"earl" wrote in message
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The Plant Man column
for publication week of 08/29/04 - 09/04/04
(774 words)
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The Plant Man
by Steve Jones
www.landsteward.org


"Easy care" plants for the horticulturally challenged!


a quick note about natural snake repellents. Sometimes, a
newspaper editor has to cut part of a column when space is tight or a
major news story is breaking. I heard from several readers who said
that their newspaper had had to cut part of a recent column referring
to the use of marigolds as a natural snake repellent. You can find
the entire column archived at my web site
hehttp://www.landsteward.org/page.cfm/18923 or you can send me an
e-mail and I will reply with a "hot link" to the story you can click
on!Now on to those easy-care trees and shrubs...

Fascinating late medieval folklore resurfaces from time to time as helpful
gardening "facts." The origins of such fantasies are often quite
interesting, even if such superstition-driven advice is uselessly silly.

Marigolds were said to have the power to repel serpents & human lust. In
other words it is proof against the devil, though it wouldn't bother a
real-world snake at all. The odor of Marigold functions as an incense that
repels the charnal serpent, but conjurs beneficial spirits. Its brightness
of red-tinged yellow meant it was a form of Fire, & was sacred to a
Sun-divinity (or a Sun-divinity's forest-dwelling spouse) hence the
folknames Summer's Bride, Bride of the Sun, Spousa Solis, The Husbandman's
Dial, Sunwort, or Holy Gold (really Holle's Gold, a Nordic earthmother).
So marigolds banish the serpent for the same reason the sun banishes all
minions of night, without concern for the fact that real serpents actually
bask in the sun, for this is purely folk superstition, rather than
story-encoded folk knowledge.

Its ability to thwart the serpent was finally due to the plant's
association with the Virgin Mary, though this association occurred late in
the flower's folk-name history, the "Mary" in Marigold originating as an
old English corruption of the Anglo-saxon Merso meaning Marsh. Most
Mary-associated plants have blue flowers (the color of her veil) or white
(for purity, or for her breast's milk). But "Mary's Gold" came to mean
yellow flowers that were offered at roadside Mary shrines in lieu of gold,
because Mary spurned material wealth as being inconsequential compared to
spiritual wealth. And a story was told that during the flight into Egypt,
desert bandits waylaid the exiled family, but when Mary's purse was turned
inside out, all that came out were marigold petals.

-paghat the folklore ratty

--
"Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
"Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
-from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
Visit the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl: http://www.paghat.com