HERB - Re: sources and names

[Sara Harless]

On Thu, 7 May 1998, khkeeler wrote:

> There is a book of English names of plant culled from the Period
> literature--written by a linguist with little serious interest in plants
> (i.e. goes to modern English common names not scientific names); there
> are floras for all the European countries matching scientific names to
> modern (and some traditional) common names; there are herbals annotated
> by good botanists to identify, where possible, the plant the Medieval
> writers meant.  I just ordered a folklore book (Oxford Dictionary of
> Plant Lore, R. Vickery) of which a Texas A&M reviewer wrote "the
> common... names are unfamiliar outside of [the British Isles] making it
> difficult to find anything..."  

This sounds like a good start. I use PageMaker for publishing and am 
learning HTML and just got started on PERL for website building. I don't 
have a server of my own but I'm the closest thing we have to an admin 
here at glenmar.com. I'll ask the boss if we can host it. We have the 
space and I have tons o' techies to help me.

> In my opinion, putting it all together is no small task, but we could
> start.

It will be definitely input intensive. I can receive and manipulate text in 
ASCII, Word, WordPerfect, PageMaker 5.0 and below, Lotus, & Symphony. I 
also have a scanner with Kodak OCR software and will soon have fax 
capabilities.

> The common medicinal and culinary herbs, vegetables and fruit will make
> the central list.
> We can quickly add the native trees of Europe.
> To add in plants brought into Europe during Period from the Middle and
> Far East, and the post 1492 additions makes the problem harder, but not
> impossible.

What I *don't* have is plant knowledge. All of you will have to supply 
the name-matching, note writing expertise. So far, all I know is that most 
plants are green sometime in their lifecycle.

> There are lots of difficult questions, but we can certainly make it
> easier for the next person to work through this stuff.

I've built many databases both for myself and for my before-retirement 
employer, GTE. To start, I would need to know database fields. So what 
data-bits do you want in this database? Start with 1) current scientific 
name, 2) most common modern name, 3) alternate names 4) notes on 
historical and modern references and uses. What else do you want? and I 
think I'd better dig out my programming notes on relational databases.

> Sara/Evaine sounded like she volunteered! I volunteer to help.

It sure did, didn't it. Thanks, I can use all the help I can get.

> I generated some lists for teaching at the Royal University and I 
> imagine others have too.  Riddle (Dioscorides on Pharmacy and Medicine) 
> lists the plants in Dioscorides' herbal, and that will cover a lot of 
> the medicinal plants of Period, since they restated D. a lot (and its 
> pretty big): I can get that to you.  Got a web site? (I don't).  

Maybe. If not here on glenmar, I'll ask if midrealm.org has any space.

> Agnes deLanvallei in Calontir > > kkeeler1 at unl.edu >

Evaine the crazed in the Middle
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