And here he is again, gloomy, cold, soulless. It also has other flavors, right here in the name: leaf, bract, leaflet, palist in botanical terms, leaves and foliage in literary terms.
There can be more associations. I have November associated with horses. After all, Saint Martin (11.11.) is coming on horseback! I may have already covered it in the Recipe book, but I have to mention my grandfather from Pojizeří again, who kept a diary in Paceřice near Turnova at the end of the 19th century and at the turn of the 20th. and “climatological”, weather. And there he never avoided the type of horse on which Martin arrived. To my surprise, he only came upon whites about five times in ten to fifteen years. As a rule, he rode a bridle, at most a spotted filly. You know, global warming!
Now the association, in my case purely equine. I thought about the horses breaking into the plants. Not only those from around Třeboň, but also in the nomenclature.
He probably thought of me first ponytail or rather a rug. Equus = horse, scome on = hair. Ergo horsetail, Equisetum, no matter what kind. For example, from those that have recently appeared on the pages of the Recipe. In this case, it is a scientific generic name; there is not even a trace of the Czech horsetail.
Such a Czech, for example konitrud. Honestly, it is not a purely Czech word and name, but taken from Polish. Veleslavín already explained how he came up with that name in the translation of Mattioli’s herbarium: Všecka the herb is very bitter… It also has purgative properties. Or when fresh or dry leaves are eaten for up to ten days, they expel mucus and bile in the stools. And it has also been tested on horses, when they are in the pasture they eat these herbs, that is, they wheeze, and if they are neglected, they get sick and lose weight…”
The Polish name conitrud was adopted by the Peslov brothers (1819) as a generic name for the plant genus Gratiola The interpretation of the Latin family name is considered above, because the name Gratiola is derived from Lat gratiagrace, thanks. Gratiola officinalis Conitrude medicare is a perennial herb from the plantain family Plantaginaceae, formerly mole-like (Scrophulariaceae), if someone was looking for her. It is a highly endangered plant today, truly poisonous, from flooded meadows and ditches.
But I ran away from the horses! Folk Czech knew e.g. conical as a general name for omej (salamounek) from the genus Aconite (in contact areas with German, where Pferdlein grew) or the designation of medicinal sage (Sage officinalis). In your time in Moravia, you could meet horse which was the recorded vernacular name for the autumn sedge, Colchicum autumnal.
Curious from the horse is just one of the many garbled, indeed garbled names of mint: horse mint, horse mint, horse balmhorse or mare on or off. A folk combination is still recorded for mints horse’s foot with no substantial explanation of how and where the mints came to be.
If we are talking about epithets, adjectives, generic names of plants, a comparison with a large animal, ergo a horse, was often used for large plants. That’s how the large-leaved horse sorrel got its name, even though the possibility of a solution that only horses eat this herb, that it’s only good for horses, is in my head.
Of course I can’t leave out the horse cage, horseradish But you have known about this herb for a long time, that it is an example of another corruption, that originally a plant with an overhanging drooping flower was referred to that way, i.e. poniklec
About the author
Václav Vetvička is a botanist with a Renaissance spirit who has been dedicated to the popularization of science for over sixty years. He worked in many famous institutions, for example as the director of the Botanical Garden of the Faculty of Natural Sciences of Charles University.
