Chastity, Vitex and the New Ethno-Botany

Chastity, Vitex and the New Ethno-Botany (Vitex agnus-castus L.)

Vitex can parch beside a road and add an inch or none a year and bloom. It is progress without growth. GNP up an inch. You’d be calling for elections in downtown Phoenix when it can somehow survive ten years in caliche and no rain. Homo sapiens, utilizing its unique gift, has gotten pretty far from this taxonomic childhood. Now, if the thing don’t grow, we worry it needs hormones, if not an air pump and if it grows too far go to ER. Gone from simple survivals and toughness to fluff, a broad range of pathetic fallacy and attrition of nature, our comfort of ourselves is exercised by giving nature human emotions, anatomy and purpose to  “the cut worm that forgives the plow,” The worm is there to serve. Blake would only say that that proves the plowman, and we nod accordingly with the Psalmist who says the earth “shouts” or the pop song, the “stars come tumbling down,” as if Jack and Jill had the Heavens to earth. But earth is mans and this his truth, that it’s not far from earth’s lungs or voice to earth’s stethoscope and blood pressure cuff while we are taking vitals of the planet. In the poetic acquisition of vocal cords and moral quantum of forgiving worms, plow style,  the human organs of the continents, the heart of nature, lungs the seas, the voices that  leap out of our fingerprints are one in their exile to forgive.

But attributing

Texas Buckeye

Does Ophelia question whether to continue with humanity and its myths? I question whether to start the year with spring or fall.  Fall is preferable for its fruition and still passion, but spring after all is what makes fall, growth, imbalance, storms, wind. So what is the greatest image of the spring but the Mexican buckeye. This shocks you. You'd prefer the redbud nobly thrusting out flowers before ever a leaf hits the stem. And look at the buckeye anyway, a mere shrub, sticks clustered up from a root with leaves , broad and palmate, like a papaya! Not a hardy candidate. But if you have seen the buckeye in bloom in late March in stands, groves under leafless trees, not covered with blooms, but with M 12 colored sun flames trumpeting out from its tips, surrounded by the black butterflies and moths pollinating it then you have seen as rare a sight as is possible in spring.