Since the chapter of Villis, decreed by Charlemagne in the year 812, the right has been imposed in the culture of the "simple", chasing witches and charlatans, in favor of well-polished gardens moving further and further away from the state of nature, within monasteries whose minerality of its cloisters comes directly from the Eastern Mediterranean culture.
Starting in the ninth century, the Salerno School of Medicine, via Constantine the African who translated into Latin many Greek and Arab texts of ancient medicine, served as a bridge between Greece, the East and Byzantium for the creation of a new «science» medical, carried by a dense activity of copyist monks and recopistes, throughout Europe. For six centuries, these monks, deprived of direct contact with certain plants since the number of singles was curbed by Charlemagne, constantly distorted the graphic representation of these plants in their copies of medical books according to their talents or their fantasies. The mandragora, not cultivated in the cloisters, is the most striking example, with a representation forcing the anthropomorphic trait of its root. So many other images were very confusing.
With the creation of the printing press, the need was felt for a return to the reality of plants, to allow a direct sensory approach by medical students, hence the first botanical garden of Padua, in 1545, expanding the range of 75 singles of the Capitular of Villis. This new botanical garden took, quite naturally, the model of the Near and Middle East with its enclosed garden, its fountain in the center and its four aisles in cross, in the direction of the cardinal points as had already adopted the medieval garden with its raised boards to ensure a drainage allowing to approach the Mediterranean climatic conditions.
It is therefore through Mediterranean medicine that the concern for accuracy in the identification of plants, in hortus, was born, thus preparing the taxonomic discipline of a Linnaeus, which will cause the return, in situ, of many field naturalists, exploring more and more distant lands for herbalism. However, with the seed harvest that will enrich our European botanical gardens, these tireless travelers, moved by the Aristotelian spirit based on empirical observation, constituted, from the sixteenth century, very precise herbaria and botanical boards to be able to dispose of the flora of the whole world under the eyes with nothing but paper at hand, since once dried flat, they are inserted in «leaflets» more easily classifiable and classifiable. This plane reduction, dear to botanists, certainly contributed to the formation of the encyclopedic spirit, with the return to the reifying libraries not only of plants, but also -through the development of iconography- the whole of life which has become the object of the natural sciences, thus giving a second breath to the «Natural History» of Pliny the Elder. These quickly emancipated themselves from the fixist and creationist theories of the church to sketch the concept of evolution, following the transformism of Lamarck.
Technological Darwinism means that today, these libraries are digital and that artificial intelligence processes this data accessible by screen… as flat as ever!
From the garden of the simple, it is, here again, a question of simplification, objectivation and putting at a distance of the world by reason to facilitate inductive syllogism that poetic or magical thought no longer lives.
Then, the reason for the sciences, arts and crafts promoted by the enlightenment will consider our land as an infinite source of profit that capitalist reason will in turn exploit mercilessly...
And yet, before the assignats and other banknotes (well flat too!) full of the transfer of meaning by the reduction-objectivation of the value of all things, it was necessary, first, capitalize on the knowledge through the time and space savings these simplifying conversions make… That’s the whole story of writing!
If figures and letters spare no one, it is also because, in the collective unconscious, they are marked by the seal of religions and law, a «superego» who plays many tricks on us today, at a time when forests are burning, accelerating global warming. Will the virtual database trees help us breathe? Will the laws (and their derogations…) succeed in preventing glaciers from melting? Will the fluctuations in stocks restore the seasons of our disillusioned land?
In this context of eco-anxiety for the new generations of humans (and non-humans…), gardeners are active with constant back and forth between their garden and forest and the mass of plant data now accessible everywhere in order to test new species, coming from the vast world, thanks to the talents of travellers and nurserymen or obtained by hybridization.
From the screen to the box and vice versa, they record their experience and willingly share it in situ or on the networks to best adapt to the evolution of the soil conditionsof the planet they inhabit and whose beauty they celebrate through the staging of biodiversity related to their biome.
In return, the plants also interact on their environment, by their shade, appreciable in heat waves, or by their roots, regulating the flood zones, under the watchful eye of the master of the place, ensuring the health of its protected for the general harmony of the biotope.
In addition to the immediate application of the properties of plants to a particular disease defined by the «materia medica» of Dioscoride since antiquity, since botany owes its existence to medicine, Men’s health also turns out to be dependent on the health of their environment and ecological interactions, as the American Rachel Carson stated in her «Silent spring».
We learn this today at our expense, especially in cities regularly subjected to pollution and heat peaks, hence the interest of urban gardens forming carbon sinks acting directly on air quality. Similarly, in rural areas exposed to intensive agriculture, parks and gardens find a new role as phytoremediation agents against pesticides to the benefit of water quality. Not to mention the animal biodiversity and pollinating insects that naturally find refuge in these exceptional areas excluded from urban or agricultural productivisms.
It becomes clear that a rebuilt «nature» after so much destruction, treats man much more effectively in its environment than a garden of the simple where each plant is isolated from its neighbor, on his dedicated board with his label growing in the middle of a bare ground, dripping in heat waves. Even in the Mediterranean climate, there are thyme trees, savory trees and ground covers lining the foot of shrub plants, regardless of the limits imposed by the labelling and the earth is never naked!
Then let us leave the medical anthropocentrism and awaken our senses, like Theophrastus, Aristotle and his disciples of the Portico, to go for a walk, as good peripatetists, to observe the complex arrangements not only of nature but also of contemporary gardeners components in consciousness with the different layers of vegetation, even underground in the kingdom of roots, as well as with seasonal cycles.
A breath of chlorophyll, a good walk in immersion in the living spectacle of plants, sublimated by the beautiful golden light of autumn, you will do as much good as a good herbal tea that you can then taste to quench your thirst if you want to taste the flavor of knowledge… naturally conforms to article D4211-11 of the Public Health Code, rest assured! Homo sapiens or «homo sine sapore» (Cicero) after the Covid years?!