There are many plants associated with the Christmas season. The current exhibit from the Warren H. Corning Collection of Horticultural Classics includes a sampling of their illustration.
From the viewpoint of our English heritage, one of the oldest plants associated with the Christmas season is holly. Holly was originally known as aquifolium or agrifolium, meaning having pointed leaves. This carried over into the scientific name of the European holly, Ilex aquifolium. Other early European names included Hollin , Holin, and Holm. It's new world counterpart is called Ilex opaca, meaning dark or shaded and referring to the dusky color of the American plant's leaves.
There are many traditions and superstitions associated with holly. Some have referred to it as the Holy Tree and claim that it first grew in Christ's footsteps. In iconographical terms, the white flowers are supposed to represent Jesus's purity and birth, the sharp leaves represent the crown of thorns worn by Christ at his crucifixion, the red berries represent his blood, and the bitter bark is also said to represent the passion. Indeed, some writers hold that holly was actually the plant plaited to form the crown of thorns and that the berries were originally white before being stained by Christ's blood.
Although holly was used in England from Roman times in decorations for the celebration of the Saturnalia (December 12), its use as a Christmas plant there is supposed to only date from the reign of Henry VI (1422-1461).
According to Pliny the Elder, holly flowers had the ability to turn water to ice. While Folklore regards it as the resting place for elves and fairies who will lodge in it and keep the house goblins from doing mischief. In a similar vein, planting holly bushes outside your house was supposed to protect the inhabitants from lightning and witchcraft.
The illustration of Ilex aquifolium on display is a hand-colored engraving by Elizabeth Blackwell from her A Curious Herbal of 1737. It's American counterpart, Ilex opaca, is illustrated by the color stipple engraving of Renard after an original by Joseph Henri Redouté from François André Michaux's Histoire des Arbres Forestiers de l'Amérique Septentrionale published from 1810 to 1813, which also served as the subject of the 1993 Holden Arboretum Christmas card (copies of all Holden Arboretum cards mentioned in this display are available for purchase from the Treehouse Gift Shop)*.
Another plant usually associated with the Christmas season, it takes its name from the Old Saxon Mistl-tan, meaning a different twig, and referring to the fact that it is always found growing on a tree, whose twigs it does not resemble. The name is related to the missel thrush which feeds upon its berries and spreads its seeds in its droppings. The European form is Viscum album, meaning white inner organs, while the greater American form is known as Phorodendron serotinum, meaning tree thief, referring to its parasitic nature.
Although there is supposed to be a monkish tradition that the mistletoe was originally the tree used for the cross, and ceased to be a tree after that usage, it is generally regarded as a pagan plant and is supposed to be banned from use in some churches.
Its parasitic nature and the fact that it appears to be alive in winter while its host tree appears dead led some pagans to believe that it held the life of the host tree during winter. The druids believed that it represented the spirit because it grew in the air on the sacred oak. They harvested it with a golden sickle in a rite which was accompanied by the sacrifice of white oxen, and insuring that it never touched the ground, distributed among themselves and hung it in their houses where it was supposed to bring them good luck.
It is best known from Norse mythology, where it was used to kill the god Baldur, who was otherwise invulnerable owing to his mother, Frigga, the goddess of love and beauty, having obtained promises from all other plants and animals that they would not harm her son, but having overlooked the lowly mistletoe. The combined wills of all of the other gods and the weeping of all things are said to have restored Baldur to life. After which his mother secured the promise of mistletoe that it would never harm any living creature again. In gratitude for the restoration of her son, Frigga is said to bestow a kiss on anyone walking beneath the mistletoe. This and its association with fertility lie at the root of our custom of bestowing kisses under the mistletoe. The older version of the tradition required the male kissing a girl under it to remove one of the berries for each kiss, and when the berries were gone, the plant was supposed to lose its efficacy and no more kisses could be required.
The illustration of Viscum album is a hand colored engraving by Timothy Sheldrake from his Botanicum medicinale in the second issue of about 1768 and constitutes the image for our 2000 Christmas card..
The Christmas rose bears the scientific name of Helleborus niger, which is derived from the Greek name , meaning killing food, referring to its deadly nature. The plant referred to by Dioscorides and Theophrastus under this name, however, appears to be a different plant, that now known as Helleborus orientalis. Both plants have the black root from which the niger part of the western European plant gets its name.
The Christmas rose gets its name from its tendency to bloom in late December or early January. This has given rise to several legends linking it with Christmas.
According to one of these, on the night of Christ's birth, a young shepherdess named Madelan, accompanied her brothers and the Magi to Christ's manger. Saddened, because she had no gift to give the infant, she returned to her flocks. There the angel Gabriel appeared to her and caused the fields to bloom with Christmas roses which she then took as a gift to the Christ child.
Two other stories focus on the forest of Göinge in Sweden. In the first of these an Abbot named Hans and a doubting monk were in the forest on a magical Christmas when in celebration of Christ's birth all the trees were in leaf, the flowers in bloom, the birds sang and the heavenly host sang Gloria in Excelsis while bells rang. All of which only served to convince the doubting monk that it was all the work of Satan, in return for which skepticism, the miracle ceased and only the Christmas roses were left in bloom.
In the other story set in the Scandinavian forest, a group of poor peasants had ventured far into the woods on Christmas Eve, Saddened by their poverty and the fact that they had nothing for their children, they began to despair, when a miracle occurred, the forest was suddenly bathed in a white light and the ground was covered with Christmas roses to cheer their children.
Other traditions attaching to the hellebore are not so festive. The oriental variety was believed by the Greeks to cure madness, and to be able to absorb illness from the sick. From Elizabethan times, it has been regarded in England as a symbol of melancholy.
Our first illustration is an anonymous original painting from a manuscript believed to have been made in Northern Italy sometime in the eighteenth century which has the binder's title of Herbier colorié. It is followed by a hand-colored engraving by William Clark from the first volume of the second edition of John Stephenson and James Morss Churchill's Medical Botany published in 1834, which provided the subject matter for the 1999 Holden Arboretum Christmas card.
The most popular Christmas plant of the present day is the poinsettia, or Euphorbia pulcherrima, a relative newcomer to the American Christmas tradition. A native of Mexico, the plant was first noticed by Europeans in the seventeenth century when a group of Franciscan priests settled there. They transformed the wild bush, which the Aztecs had cultivated as a source of red dye and of a potion for reducing fevers, into a Christmas tradition when they started gathering cuttings to adorn their nativity celebration.
As usual, there is a more colorful version of how the plant came to be associated with Christmas. In this version a poor Mexican peasant girl left the church weeping on Christmas Eve, because she had no gift to lay on the altar for the Christ child. An angel appeared to her and told her that Jesus would welcome any gift given sincerely in love, she then picked some weeds from the side of the road and placed them on the altar where they were miraculously transformed into the bright red flowers we know today, which the Mexicans have ever since called Flores de Nocha Buena, or Flowers of the Holy Night.
The plant was first introduced to the United States by Joel Robert Poinsett, the first U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, who brought them back to his greenhouse in the 1800's after first seeing them in Taxco in 1825. The popular name of the plant is derived from this politician who gave them to his friends.
They were not a terribly hardy plant and were limited to hothouse growth and ornamental plantings in California and other southern states until 1923, when Paul Ecke, Sr., a California nurseryman, obtained a seedling of a variety known as oak leaf from a woman in New Jersey and began developing its sports. The result was that in 1929, he had developed it to the place that it was a viable indoor potted plant. The poinsettia continued to suffer from a limited peak blooming period (referring to the length of time the colored bracts remained intact) until James Mikkelsen of Ashtabula, Ohio, developed a long-lasting cultivar in 1963, which is the basis for most varieties of our current Christmas plant.
The first illustration is a hand-colored chromolithograph by Berthe Hoola van Nooten from the third edition of her Fleurs, Fruits et Feuillages Choisis de l'Ile de Java of about 1850. The second more traditional illustration,used for the 1997 Holden Arboretum Christmas card, is a hand-colored engraving by Frederick William Smith after Samuel Holden from the 1838 volume of Paxton's Magazine of Botany and Register of Flowering Plants.
*Notecards and Christmas cards mentioned above are available for sale from The Treehouse Gift Shop, The Holden Arboretum, 9500 Sperry Road, Kirtland, Ohio 44094. For information on ordering and pricing contact Diana Lapinskas, The Treehouse manager at the above address or by phone ar 216-256-1110 or 216-946-4400 Monday through Friday from 10am to 5pm EDT.
This is the text of an exhibit on display in the Rare Book Room in the Warren H. Corning Library and Visitors Center of The Holden Arboretum, 9500 Sperry Road, Kirtland, Ohio 44094, from November 29, 2000 through January 2, 2001, from 10 am to 4:45 pm Tuesday through Friday and during such weekend hours as the library may be open.
Stanley Johnston, Curator of Rare Books, The Holden Arboretum
e-mail: stanley177@aol.com