Pagina 63 - Juliana_Book_eng

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and the Nativity of Our Lady (September 8th), they were allegedly protected
from plague and other infectious diseases. But in spite of its miraculous healing
properties, people were afraid of this plant and did not use it very often.
The famous Italian physician Pietro Andrea Mattioli (1501-1577) wrote several
comments to Dioscorides’s encyclopedia De materia medica. Mattioli’s work
was a bestseller in the 16th century, with 60 editions and reprints. In it, Mattioli
describes several medicinal plants. He wrote the following about this species:
“Many people say that these berries envoke sleep in you if eaten. I myself am
not going to do so, for they could evoke eternal sleep instead.”
This plant has an underground horizontal rhizome, while the stem is 30 cm tall
and bears a single whorl of 4 oval, sharp-pointed, to 10 cm long, reticulately
veined leaves. The stem bears a single, radially symmetrical flower, with greenish outer tepals and yellowish-white
inner tepals. The fruit is an approximately 1 cm wide blue berry, which contains saponin gylcosides and is highly toxic.
This species is a rare exception among monocotyledons, given that it has reticulately veined leaves and flowers with 4
tepals.
The general distribution encompasses almost the whole of Europe, Asia Minor and Siberia. In Slovenia it inhabits
shady, damp forests.
The generic name was supposed to refer to the symmetric arrangement of the leaves and flower parts (par = equal);
according to a mythological interpretation, however, this name is after the Trojan prince Paris: the blue berry is the
apple, while the four leaves are the Goddesses Hera, Athena, Aphrodite, plus Prince Paris.
Parnassia palustris L. subsp. palustris – Grass of Parnassus
“Towards the end of summer, this simple but incredibly attractive heart-shaped
plant occurs in meadows in very high numbers. It is irradiated by a poetic
mood, and it is admired especially by flower lovers. From a basal bouquet of
heart-shaped leaves, a slender little stem with a single leaf is rising. A fairly
large and incredibly attractively designed star-shpaed, snow-white flower
opens at the top, smelling sweetly in the bright sun.” This is how the grass of
Parnassus was poetically described by Ferdinand Seidel in 1918 in his booklet
The Vegetation of Our Alps.
The basal leaves are heart-shaped and long-stalked. The plant has only a single
stem leaf, which is sessile, with a heart-shaped base. The flowers are solitary at
the top of the stem. The perianth is double and pentamerous. The petals are white, orbicularly ovate; in front of them,
five nectariferous fimbriate scales with round glands are located.
The general distribution extends throughout the Alps, but the species can be also found from northern Africa through
the entire Europe to Siberia. In Slovenia, it grows in wet meadows and marshes from the lowlands to the uplands.
The plant was given its latin name after Mt Parnassus (2,459 m), the residence of the Muses. Before the Linnean
binominals were established, this plant was called Gramen Parnassi – Parnassus grass. There are not many folk names
in Slovenia.
An interesting text about the grass of Parnassus (in Slovenian folk language known as ‘Christ’s shirts’), written by
Darinka Soban in connection with Tavčar’s novel The Flowers in Autumn, was published by the journal Proteus in
1992. The “white star of Christ’s shirt”, which glittered on the chest of Meta, the main protagonist, consisted of waxy
white flowers of the grass of Parnassus. In the well-known TV serial based on this novel, however, Meta presses
against her breast the pale purple Meadow Saffron! And this in spite of the fact that Tavčar clearly wrote:
“Something white was blossoming nearby.”
The Grass of Parnassus is a harbinger of autumn not only in the eternal circle of nature, but symbolically as well:
"I’m the same as this thing: now it blossoms before the winter, and what shall come of it? The flower drops of and
there’ll be nothing of it ...”
Physoplexis comosa (L.) Schur – Tufted horned Rampion
“The tufted rampion is one of the most glittering plants of our Alpine flora.
And we often speculate in vain how such a flowering beauty can spring up
from live rock,” wondered Tone Wraber in Luka Pintar’s work The Flowers of
Slovenia.
The tufted rampion is a relict of the Tertiary flora which in the Alps prospered
prior to the Ice Age. In Slovenia, we can find it in rock crevices in the montane
belt of the Julian Alps in the Koritnica Valley, on the slopes of Mt Mangrt,
Ruševa glava and Loška stena, in the Možnica Valley, at Beli potok below
Kriški podi, at Vrata, and below Mt Stenar. The only site in the Karavanke Mts
is in the Belca Valley below Mt Kepa.
The egeneral distribution extends to the southern calcareous Alps from Lake