Le calendrier républicain

"...pour glisser parmi le peuple les notions rurales élémentaires, pour lui montrer les richesses de la nature, pour lui faire aimer les champs, et lui désigner avec méthode l'ordre des influences du ciel et des productions de la terre." --Fabre d'Églantine Every day of the French Republican Calendar was associated with a different plant, animal, agricultural tool, etc., both to replace the custom of saints' days and to celebrate the agricultural and natural world. Familiarity with the plants and animals and artifacts around me brings a personal pleasure when I go outside: and, while the makers of the republican calendar were French, most of the daily objects can be found all around the world. It's not a Jacobins-only club here in the calendar! NB: Different methods exist for converting dates between the Gregorian Calendar and the Republican Calendar. I'm going off the dashboard widget available here. Maintained by needsmoreresearch.

[frenchrepublicancalendar]

Happy 26 Pluviôse from the French Republican Calendar!

~brought to you, with affection and apologies for the color scheme and the atrocious pun, by the 8th, 26th, and 18th day of the month.

[montagnarde1793]

Articles classés Peupliers de la Liberté écrits par krapo arboricole

En l’honneur du jour du peuplier - malheureusement s’il existe encore des “peupliers de la liberté” de la première Révolution, je n’en ai pas connaissance…

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montagnarde1793 said: Not to mention, along with oaks, they’re the most common kind of liberty tree! Which makes sense. But I read somewhere that they’re particularly susceptible to diseases and tend on average not to survive the centuries…

I didn't know they were common liberty trees!   Good for them. 

They're fast growers and they propagate well from cuttings, but yeah, I believe they aren't generally long-lived.  Many of the cottonwoods are riverside trees, so they're adapted to shooting up fast and spamming the surroundings with seeds--because they're likely to get knocked down in a flood sooner or later.  They also grow well from cuttings, another thing that's handy if you expect to be broken up and carried off by a river.

I was looking up longevity for Lombardy Poplars--they're the distinctive columnar ones and yes, they're vulnerable to a particular fungus--and found a whole article on the poplar popularity in the United States.  They were huge in the landscaping world but the thing where they don't live long and spread out root systems into nearby sidewalks and pipes made it a fairly short fad.  (Apparently in 1871 planting Lombardy Poplars became illegal in Albany, NY.  I wonder if it's still true.)

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9 Pluviôse: Peuplier (poplar, Populus spp.)

--Well, do you think I'll have a hard time getting a good price for this study?

--No...you just need to find someone who really likes poplars.

Daumier, The Artists (1865) (...and apologies to Monet, Cézanne, Gauguin, and Pissarro above.)

I really like poplars.  Poplars, aspens, cottonwoods--they're all close relatives in the Populus genus.  I particularly like them in late spring, when the cottonwood lives up to its name by absolutely filling the air where I live with the giant floating white puffs that carry its seeds.

Maybe one of these days I'll go and visit the Balmville Tree, among the oldest trees in the eastern US.  Legend had it the tree grew from George Washington's walking-stick, planted during the American Revolution, but core samples show it to date from 1699.

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8 Pluviôse: Mézéréon (mezereon, Daphne mezereum)

Like the snowdrops of a few days ago, this is a very pretty early bloomer.  Lovely pink flowers, brilliant red berries, and enough toxic mezerein and daphnin to cause rashes from skin contact and potentially death if the berries are consumed. 

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montagnarde1793 said: Interesting!

I mean, there's a few mental leaps amongst bracket fungus, squishy tindery stuff, love, and...cajoling? coaxing?  That's my sense of the verb "amadouer?"  But I dunno, I guess I can see it.  Not sure how much is folk etymology, though.

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montagnarde1793 said: Hm, I wonder if it’s etymologically related to amadouer. And if so, how and why.

It is!  Or so says Wiktionnaire, anyway: "De l'ancien occitan amadou (« amoureux »), du latin amator (« aimant »)."

I'm not sure whether it's because it clings lovingly to its host tree, or because it sparks up in a fiery and passionate way.

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7 Pluviôse: Amadouvier (tinder fungus, hoof fungus, Fomes fomentarius)

Some 5000 years ago a man died on what is now the Austrian-Italian border, in the Ötztal Alps.  When his body was found in 1991 he still had with him his pouch of tinder fungus, complete with traces of iron pyrite showing its use as a fire-starter.  So joining the French Republican Calendar may be a pleasant change of pace for this fungus in its relationship with humans.  Generally, we're beating it into a pulp--amadou--to use as tinder or to dry fishing flies or even to make into hats. 

What would F. fomentarius rather be doing?  Mostly, parasitizing trees, slowly contributing to their death and decay.  Its mycelium enters the wood of a host tree through wounds in the bark, feeding on it; on the outside of the tree the fungus produces a hard, layered fruiting body that can live up to thirty years.  The yearly growth of new layers always occurs on the bottom of the fungus--if the host tree dies and falls over, the fungus adapts to the new orientation.  Pick your pun: it knows what's up, or it knows what's going down.

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6 Pluviôse: Laurier-thym (Laurustinus, Viburnum tinus)

Millin is stern about this plant's name in French: this is not a laurel nor a thyme, but a viburnum.  The "laurel" comes from its similarity to bay laurel, also an evergreen with glossy leaves.  Which is all very nice, but what's much more interesting is that the leaves have domatia.  The leaf produces a little tiny chamber for even tinier arthropods to live and breed in--in this case, mites. The predatory mite Metaseiulus occidentalis thrives on laurustinum and eats the eggs of the plant-eating two-spotted spider mite (Tetranychus urticae).

Leaf drama.

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montagnarde1793 said: Well, they’re an astrological sigh. Mine though, as it happens, so not so much for this time of year. It would probably be anachronistic to assume that was deliberate. I mean, when they say they want an end to superstition, they don’t mean astrology.

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The trouble with bulls is that there’s just too much symbolism.  You start writing about astrology and then the next thing you know you’re off on a ten-page essay… 

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Bulls historical,

Bulls divine,

Bulls metaphorical,

Bulls all the time!

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montagnarde1793 said: Well, they’re an astrological sigh. Mine though, as it happens, so not so much for this time of year. It would probably be anachronistic to assume that was deliberate. I mean, when they say they want an end to superstition, they don’t mean astrology.

The trouble with bulls is that there's just too much symbolism.  You start writing about astrology and then the next thing you know you're off on a ten-page essay... 

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5 Pluviôse: Taureau (bull, Bos taurus male)

The hardest calendar entries to write are the ones with the most extensive subject matter.  Where do you even start with bulls?  Bovine biology?  Agricultural technique?  Cultural symbolism? 

I turned the question over to a four-year-old and asked what she wanted to say about bulls.  Three factoids.

They're big.

They eat.

They like to be underground a lot.

Well, thanks.  Time for a fact-check, then.  Are bulls big?  Yes.  They are: Wikipedia tells me that "adult bulls may weigh between 500 and 1,000 kilograms (1,100 and 2,200 lb)."  And do they eat?  They certainly do.  Cattle are herbivores, with a complex digestive system that allows them to break down cellulose-heavy vegetation like grasses.  (Though it's really the crowd of microbes in the rumen that do most of the work.)

"They like to be underground a lot" fails the fact-check--unless you want to talk about the Hall of the Bulls in the famous Lascaux caves.

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4 Pluviôse: Perce-neige (snowdrop, Galanthus nivalis and other Galanthus spp.)

Well, well, look what's come poking up through the snow!  The French Republican calendar, here with the month of Pluviôse.  It's warmed up to a balmy 15˚F (-9˚C) where I live: a fine time to tell yourself that spring will come.

The snowdrop propagates asexually from bulbs--familiar to even very casual gardeners like me--but it also produces small seeds with elaiosomes, fat- and protein-rich structures that attract ants.  The ants feed the elaiosomes to their larvae, then carry the seed to the nest's disposal area, where the colony's waste provides plenty of nutrients for germinating seeds.  Many plants mix sexual and asexual reproductive strategies like this; it seems to suit snowdrops well, as a thriving snowdrop population can spread out happily into thick carpets.

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23 Thermidor: Lentille (lentil, Lens culinaris)

Here's a hard-working legume!  The many varieties of lentil feed quite a lot of the world.  They especially make themselves valuable in vegetarian or low-meat diets: the lentil is high in protein and a good source of iron and B vitamins.  While lentils are deficient in two of the essential amino acids, mixing them with rice or pasta makes for a complete protein profile.  If you are alive, thank a lentil--at the very least, on behalf of your ancestors.

What do lentils like?  They are happiest in cool climates, tolerating some touches of spring frost; they want well-drained soil and not too much rainfall.  Inoculate them with Rhizobium friends--everyone remembers about Fabaceae and the nitrogen cycle?--and keep down their weedy competitors.  And your lentils will repay you.

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22 Thermidor: Caprier (caper, Capparis spinosa)

Capers are best known in their culinary role: the little pickled green things in a jar, so tasty on deviled eggs and often spotted in company with salmon, are the unripe buds of the caper bush.  People also pickle and eat the ripe berry, and sometimes the leaves.

What are the white spots on capers?  Well--okay, in the above photo, there are obviously large grains of salt.  But even unsalted capers often show small white speckles.  Those are crystallized spots of rutin, a compound formed as mustard oil is released from the pickled buds. 

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20 Thermidor: Écluse (lock)

A lock on a canal or river allows boats to move between stretches of water on different levels: useful in canals, particularly, because a lock system allows a canal to be carved through the land regardless of highs and lows.  The many designs get very complicated, but the basic idea of a pound lock is that the boat enters a chamber with gates on either end that allow water in and out.  I am not engineer enough to report further, even though I now live near one end of the Erie Canal, which is a lock motherlode.  (The top pics, by the way, come from the lovely New York State Archives, which is a lock image motherlode.)

Qiao Weiyo of the Song Dynasty period can be credited with the development of that pound lock system in 984.  Sluice gates and other simple forms of water-level management were already common, but they were inadequate for the needs of the heavy tax-grain barges.  The pound lock system protected the boats as well as simplifying their movement.

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19 Thermidor: Gentiane (gentian, Gentiana lutea and other Gentiana spp.)

Gentiana is a large and colorful genus.  Intense blues are typical, but some species are purple, white, or yellow.  Millin describes the yellow gentian as the principal French species.

The root produces intensely bitter compounds, particularly amarogentin, used to study human taste receptors and to flavor tonics like Angostura bitters.  And also Moxie.  Excellent stuff.