This isn’t our normal walk in the garden. Unlike others, where we’ve looked at a plant and seen the stories and meanings men have woven around them, this is a personal conversation between a gardener and the person who visits his garden. The Garden of Gods and Monsters is open to all but today you and I are going to walk quietly because I want to show you one of it’s essential truths. Here in the wildflower meadow I want to introduce you to the Jerusalem artichoke.
How you are feeling as you come into the garden is always valid. You may feel unimportant, unloved; you may feel you have no purpose or reason to exist; you may feel that you have no direction, and no hope of ever finding one. This is ok. The truth of my garden is that there’s never any expectation to feel anything but your truth. You have a right to feel your worst or best in this moment, but I hope that this little yellow flower will help to bring you comfort.
If we were to sit for a day in the meadow and simply watch we would notice something amazing happen. We would notice that certain plants seem to turn and trace the course of the sun over the day. Although there are a lot of plants that I could have chosen the Jerusalem artichoke is, for me, the one which best illustrates the point I want to make. I want to tell you that you are more beautiful, more important, more valuable, and more amazing than you perhaps ever believed that you were.
The phenomena of plants turning to follow the sun has been known for millennia. We used to call this principle “heliotropism” meaning “sun turn” and the Ancient Greeks were well aware of it but thought it was the action of the sun drying the side of the plant closest to it and causing the plant to twist. They did, however, name one of the plants in their garden heliotropium. But then in 385 BC a clever man came along and told us that it was unworthy of our time to think about it.
It’s a sad fact , like so many other cases that people accepted one man’s truth over the importance of questioning the presented facts, a lie becomes accepted truth and generations suffer because of it. We see this throughout the history of Western medical, legal, religious, and ethical practice. questions we should be asking. An ancient Greek or Roman said it and powerful voices asserted it. So it must be true; because the Greeks and Romans were the fathers of civilisation and we don’t want to contradict our elders. That Aristotle put the brakes on our understanding of heliotropism for 1,800 years is in a sense truly irrelevant unless you’re a botanist, but his view on sun turning plants, like the ideas of Evagrius Ponticus, Galen and Hippocrates shackled humanity to systems that were ultimately detrimental to our full development.
The view of Aristotle was no less wrong than that of original sin, cardinal sin, that the liver makes blood for the veins and the heart the blood for the arteries, that the uterus causes hysteria, that wombs can wander, that disease was caused by “miasma”, or that the earth is flat and the sun revolves around it. We kept those beliefs for a very long time because only a brave man dared challenge them. In most cases there were grave penalties, including death, for those who did. The little voice that speaks the truth is often drowned out by the louder, more important one until enough people stop believing and start questioning what they’ve always been told.
The same is true for you and for the Jerusalem artichoke. The plant was unknown to the Greeks, it was a stranger living in a foreign prairie and so would probably have been thought of as barbaric. Had Aristotle met it he would probably have dismissed it as unimportant, because though pretty it didn’t show any signs of being useful. But were you to dig a little, to try and question the true value of the Jerusalem artichoke, you would find a great truth.
To the First Nations of North America, in who’s prairies it grows, Helianthus tuberosus is more than just a pretty plant who turns to follow the sun. It is a valuable source of excellent nourishment. Before Aristotle was even born they had dug down into the soil and seen the true value of the plant. In the end even the name “Jerusalem artichoke” is a western lie now told too often to be changed and it denies a beautiful heritage.
The plant, as I say, is from the North American continent, not the supposed seat of dominant theologies and, cough, “civilisation”. The true reason “Jerusalem” was applied is lost in time, but perhaps the most logical reason follows like the game of Chinese Whispers. Early Italian immigrants were said to have looked at the flower and called it “girasole”, their word for sunflower. Through people talking and spreading this shallow explanation of the plant, we can see girasole becoming Jerusalem, not least because of the Western need to tie everything back to their own religion and find a “Christian” interpretation for everything. Another, equally valid explanation would be that it was named by the pilgrims who learned to use this indigenous food and called it Jerusalem because they saw their colony as a “New Jerusalem”. Westerners have an amazing need to appropriate other cultures and turn them into something that fits their world view. Just ask yourself how our European ancestors thought of clover before St. Patrick and his church got his hands on it.
The same is true for the artichoke part of it’s common name. It was in cultivation long before Europeans blighted Turtle Island and in 1605 a French explorer Samuel de Champlain “discovered” it being grown domestically. He brought tubers back with him to introduce to the French explaining that the flavour was artichoke like. The French found it very pleasant and it remained a favoured vegetable for centuries and the designation “artichoke” stuck. As to the other common name “Indian potato”, I decline to even comment on the disrespect and inaccuracy of that one.
But what does this have to do with you, with the place you may be standing in at the moment, and how you feel about yourself? Possibly nothing if we look at the surface. Fine, clever men may have defined you as of no importance; and you and others may believe their description of you. Society may have placed the acceptable standard for beauty, lifestyle, even your thoughts and beliefs, higher than you could ever attain. And so we twist ourselves to try and face the sunlight of public opinion and socially accepted worth. But when we do that we deny the essential truth of ourselves. We have infinite capacity for good, for beauty, for empathy, compassion, and to nourish the lives and souls of others. Beneath the surface there is another truth. There we can find infinite worth within ourselves and others. We just have to be willing to question the accepted truth and call it false; to see the beauty within rather than just the shell we’re told is valueless.
The Garden of Gods and Monsters 
Wow! This article was a pleasant hike. I wish you were still writing. I’d be proud to link our blogs in mutual support. My research led me another possibility on the origin of the term “Jerusalem” Artichoke.
Thanks for the comments. I’m thinking of continuing over the coming year and expanding on the types of plants covered. Be good to speak further.