northern white cedar

I've been away at a conference for a few days but am back at my desk today and thinking again about botany. I posted here about the way that plant names are entangled with human history and I mentioned some of the trees that are found in the forests of northern Minnesota. This is just a little story about the northern white cedar, which is native to the north-east of the US and the south-east of Canada with Minnesota at the western edge of its range.

This was the first North American tree to be introduced to Europe and that's largely, I think, because of its medicinal properties. When the French explorer, Jacques Cartier, came to Canada for the second time in 1536, he discovered - from Huron informants - that the foliage of the plant could be prepared and used as a cure for scurvy. (His crew were badly afflicted after the journey across the Atlantic.) As a result, he named it arbor vitae, tree of life, and took samples back to France, where it was cultivated.

In 1580, an English edition of Cartier's travels was published under the title: A shorte and briefe narration of the two nauigations and discoueries to the northwest partes called Newe Fraunce. I happen to have to access to this and took the chance to look at the narrative of the arbor vitae. It's interesting because Cartier cites a Native American name for the plant. He says: 'they told us, the vertue of that tree was, to heale any other disease: the tree is in their language called Ameda'. But it's worth looking at the orginal presentation of this passage. Below is a fasimile with the name ringed in red:

What really strikes me is the way the name, Ameda, is set off typographically. Whereas most of the text is in black-letter type, this term is in some kind of Roman font and in small caps with extra space around and between the letters. A theme I've returned to a lot throughout our discussions is that of transcription and this is, of course, a 16th-century transcription of a Native American term. The typographical difference doesn't help us to pronounce it but it does suggest another voice in the text and I've found myself trying to imagine what a voice rendered in well spaced Roman capitals might sound like! (Deep and booming? Or just subtly particular? Not what Cartier's own voice sounds like even when he tries to pronounce it correctly?) Actually, the word 'God', which appears right at the bottom of the page, is also set off typographically. But 'God' is just capitalised - it's in the same font as the rest of the text. Only the Native American term appears in a different font altogether.

So, here we have two names for the same tree but more than one voice is speaking in each of them. When Cartier names the tree arbor vitae, he is not inventing a term but drawing on a Christian name for the cross. I don't know if you've seen this site on the iconography of the cross. It's very good and it provides some references for the arbor vitae:

Peter and Linda Murray. 1998. Oxford Companion to Christian Art and Architecture, pages 540-41.
William Wood Seymour. 1898. Cross in Tradition, History, and Art, pages 83-93.
Eva Wilson. 1994. Ornament 8000 Years: An Illustrated Handbook of Motifs, pages 135-38.

And, when we learn the Huron (?) name for the northern white cedar, we encounter it transcribed in Cartier's text, isolated from the language around it through the typographical choices made by the printer.

That's enough for now, I think. The northern white cedar has other names too, but I'll come to them another time. To finish, here's a picture of the plant itself (borrowed from wikimedia):