VII: Verbena
The many trials of Joseph Dombey, botanist-at-large
Good morning. Today is septidi, the 27th of Prairial, Year CCXXXI. We celebrate la verveine, a beautiful herb people believed must have powers due to its scent.
The lives of botanists are not typically seen as adventurous the way, say, archaeologists and paleontologists (unfairly) are. While we inexplicably choose people who scrape at dirt for a living to portray as heroic men on the silver screen, in real history, it's the botanists who got into the most adventurous scrapes, particularly during the colonial development of the Americas, when the exchange of new plants between the continental masses led to as much scientific excitement, national jealousy, and frenzied expeditions as the space race would in the 20th century.
Let's take a look at just one tumultuous life, that of the French botanist Joseph Dombey.
