In 2022 I began having coffee meet ups with three of my mentors to discuss a project on native plants they wanted to involve me in. Amanda Lafleur, Bill Fontenot and Dr. Ray Brassieur and I met a few times in the fall of 2022. At the meetings I presented them each with a sprig of the sweet everlasting. I left these meetings with a life changing sense of dedication and dignity for the work I was doing.
In December 2022 I attended a prairie society function at NuNu’s in Arnaudville where I ran into my Frozard neighbor Dr. Allain whose photographs on the USGS survey I had used for months. I knew at this time that this plant was rare in my experience, but these prairie biologists were familiar with it. I gave Dr. Allain a sprig of flowers and he was able to sprout seed. He thought the rosette was purple cudweed, which was common in our area. I knew there were differences between the purple cudweed and the sweet everlasting in my own pasture, and taking all opinions in for consideration, continued observing them.
At a follow up coffee with Dr. Brassieur I presented him with a gallon ziplock bag of the vinéraire. He was full of insight and offered the origin of the name.
The word vinéraire conjures up ideas of a plant that is venerated, and so this is true, but the word has more to do with vulnerability than adoration. He explained that vinéraire, as we say, was a corruption of vulnéraire, a vulnerary (all purpose healing) plant. "Corruption" isn't really a nice word and I don't ascribe to the idea that Louisiana French has been degraded in any way, rather, it has been enriched. The name represents a change to the French in Louisiana because of factors such language influences and the predominantly oral aspect of the language. For example, I worked with American Beauty Berry, in French sassepareille, but also in Louisiana creole chassepareille and sometimes in Point Blue, bouilli sauvage. Would I call chassepareille a corruption? No, I'd call it poetry.
According to vocabulary.com:
The old-fashioned word vulnerary can be used as a noun or an adjective to describe plants that are used to heal wounds or treat illnesses. Calendula flowers are sometimes used as a vulnerary…Vulnerary shares a root with vulnerable, the Latin vulnus, or "wound."
Dr. Brassieur also told me of emails he’d received from native women down the bayou like Marlene Toups and Therese Dardar who were looking to Louisiana ethnobotanists and horticulturalists for the vinéraire of their memory. Some said they had not seen the plant in forty years. They used to smell it in the savanne, like syrup, and their daddies would bring it back from the rabbit hunts. Dr. Brassieur remarked that smelling it in the field was the same way I found it, plus my field is full of rabbits.
I left that vinéraire-coffee with the good professor with a clear mission: to grow this plant out and return it to anyone who wanted it, especially the native women and tribes who had lost it. I knew this plant existed up north, but I had no other sightings of it here in Prairie des Femmes in all of my years tromping this countryside and scanning the roadsides. Even the fields boardering my field are strangely barren of it, or much diversity at all. I felt confident that whatever strain of this plant that was surviving here was somewhat tolerant of our micro-climate, and deserved after all these years to be venerated.
Part 7: Big Bill as the Voice of God
Part 9: The Prairie has a memory.
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