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I like what you said at the beginning of this post: "our destination is nothing less than a fundamentally transformed perception of reality." I think it's working because I catch myself every day thinking of some idea from your writing that has made me think much more deeply about the world around me and how our medieval ancestors would have seen things. It's like lifting a veil into a simpler and more profound reality that we have largely - often completely -forgotten. One of the things that has made terrible inroads to this way of life and thinking is the digital lifestyle. It is a terrible destroyer of reality, and yet if we did not have it, how would we learn about our forgotten world of wonders? ... about flowers, I've always been deeply affected by their intricacies and variety and what seems like God's gratuitous beauty for our enjoyment and for the bees' livelihood. Flowers seems like God's clear shout-out that He is here with us. No wonder there is symbolism in them. I love the references to the flowers in the art you've shared. It helps me look more deeply.

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author

Thank you for another wonderful comment! It truly is a marvelous and mysterious experience when we can start to see the world differently. I think my "re-education" began in earnest years ago when I was living in a log cabin on my five-acre farm in the northern hinterlands, and it continues to this day (it's been a long and slow process—I had a high-tech childhood and spent a lot of time with digital technology in my early twenties, so it was a big change for me).

Yes, exactly, "gratuitous beauty"—that's how I think of flowers as well.

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4 hrs agoLiked by Robert Keim

Oh how I adore flowers. Lovely to read what you wrote about them. They make angels smile.

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Great post, thanks. The strawberries illustrated are what we would today call "wild" or "alpine" strawberries. Much smaller than the modern cultivars, and more spherical, as you noted. They are still grown, I have a few which pop up among my cultivated strawberries every year.

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Yes, what's interesting to me though is that strawberries were cultivated fruits in the Middle Ages (at least in the fourteenth century, presumably earlier in some places), and I don't recall seeing any medieval depictions of conical strawberries. So when (and why) did cultivated strawberries start becoming conical?

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Good question! Nobody knows, but given that most development of fruit and vegetable varieties (and flowers too) got going commercially in the 18th century, I suppose then. There is a suggestion online of the 18th century France as the origin. Not done anything more than cursory research though.

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That makes sense. I suppose the spherical vs. conical issue is probably discussed somewhere in the book by Dr. Darrow (https://archive.org/details/strawberryhistor00darr/page/436/mode/2up), but the information might be hard to find because it's a very long book (over 400 pages!).

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