A metrical line from plant to poet to the god of physicians. A geology of medicine and herb. Not companion planting but conviviality. Plants doting on stones, metals smitten with flowers.

Asclepios cut open the earth, restored the heart’s beat to the dead. Milkweed took the garden’s pulse, deemed it butterfly- and bee-fluent.

A diagnosis was made, of dactyls like waterweed, of rose-stanza silkweed, of a lyre heart-strung and serpent-wound.

zahara starlight zinnia

APPENDIX D

Map of Medical Materials

province of Saskatchewan with Dioscorides

APPENDIX D (1)

Legend

1. Aromatics

Mixed grass, flowers, oil, and sap. Corn-rose under rising moon. Meadow saffron under Saturn. Poppy resin and a blood-firing ecotone. Where blooms blossom algae, where scarcely a wheeze breezes sea rush into lungs of the sea.

2. Living Creatures

Aspen groves and grassland. Amidst beaked willow and red osier dogwood a medicinal of the winged and the furred, the shelled and the finned. Mesic-wet and mixedwood, where hare meets rabbitfoot-grass, where rattlesnake plantain sloughs the skin of a yellowbelly racer.

3. Roots

Cool summers and cold winters. Naked in plain sight the hidden lines of rock-brake fern, parsley fern, dense cryptic fronds. Dig down and crack the curative cypher. The forest buttressed by a pharmacopeia of roots and … holdfast! The gall, the earthgall! O horehound, O mother of thyme!

4. Other Herbs and Roots; Narcotic Plants

Woodlands and shrubland borders. Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow. Bur reed and wild rye. Governed by the moon the perfection of dog-tooth, the smooth brome, the nodding-off brome. Till the leaf falls the sweet sleep-inducing vernal grass.

5. Earth and Metallic Stones

Let this suffice: the story under the understory. The story under tamarack and trembling aspen, under jack pine and black spruce. Under bog and calypso orchid, under heart-leaved twayblade. Earth, earth and stone, sand heated by sun. Clay, palladium, silica, zinc. Fossilized oyster shell, pine cones turned to stone, earth to wither tumors, earth to poultice a wound.

APPENDIX E

Topography of Repeating Plants and Patterns

province of Saskatchewan with William Morris

APPENDIX E (1)

Legend

1. Tulips among a grass of worsted warp.

2. Leaves peppered with carnations and peonies.

3. Honeysuckle and myrtle (one entwines linen, one adorns a wall).

4. Sunflower and acanthus leaves in a garden of combed cotton and silk.

5. Block-printed bluebells on cotton and linen.

6. A simple appliqué design of pomegranates and foliage.

7. Elegantly worked trees with hopelessly stylized birds.

8. Branches of hummingbird and crested bird on printed cotton.

9. Honeysuckle and briar on cream-colored ground.

10. A design of curving leaves.

11. Vine and pomegranates on 3-ply carpeting.

12. Pomegranates and foliage in pink and green silk.

13. Rosebush and apple tree cushion covers.

14. Morning glory and bindweed cushion covers.

15. Artichokes and thistles in gold thread and silk.