a
duo engaged for the week by the tourist board of Oaxaca, he there and then
confided to me his first intuition about the weird thing among the weapons." He
gave Martinez a few pages covered with notes and diagrams, all of which the
archeologist reproduced in facsimile to illustrate his booklet. Gutierrez died in
Vera Cruz only a few weeks after his return from Oaxaca.
With the Saragoza reconstruction, the account given by Martinez and the notes
and diagrams provided by Gutierrez constitute the most complete and scholarly
documentation of the Sigurya. There is no longer any doubt that the
cephalocarpus at Monte Alban is a complete plant, and is therefore evidence in
support of the theory advanced by Malguena. With the plant on the ground, as it
is shown in a photo taken by Martinez, the protuberances look rather like stunted
pendulants, some of which act like normal roots and attach the plant to the
ground, while others look like the arms of a blind man groping desperately in the
air for some nonexistent handhold. What neither Gutierrez nor Malguena were
able to explain satisfactorily is the metallic nature of the plant. In his notes,
Gutierrez speaks of a process similar to that which petrified the trees in the
Yosemite National Park in California. This point of view would imply a process
aimed at rendering permanent a plant which, being parallel, was permanent in
the first place. It would also imply the transformation, by an infinitely slow
process of mineralization, of a nonmaterial object existing outside of time. None
of this is compatible with the theoretical premises of parallel botany. More
plausible is the theory put forward by Van der Haan, according to which the
Sigurya of Monte Alban is a concretion formed from the imprint of a real plant.
This concretion occurred, according to the theory, in the course of an extremely
violent earthquake that caused the greater part of the ancient acropolis to
collapse. This earthquake also cracked open the surface of the earth over large
areas, allowing the escape of gases and liquids so hot that they were capable of
melting the ferrous minerals in which the zone abounds.
The Sigurya of Monte Alban is now on display in the little museum of Oaxaca,
together with the precious finds from Tomb No. 7. An enterprising jeweler in
Taxco has made a tiny copy of it, and this can be bought as a souvenir in the
shops beneath the arcade in the picturesque little square.
Malguena, seizing on the evidence that the Sigurya of Monte Alban was a
complete plant, and therefore neither fruit nor flower, carries his theory to its
logical conclusions. He declares that the corpus is a deceit, an extreme bit
authentic example of paramimesis. The furious debates on the nature of that
ambiguous organ, still raging in the botanical world, are perhaps the best
possible support for his point of view. After all, paramimesis has no other object
than to create doubt and confusion, and to protect a plant that even an excess of
zeal or love of science might easily destroy.
Sigurya natans, simply because it is an aquatic plant, does not fit pl. xxxii into
the normal categories of parallel botany. Only two specimens are known. The
more famous of these is the one described by a certain Jacopo della Barcaccia,
who was with Magellan on his last great voyage, in a letter to his wife Dorotea.
This priceless document was discovered in Padua by the historian Tschbersky.
The other known specimen is the copy in wood made, like the S. barbulata of
Saragoza, by the sculptor-scientists Maanen and Palladino.
As regards the S. natans described by Barcaccia, we need only reprint some part
of the long letter mentioned above:

In those crystal-clear waters [of a lake on one of the Termadores Islands]

there are crabs with antlers like stags and many fishes covered with feathers
like birds, and also eels as long as boats whose scales were like golden
ducats; and men say they are mortally dangerous. There are also enormous
turtles which the men who live on the water mount like horses, and so ride
from one island to another. And in the trees there are fisher-birds with beaks
as long as swords, that are a wonder to set eyes upon, and others that sing
so sweetly that Fra Simone himself would envy them [Fra Simone was a
composer and organist at the church of Santa Teresa in Padua].
Also in those waters are strange fruits with fingers, and no man can touch
them, for it a touch they dissolve and melt away, and the young men are
forbidden to look at them, for they fade from the sight and make themselves
invisible. This fruit they call panala, and it filled me with wonder, for it is
neither tree nor shrub nor yet a flower, but it floats on the water and the
roots hang down from it. It is as black as the ink of a squid, and when
darkness creeps over the water all the men and women of the island pray to
this fruit as if it were the os sacrum of St. Barnaby himself.

Tschbersky thinks that Barcaccia's descriptions have a lot in common with the
more succinct annotations of Pigafetta, Magellan's official historian. He writes:
"There is no doubt in my mind that the magic fruit floating in the lake on that
island was indeed a Sigurya natans. Many other travelers whc have followed
Magellan's route to the Termadores Islands have confirmed Barcaccia's account.
The panala was indubitably the ultimate form of a group of plants which one
after the other have vanished at the fatal touch of man."
The model carved by Maanen and Palladino is only partly based on the
descriptions left us by the travelers of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. The
information gathered by the missionary Father Beaulant, a keen student of flora
who lived for many years among the natives of the Termadores, provided the
sculptors with sufficient data for them to complete the work of reconstruction in
the greatest detail. This model is also on show at the Botanical Laboratory of
Saragoza, and thanks to the inclusion of the aquatic pendulants in a large block
of Plexiglas it gives a really convincing feeling of reality. The pendulant, are
long and thin compared with those of the Sigurya erecta (this is Malguena's
name for the plant with the stem), and in river water they must undulate like the
native algae of the stream. The theory that the Sigurya originated in the many
little streams that gone down from the mountains and feed the inland lakes of the
islands is supported by some of the prayers in which the natives invoke the spirit
of the panala to stem the fury of the torrents in spring. Maanen, perhaps
following some unofficial statement of Malguena's, suggests that the panala of
the Termadores might be the mother of all Siguryas. In common with all the
organisms of our planet, the Sigurya would therefore have distant aquatic
ancestors, and the S. erecta variety would represent a more recent development,
a second phase of parallelization.
 PL. XXXII Sigurya natans

* James Fadden has made an attempt at reconstructing the bizarre and almost
incomprehensible manner of the lost original text, which is typical of the
strobological school and has suggested to Bunoughs and other modern writers
the cross-cutting techniques popular in contemporary poetry and fiction.
Here is the breathtaking opening:

"In Tha (beyond) mos (Es-tor) Demoklitus (Theo-the) and I gath-olive-ered

Demo (Theo) klitus (the-be) called. Plant (ant-plan)t skirt Mar vest (kos) tal he-
(noses noses no) (ses) -ad."

CONTENTS
PART ONE: INTRODUCTION 1
General Introduction 3
Origins 20
Morphology 35

PART TWO: THE PLANTS 57

The Tirillus 59
Tirillus oniricus 62
Tirillus mimeticus 64
Tirillus parasiticus 67
Tirillus odoratus 68
Tirillus silvador 70
The Woodland Tweezers 73
The Tubolara 78
The Camporana 80
The Protorbis 86
The Labirintiana 95
The Artisia 100
The Germinants 112
The Stranglers 117
The Giraluna 119
Giraluna gigas 134
 Giraluna minor 1 43
The Solea 145
The Sigurya 162

PART THREE: EPILOGUE 171

The Gift of Thaumas 173
Notes 178
 PART THREE
EPILOGUE

THE GIFT OF THAUMAS

For some years past the Swiss biologist Max Spinder has been going for his
summer holidays to Emplos, a cluster of little white houses on the edge of the
grounds of the Hotel Peleponnesus, high on the cliffs of Cape Antonosias. Last
summer, while walking under the centuries-old pines, he met the American
archaeologist John Harris Altenhower, who was at Emplos to study the nearby
ruins of the Temple of Kanos with a view to deciding whether or not to involve
the University of Cranstone in an intensive excavation program. The two men,
who share a love on Greece and a passion for exploring unknown worlds, soon
became fast friends.
One morning they decided to go for a walk along the cliffs, following a path that
wound between pines and myrtles until some three kilometers from Emplos it
reached the snow-white fragments of the Temple of Kanos, scattered in the
underbrush beneath the purifying sun. They talked of their work, and Spinder
was deploring the incredulity with which the scientific establishment, and even
some of his own colleagues, had greeted the news of facts that were as yet
inexplicable but which he had proved experimentally. When they were a stone's
throw from the ruins, Altenhower broke in on him to observe that more than two
thousand years before, in that very place where they were walking, Heraclitus
and Theaetetus had carried on the famous dialogue immortalized by Plato.
Taking his friend by the arm, as if he wished to re-create the scene, with an
ironically theatrical gesture he declaimed the key sentence of the dialogue: "But
if you, o Theaetetus, were to see among the myrtles a berry as white as a pearl
and as cubic as a cube, would you reject it with contempt and disgust as a
horrible whim of nature, or would you pick it with joy and gratitude, as a divine
gift from Thaumas?"1 It was then that Spinder brusquely shook off Altenhower's
hand from his arm left the path and worked his way laboriously through the
dense undergrowth until he reached a large piece of white marble, maybe a
section of column, that lay almost entirely hidden from view about ten meters
from the path. There he stopped, bent down and, almost overcome with emotion,
called out to his friend. When Altenhower joined him, anxious to know what on
earth was happening, Spinder pointed to two strange black plants no more than
twenty centimeters tall that stood upright like little bronze statues in the midst of
a minute clearing, a small circle of bare earth amongst the prickly scrub.
There was a slight sea-breeze laden with the scents of seaweed and thyme, so
that the longest branches swayed on the pine trees and the leaves fluttered on the
bushes; but the two little plants remained perfectly motionless, throwing a
brightly colored and extraordinarily luminous shadow an the burnt clay soil. It
was as though the sun's rays had passed miraculously through them as through a
prism, casting on the ground not a shadow but a rainbow.
The two men were overcome with astonishment, and for a while they stood there
staring at the sight in helpless speechlessness. Spinder knew from experience
that the plants would dissolve into dust at the first touch, so he decided to return
to Emplos and fetch photographic equipment.
Unable to tear their thoughts away from the amazing vision they had just
witnessed, they both walked in silence. Suddenly Altenhower stopped dead.
What extaordinary intuition, he asked, had led Spinder to those plants, which
from the path had been completely hidden. The biologist smiled and said: “I’m
flattered by your high opinion of my powers, but at the same time rather
surprised by your ingenuousness. You must surely know that there was nothing
miraculous about it. The water-d:viner believes in the movements of the rod, but
the truth is that without knowing it he has an exceptionally sensitive reaction to
certain natural things: colors, smells, kinds of earth, the shapes of plants, all
things that derive the ultimate subtleties of their nature from the presence of
water under the soil. Like a frog with an instinctive perception of a pond some
miles away, he unconsciously distinguishes differences of shade and size which
would not be perceptable to us. And the same holds true for the archeologist who
'has an intuition' of a buried temple under a perfectly ordinary ploughed field,
and the botanist who 'has an intuition' of the presence of a parallel flower in the
midst of a thousand normal plants. They both read signs which little by little,
through the continual habit of specialized observation, build up in the deepest
levels of the memory. There they lie in readiness for the time when a particular
combination of automatic analogies will call up images long forgotten and now
remembered with instant clarity.”
The discovery on the cliffs of Cape Antonosias of the two Parensae
parumbrosae, which Spinder, thanks to a brand-new process, was able to
transhabitate with complete success to his laboratory at Hemmungen, was
announced to the public in the latest issue of The American Botanist. It was the
first time that the authoritative organ of the American Botany Association, which
traditionally interests itself only in normal botany, had really opened its columns
to a phenomenon of parallel botany. The evidence of Altenhower on the
circumstances of the find, the description of the plants themselves and, above all,
the phenomenon of the colored pseudoshadow which was perfectly visible in
Spinder's photographs-all these aroused a good deal of sensation in scientific
circles. Even today, some months after the news broke, the media are still
devoting a lot of time and space to the event.
One of the first newspapers to take up the story was the Greek daily Omonia,
which interviewed Professor Spyros Rodokanakis, Professor of Botany at Athens
University. This veteran botanist is well known to the Athenians for his
provocative attacks on what he calls "the invasion of reason." A few years ago
his vitriolic sarcasm did not even spare the colonels, who for some reason best
known to themselves chose to turn a blind eye to the violent attack on their
regime which the professor launched from the pages of Botanika.
But the furious arguments and controversies carried on by Rodokanakis often
close more doors than they open. He often unwittingly becomes the mouthpiece
of those who, in the name of tradition, wisdom, and a kind of freedom that is
never very well defined, obstinately refuse to leave the murky vapors of their
own mental status quo. And so it was on the occasion of the short interview
which he gave to the Athenian daily.
"It is fashionable," he said, "to stigmatize the mass media for the devilish way in
which they create false needs and consequently contribute to the spread of manic
consumption. But if labor-saving electric appliances and the small family car can
atrophy our muscles, there are in my opinion far graver, more real and more
imminent dangers threatening the survival of man. The so-called hidden
persuaders are merely vaitless shopkeepers compared with those who in the
name of culture and scientific information pollute our minds and intelligences
with ideas that could have no other purpose than to put an end to our already
frail ability to tell perception from fantasy, reality from fiction, and truth from
falsehood. These gentlemen have cynically sold us telepathy, alpha-rays, flying
saucers, mental deconcentration, acupuncture, the Loch Ness monster, forks bent
by willpower and the Black Box. These ghost hunters in nonexistent laboratories
have now, it seems, discovered in the vegetable kingdom those anthropomorphic
qualities which man himself is rapidly losing: the ability to feel joy and sorrow, a
real love of the arts, a hatred of tyranny and even the use of a comprehensible
language. We are told that we may safely and confidently engage a saxifrage to
spy on our unfaithful spouse. They encourage us to play the Ungo and the
kalamatiano to make roses grow more voluptuous and perfumed. They suggest
we should recite the poems of Verlaine to siraighten a wilting aspidistra in the
waiting room of a Parisian dentist. And they assure us that while the voice of
Gigliola Cinquetti weakens geraniums, that of Renata Tebaldi stiffens their
stems.
" And now this glorious literature of fiction and fantasy has been enriched by a
new masterpiece: among the sacred ruins of Kanos, where Heraclitus himself
meditated, they have discovered a "parallel" plant as black as ink, that foctoows
a shadow as bright and many-colored as the windows of Notre Dame. It will not
be long before we hear that a cyclamen has been proclaimed Rector of the
University of Athens."
But in the fury of his rancor the veteran botanist lumps together the absurd with
the possible, madness with reason, good with ill. His mental inertia leads him to
express a mere hotchpotch of refusals and denials, when a more open attitude, a
calmer optimism, a more generous confidence in others, would certainly have
rewarded him with unsuspected creative happiness. Though perhaps we can
scarcely be surprised if the revelation of a parallel flora, splendidly enigmatic in
character, has given rise to incredulity, skepticism and, on occasion, open
hostility on the part of those who with blind bureaucratic resignation go on
cultivating the old common-or-garden plants in their common gardens. We have
to admit that in the wake of a perfectly understandable alarm, the fascination of
mysterious and ambiguous organisms suddenly wrenched from the deep
shadows of the jungle and from the mists of legendary valleys has lead at times
to the hasty formulation of exotic theories and shaky hypotheses.
But the episode of the Parensae parumbrosae is emblematic of what is
happening in the most recent phases of parallel botany. As we have seen in our
brief review, research is going on in many different directions, and though we do
not yet have the comfort of clearly defined principles and the support of solid
structures, what is emerging is a "style" of method and research that enables us
to predict the general outlines of the new scientific discipline.
The circumstances of each new find enlarge our experience, and thereby increase
the chances of further revelations. Special techniques are at last permitting us to
transport plants which only a few years ago would seem to have been relegated
forever to some dark and secret place of exile. In laboratories throughout the
world, plants that have been, as it were, suspended for millennia between life
and death now await the explanation of the mysteries of their existence.
The sudden questioning of things that have always and in every way conditioned
our sensory and mental behavior demands a spirit of invention, an originality of
method, a freedom of interpretation normally suffocated by the enormous weight
of accepted ideas inherited as a result of our traditional scientific education.
Thus it is that a growing number of young scientists, in spite of opposition from
the establishment, are refusing to undertake research of which the results are a
fait accompli, and instead are committing themselves with feverish enthusiasm
to the exploration of an unknown world rich in exciting possibilities.
In spite of the warnings of good sense and personal gain, these men have dared
to discard from their cultural and scientific baggage all those officially
consecrated ideas they worked so hard to acquire, and have shown themselves
willing to start again, to invent methods capable of penetrating the mysteries of a
Nature whose laws are hidden in some remote and unknown country of our
imagination.
It is reported of the Swedish philosopher Erud Kronengaard that he once said to
a friend: "There are two kinds of men, those who are capable of wonder and
those who are not. I hope to God that it is the first who will forge our destiny." A
statement which strangely but clearly echoes the question put by Heraclitus to
Theaetetus, a question to which the scientists now exploring the "other" reality
beyond the hedge have already given a resoundingly emphatic answer.

1. For the Greeks Thaumas was the god of wonder. In the Platonic dialogue
referred to by Altenhower, Socrates says: "Wonder is the emotion proper to the
philosopher and philosopay begins in wonder. He was a wise genealogist who
said that Iris, messenger of the heavens, was the child of Thaumas." (Jebb trans.)

END

CONTENTS
PART ONE: INTRODUCTION 1
General Introduction 3
Origins 20
Morphology 35

PART TWO: THE PLANTS 57

The Tirillus 59
Tirillus oniricus 62
Tirillus mimeticus 64
Tirillus parasiticus 67
Tirillus odoratus 68
Tirillus silvador 70
 The Woodland Tweezers 73
The Tubolara 78
The Camporana 80
The Protorbis 86
The Labirintiana 95
The Artisia 100
The Germinants 112
The Stranglers 117
The Giraluna 119
Giraluna gigas 134
Giraluna minor 1 43
The Solea 145
The Sigurya 162

PART THREE: EPILOGUE 171

The Gift of Thaumas 173
Notes 178
 Table of Contents
CONTENTS
PART ONE
INTRODUCTION
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
ORIGINS
MORPHOLOGY
CONTENTS
PART TWO
THE PLANTS
THE TIRILLUS
Tirillus oniricus
Tirillus mimeticus
Tirillus parasiticus
Tirillus odoratus
Tirillus silvador
THE WOODLAND TWEEZERS
THE TUBOLARA
THE CAMPORANA
THE PROTORBIS
CONTENTS
THE LABIRINTIANA
THE ARTISIA
THE GERMINANTS
THE STRANGLERS
CONTENTS
THE GIRALUNA
The Flower with the Golden Seeds
The Bride of Pwa'ko (free rendering)
The Sun and the Moon
Giraluna gigas
Giraluna minor
THE SOLEA
The Silver-leafed Tchavo
Waa'ku-ni Creates Words
The Stake
 The Stone of Truth
The Golden Spear of Tschwama
THE SIGURYA
CONTENTS
PART THREE EPILOGUE
THE GIFT OF THAUMAS
END
CONTENTS