Brantwood - Cyanotypes and Erba Della Madonna

Alex prepared the studio space for making cyanotypes, a fascinating process of exposing plants directly onto paper, registering only the non-translucent aspects of the plants shape. I know nothing about it – but it’s a fascinating and wonderfully tactile process. We worked late, me watching, Alex producing the first cyanotype images – Spiked Speedwell and Hedge Woundwort, then Woodruff, Wild Strawberry and an Ivy Leaved Toadflax leaf.

Exploring today the significance of ‘Erba della Madonna’ in Ruskin’s life. But first, after our discovery last night that this plant was in fact the ‘Ivy leaved toadflax’, I realised I had photographed this plant several times already. It grows in relative profusion in the cracks on the wall directly outside Ruskin’s front door, the site of so many photographic portraits of Ruskin. Speaking to Sally, the head gardener here, she tells me she has never planted it there, though they had planted it down near what is now the entrance. I like to believe Ruskin originally planted ‘Erba della Madonna’ in this wall, opposite his front door, transporting it from Oxford. He frequently also referred to this plant as ‘Oxford weed’. It doesn’t grow naturally anywhere else here at Brantwood – just this one precious patch outside his front door. The references to this plant ‘having been known is Harristown as my plant’ (ie by Rose and Maria La Touche) are added to in a letter to Lady Mount Temple on 3rd May 1876… “Little Bignall churchyard with it’s ruined chapel.. and the window so overgrown with my own Madonna herb that one would think the little ghost had been at work planting them all the spring”. Was Rose his little ghost?

The plant is indeed a marvel in miniature – it seems a microcosm of perfection – it’s beautiful and delicate falling form, a tiny ivy-like leaf in miniature, the modesty of it’s snake-like flower. Though it can grow as a kind of ground ivy, it seems most at home growing in crevices between stone and masonry – it tumbles down, or ventures upwards as it decides. Ruskin seems first to have drawn the plant in 1845, in mention he makes of a “study of the marble inlaying on the front of Casa Loredan, Venice”. Ruskin says of this drawing “the lovely wild weeds being allowed to root themselves in the sculptures, the bit of Oxford weed below…”. In Modern Painters, in praising various painters for their truth in finish, he says “how Bellini fills the rents of his ruined walls with the most exquisite clusters of the Erba della Madonna”. Most often, the plant is associated with Venice, in drawings he did of ruinous buildings – on top of the columns of St Mark’s in 1876 “I am weary this morning, with vainly trying to draw the Madonna herb clustered on the capital’s of St Mark’s porch; and mingling it’s fresh life with the marble Acanthus leaves…”, or a cluster of it “drawn in a nook behind one of the shafts of the destroyed cloister of San Zaccaria”, or drawing it’s presence on the ruinous ‘Stilted Archivolts’, in Rio di Ca’Foscari “set off by the dark and delicate leaves of the Erba della Mandonna, the only pure piece of modern addition to the old design, all else being foul plaster and withering wood.”

Though he grouped this plant with his ‘Draconidae’ in Proserpina, meaning it had dark qualities – a serpent or dragon-like nature, or an evil spirit, he clearly loved it. “in the fairest of them, the erba della Madonna of Venice descends from the ruins it delights in to the herbage at their feet, and touches it, and behold, instantly, a vast group of herbs for healing…” He goes on later “Indeed Linaria and several other Draconid forms are entirely beautiful.”

I think for Ruskin, it’s a plant of his early years, which he encountered many times while drawing in Venice, perhaps also in Oxford – it formed a kind of natural decoration for ruinous buildings to him – never a weed to be uprooted, never a symptom of decay, but a lovely and natural embellishment. Rose La Touche clearly associated it with Ruskin, sending him a bouquet of it after his Dublin lecture. It’s a very unusual and humble plant to make a bouquet of. I think this plant, unusually, was an almost entirely beneficent presence in Ruskin’s life. It’s one of these small and subtle wonders that emerge slowly into one’s mind, a small jewel of time spent here.

We had a wonderful walk, and found the wonderful Vervain growing in the lower garden, but then went up to the highest of Ruskin’s ponds, passing his old water channel and stopping often to look at little patches of Wild Strawberry, Whortleberry, Wood Sorrel, Herb Robert, Violet, growing within the rocks, ferns and moss. By the high 'reservoir' an ancient and twisted Honeysuckle had formed a huge bush high in one of the trees. It was a beauty of a serpent, an old one, a survivor, which seemed to have achieved a kind of harmony with its host tree. We picked some honeysuckle flowers, taking in huge drafts of it’s incredibly heady scent, and wondering whether it might indeed induce erotic dreams.