The History of the Kingdom of The West
Scrolls

Roses Are Red, Violets Are Blue, Wolfsbane Is Poison And Not Good For You

Photo and Contribution
by Tatiana Nikolaevna Tumanova

Roses Are Red, Violets Are Blue, Wolfsbane Is Poison And Not Good For You
When I floated the idea of changing a floral border for an herbal one past Aricia, she really like it. To help me out, she sent over five pages of some simple drawings of medicinal herbs/plants and made a note of some nice ones she liked. I looked over the drawings, then went out on the internet and found more pictures of things and printed them all out. It was pretty daunting, but finally decided to tackle this by shape. I shuffled through the pile and made a note of which ones had nice large flowers and labeled those "line enders", things with delicate pointy bits were "medium line-enders" and stuff with large leaves and things were marked as "fillers."

The Black Hours floral decorations usually sprang out of the corners or up from the bottom out of stylized pots, off of the corners of text blocks and sometimes the tips of capital letters, also out of the triangular areas between the outside border and the circular scenes. They twined in slightly asymmetrical curves and branched over each other to make an open but intertwined effect. My Black Hours border had a major start in the middle and I used three onions as the starting point. In each corner a bulb of garlic was used for the purpose. I tried not to think about the entire border as it went along, just the piece I was working on, but there had to be some planning involved as the distribution of color amongst the plants needed to be somewhat even at the end, although most of the border would be gold (stems) and silver (leaves). I knew that if I could get each side filled in, those could be duplicated, then that just left the middle pane and the top of the border to do.

So I began in the lower right-hand corner with a garlic bulb and drew in some curving and branching lines up to the Arms. Another curved line was started out of the tight spot to the right and below of the circle that would eventually hold a seal. Then I looked through the pile of pictures and started selecting things that would fit into the various shapes at the ends of the vines, between the vines, and filling up the leftover spots. In this case it was clary, bettonica, foxglove, lady's mantle -- hops filled up the big spot to the left of the garlic. Working up from the left corner were hounds-tongue, germander, mountain arnica, mouse ear, elecampane, hellabore, arnica, and some lavender and willow leaves tucked in here and there to fill things in. Starting above the Arms was verbena (vervaine), burdock, eryngo, greater mullein, feverfew, thyme, yellow flag (iris), borage, apothecary rose, catnip, mace, flaxweed (snapdragon), and more foxglove and lavender. A lot of this was transferred over to the left side but then the design had to change somewhat because the box on the left was a different shape than the box on the right. On the left some long birthwort was twined along with a poppy to fill in the odd shape. In this photo, the middle part was just being filled in.

Note that the Arms were drawn in detail on the left side, along with those features in the miniatures that I needed a guide for (as opposed to doing them in free-hand while going along). -- Tatiana Nikolaevna Tumanova

The West Kingdom History Website was created by and is maintained by Hirsch von Henford (mka Ken Mayer).