On this page I assemble examples of text placed such that it appears to be concerned with the CROWN or presentiment of a plant, such as this:
To explain: this is the first growing node of the plant, the point where the roots and stem separate and go in their different directions.
“Crown” and “presentiment” are old-fashioned horticultural terms, not the terminology of modern botany.
(The French “presentiment” was the preferred term of the master gardener, Alan Chadwick, himself a student of the French horticultural wizard Louis Lorette.)
It is, of course, gynaecological. It refers to the presentiment of the child’s head in the birth canal. So too does the English “crown”.
The idea is that this is the point from which the plant is born, drawing parallels with human birth. (In the parallel, the Earth, the soil, is the mother.)
These parallels have been systematically expunged from modern botany, but were a feature of traditional plant terminology.
(The “crown” in modern botany refers to the entire above-ground part of the plant, losing all the symbolism.)
In the Voynich herbal pages we find paragraphs of text placed at exactly this point: the juncture of root and stem.
It is the most important part of any plant, the primal node.
The nurture of the “presentiment” was a feature of classical (premodern) horticulture but has been lost in the quantifying crudities of industrial horticulture.
(Preindustrial understandings of plants were preserved well into the 20th C. on artistocratic estates throughout Europe but were then completely disrupted by the World Wars.)
In the illustrations and in the placement of text, the Voynich ms. gives particular emphasis to this point of the plant – the presentiment.
The natural implication is that the blocks of text are about or in some way concern this aspect of plant morphology.
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