FKA Santa Maura

Lots & lots of saints today, including Saint Andrew (not the patron saint of golf) & Saint Trojan (not the patron saint of condoms).  But enough about them & what they are not.  This afternoon, lets get to know Saint Maura.  Don't worry, there isn't much to know.

First let me say that a friend of mine wanted to choose Maura as her confirmation name but the priest would not let her becasue there was no saint named Maura & she chose Margaret instead.  There are slews of Margarets.  As it happens in this post-google era we can all know there is indeed a Saint Maura.  She was a virgin (so much more appropriate than a few of the Margaret-ilk I would think but there you go).  She was martyred.  End of story.  Well not quite.

Apparently a kinda-sorta cult sprang up around Maura & for a while there she was very big in the east.  We don't know why exactly because one of Emperor Constantine's brothers (1/2 brothers?  I get confused) divided his time between being emperor & putting down christians generally, & when he had a little extra time on his hands he would go round repressing devotions to Saint Maura specifically.  & that was more or less all I could find about Maura until....

It turns out there is an island named after her.  Originally  I couldn't find the island, even with google but eventually I learned it was renamed Lefkas (in English).  I'm sure they had their reasons. 

Naturally I got curious what those reasons might be.  While trying to find out (I never did but I did not look that hard) I learned  it was the birth place of that well-known Greco-Irish writer Patrick Lafcadio Hearn.  Don't worry if you have never heard of him, apparently he was mostly big in Japan. 

So there was a Saint Maura, not too much remains known except they named an island for her & then they renamed it & then a guy who was named for the island went on to change his name.  Which brings us to the end of this story & the end of November.

Hard laurel (not)

I have spent most of the last two months deep in the Boraginaceae family.  Not only would I not want to live there, it is not even a nice place to visit.  The blocks of wood have been, well, blocks of wood, but the notations & alterations to the original records are fatiguing.

It is not unusual for the original index cards to have some things crossed out & other information clearly added later & I am fine with that.   By & large, botanical taxonomy works on an almost glacial timeline (until very recently of course, when that whole DNA thing came into being).    The edits I found in this family, though, they were, well, special.  For example, a complete sub-set originally noted as having been collected in Guatemala were updated to reflect collection in Cuba.  I understand not being quite sure if you are in Brazil or Suriname.  I can imagine collectors listening carefully for Portuguese v Dutch to determine which side of the border they were on.  But Guatemala or Cuba?  One is more than twice the size of the other & the smaller one is a group of islands.  The other is, while not entirely landlocked, certainly not to be confused with an island.

I don't care how drunk you got on/off the plane, at some point during your expedition you will be absolutely sure you are not in one or the other.  If, for example you come across ancient looking pyramids above the water, you are not in Cuba.  You could be many many places other than Guatemala, but Cuba absolutely would not be one of them.  If you climb to the highest point you can find & discover you are in a chain of mountains, again you are not in Cuba.  Guatemala has enough mountains (& pyramids) that you would have a hard time walking straight ahead in any direction for any amount of time without encountering one or the other, so if you do walk straight ahead for a day & sight neither, well, welcome to Cuba.  Or at least to welcome to not-Guatemala.

It seems perfect that confusion reigns here in Boraginaceae.  Because I am not a botanist, I don't even pretend to be one on this blog, when I start to work with a new family I try to find something familiar in it.  Some something to hang by brain on while I get to know the others.  For Boraginacea, up popped borage.  This was both good & bad, because while borage was already known to me, it is unlikely to appear in the wood collection; it can sport woody stems, but it is not widely recognized as a tree.  Or even a shrub.  & by "not widely" I mean "never".   You can see how it would help to first acquaint myself with some specimen I am likely to encounter, but borage was just so easy, what with being right there in the name Boraginaceae, & because it also happens to be the name of the garden gnome that shocked (Shocked!) the officials at last year's Chelsea Garden Show.  Once I made that connection, it was all over as far as finding one more suitable.

& so finding something familiar has not helped as much as it usually does, what with we-don't-know-what-country-we-are-in collectors & my memory latching on to banned lawn ornaments.  Confusion is looking endemic for this family: so far almost 1/2 the specimens that have common names recorded have "laurel" somewhere in them.  You might think, well that should make things easier, but it doesn't.  True laurels are found in the Laurel Family is Lauraceae, making the laurels of Boraginaceae impostors.  Or maybe they are just lost.