The end of aeons of unfettered natural development on St Helena was signalled in 1502, when the Galician commander João da Nova (1460–1509), with a modest flotilla under his command, is said to have happened by chance on the island on his return voyage from India. The year is commonly acknowledged, but narrowing the date with greater precision is problematic. The island had become widely known by its present name during the 1500s before Jan Huygen van Linschoten first asserted in his Itinerario of 1596 (translated into English as a Discours of Voyages two years later) that it was so named ‘because the Portingales discovered it uppon Saint Helens day, which is the twentie one of May’. The testimony of such a venerable authority became widely accepted, not least by the island's first historian, T. H. Brooke, on whose volume of 1808 subsequent generations of writers have leaned heavily. Under the more sceptical gaze of recent scholarship, however, and with recognition of the disparity between the calendar of saints’ days that would have been observed by the Protestant Dutch merchant van Linschoten and the (necessarily pre-Reformation) feasts celebrated in Nova's day, certainty evaporates. It seems apposite that the very moment of European contact with the South Atlantic island should be clouded by dispute, for many years of contested ownership of the island paradise lay ahead, with claim and counter-claim asserted by nations lying thousands of miles to the north.

The Portuguese, Dutch, and the British

Little more than a decade after its precipitous outline first materialized before the eyes of the lookouts at the mast-heads of the homeward-bound Portuguese fleet – and doubtless after fleeting opportune visits from other vessels of the same nation – St Helena received its first long-term settler in the form of the unfortunate Fernão Lopez, once noble and now an abject specimen after being tortured and maimed by his compatriots in Goa.

THE PAST THIRTY years have seen significant growth in high-quality research focusing on exemplary literature. Publications of round-table discussions have clarified the status of the medieval exemplum, and resulted in the publication of works such as the Thesaurus Exemplorum Medii Aevi. In this context, the Ci nous dit, a fourteenth century collection of 781 exempla that take the form of short, moralising narratives, has been the subject of several studies. According to Jacques Le Goff, an exemplum is a short story, given as true. It provides a moral lesson with a didactic and convincing aim and it is designed to be included in an oral discourse, often of a religious nature. More recently, scholars have developed the idea of a process of ‘exemplification’ of any kind of narrative form, a process that renders it difficult to confine exempla to a single literary genre.

The oldest French copy of the Ci nous dit was written by an anonymous author between 1313 and 1330 in the North of France. Given the 812 images that come with the 781 exempla in this manuscript, it seems to have been written for a lay aristocratic readership. Why should we begin yet another study of this collection of exempla? Simply because, until now, the place of vegetation in this collection has not been examined by the academic community. A book about animals in exempla was published in 1999, but representations of the vegetal world, which occupy a significant place in collections of exemplary literature, have yet to be explored. A number of questions might be asked. What kinds of plants are used? What do they represent? And what are their functions within exempla? This list of questions is far from exhaustive. Rather than concentrating on providing direct answers, the aim of this chapter is to outline a new area of research and a series of pertinent issues. The chapter will not broach the question of sources for the exempla, which is addressed in Gérard Blangez's edition of the Ci nous dit. I will begin by proposing an overview of the vegetal world in the collection before classifying the different uses of vegetation in the exempla (decorative roles, supporting roles, key roles) and finally present the symbolic function of vegetation when it appears in supporting or key roles.

ARBORE AL RE PRESE NTATIONS AND symbolism in the premodern Islamic imaginary are extensive and multidimensional. They can be traced in both religious and non-religious literature as well as in art and architecture. In the non-religious sphere, we find rich poetic and aesthetic engagements with the tree's perceived feminine form and beauty by poets and scholars indulging in recreational activities in gardens and natural settings. We also find discussions of the tree's social, emotional, and medicinal benefits in various literary texts and botanical manuals. In historical and biographical accounts, we find trees presented as markers of significant events. The shajarat al-bayʿa (‘tree of the pledge’), for example, is a famous tree at al-Ḥudaybiyya (a place located 14.5km outside Mecca), under which the Prophet Muḥammad is said to have received his companions’ pledge to fight the tribe of Quraysh that had prevented them from reaching Mecca. The tree was subsequently venerated by Muslims, as the pledge of allegiance to Muḥammad marked the start of a series of victories that culminated in the triumph of Islam. The pledge became known as bayʿat al-riḍwān (‘pledge of gratification’) and was mentioned in the Quran. In art and architecture, consistently recognisable arboreal imageries and patterns covered the surfaces of Islamic buildings, carpets, textiles, objects, and illustrated manuscripts across the great cultural and regional diversity of the vast Islamic world. This ubiquitous presence of arboreal representations has shaped Islamic artistic taste and influenced Muslims’ aesthetic preferences for abstract expressions of natural beauty. In the religious sphere, the focus of this chapter, we find ample references to trees in the sacred texts of the Quran and Hadith, and the extensive commentaries on them, as well as in the religious and mystical discourses associated with them.

This ess ay be gins with a whakataukī (Māori proverb), because this is the way Māori impart knowledge and present their taonga (treasures). There is no specific term for the word ‘value’ in Māori; objects of good or cultural value are taonga. Whether these are tangible or intangible remains of the past, whether their end value is material or spiritual, they are classified ngā taonga a ngā tūpuna (ancestral treasures) and ohaaki a ngā tūpuna (guidelines, maxims of the ancestors). Knowledge itself is taonga and so too are whakataukī. At a formal level this article follows the guidelines mapped out in the whakataukī cited above. It was conceived as a conference paper and therefore presented orally, as sound. Its transformation from spoken word to written record, that is, from intangible sound to material image, aims at fixing awareness in materiality. With this push, and in accord with the whakataukī, the research sends out tendrils of new growth to promote understanding, knowledge, and well-being. There is a creative process outlined in the whakataukī that this work strives to emulate. It also seems fitting, in a study juxtaposing indigenous New Zealand and European cultures, that both spoken and written words are used in its transmission, for Māori had no written language before Europeans settled in New Zealand. Repetition and oral presentations are what kept and continue to keep Māori culture alive. By adhering to Māori practice and seeking to present taonga in the Māori manner, I can contribute to and become part of a living culture. Only working within its frame can I understand Māori culture and begin to compare it with that of western Europe on equal terms.

This study works in wide open spaces. It looks across the hemispheres at Māori and European use of arboreal imagery around the time of the Middle Ages. Both cultures made significant metaphorical use of trees and plants in their struggle to commit their histories to memory for future generations well before European explorers Abel Tasman and Captain James Cook arrived in New Zealand in 1642 and 1769.

Permanent settlement of the island so profoundly changed its face that within half a century the continuing viability of maintaining a foothold there was called into question. At his arrival as governor in 1714, Isaac Pyke was moved to wonder whether the population then established might not be better decanted in its entirety to Mauritius, which had recently been abandoned by the Dutch. For his ultimate superiors, the Court of Directors of the East India Company, however – no matter their disappointment at the seeming incapacity of the island to sustain itself independently – St Helena's strategic significance ruled out such a possibility. The viability of the island as a permanent settlement would continue to be questioned for decades to come.

Populating the island

Having received a charter to govern St Helena from Oliver Cromwell in 1657 (all copies of which appear to have been lost), the directors of the EIC – whose homeward-bound vessels had for the past nine years been formally ordered to assemble there to form convoys for the final leg of the voyage northwards – now found it expedient to establish a permanent presence on the island. Having debated the proposal on 15 December 1658, the directors decided on a show of hands ‘to send 400 men with all expedition to remayne on the island, with conveniences to fortifie and begin a plantation there’. Accordingly, a fleet commanded by Captain John Dutton sailed for St Helena the following February, escorted by the Marmaduke man-of-war, though evidently carrying rather fewer men than originally envisaged. Dutton was to become the first governor of the island (1659–61), with authority over the whole population of ‘planters’ – the term accurately reflecting both the population's status as Company-sponsored migrants and the expectation that one of their immediate priorities would be to render the settlement economically self-sufficient.

With this aim in mind, Captain Bowen of the London was instructed to set a course via St Jago on the Cape Verde Islands in order to acquire ‘all manner of plants, roots grains, and all other things necessarie’ for the establishment of the plantation, as noted in the previous chapter.

BEOWULF IS NOT accompanied by illustrations in the sole surviving manuscript of the poem, and the text on the page has no foliate margins, yet the edges of its world teem with arboreal life. Though I have recently noted that in certain respects Beowulf is ‘uncommonly treeless for an Old English poem’, this chapter challenges that view by arguing that the tendrils of trees and other plants are in fact entangled in its borders. In this role they operate as a complex extended metaphor for human life in the wilderness east of Eden, where Adam and Eve were driven after the Fall, and the garden of Paradise to which humans may one day return. To begin, I will address the main appearances of trees in Beowulf, with those found in the song of creation, at Grendel's mere, and at the forest of Ravenswood. In addition to recognising the woodlands of the early medieval material world as an element of Beowulf's landscapes fully integrated into the symbolic world of the poet, my argument will then consider these trees in light of other marginal arboreal presences in early English material culture. Here, in considering the foliate margins of various objects, including the Newent Cross, the Franks Casket, and several brooches decorated with foliate designs, I will argue that when considered in concert, these artistic productions reflect a complex set of understandings about the place of the cultural world of humans within the ‘surrounding forest’, with the forest in this context serving as a capacious metaphor for the material world and everything in it.

Creation Songs

Trees make their first appearance in Beowulf not long after the poem has begun, in the first song sung in Heorot. This song of creation perhaps reflects the creation of a world in the poem itself, but also the manner in which the building of Hrothgar's hall is comparable with the timbering of the cosmic hall – a parallel also found in Bede's commentary on Genesis, as Jennifer Neville has noted.

ALL THINGS ARE connected, but not all things are connected equally – this is one of the central tenets of the ecologies in which all things exist, (inter)relate, and communicate. Recognition of this coextant, if unequal, connection between entities is becoming more commonplace when engaging with things and spaces and places – both of the present and of the past. This increased awareness of interrelational connections is certainly true for those working with material culture and objects, but is also seen in a wider socio-cultural context and more broadly in academic discourse. Pioneering work by the likes of Donna Haraway, Tim Ingold, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Andrew Patrizio, Jane Bennett, and Timothy Morton (among others) has sought to highlight the interrelational and fluid network of things that form, inhabit, and shape the environments in which they and we exist and move, seeking to decentralise the human-centric narratives and structures which have traditionally shaped understanding of the world, and of the species and objects that inhabit it. As noted by Andrew Patrizio, ‘natural history is entangled with the images and processes of the visual (social history of art is a natural history of art)’. Such work has radically shifted the possible discussions surrounding things and objects; it reaches for a more complex and nuanced approach to living, knowing, and being in and of this network, instead of a top-down model of production, patron, viewer, or a human/object binary. These approaches acknowledge and promote the importance of a collaborative and fluid spectrum of natural and unnatural, human and non-human that make up a material and embodied being-in-the-world, of which these medieval objects, their makers and viewers are part. Alongside this awareness of an eco-critically inflected approach to these objects and these materials, it is also important to acknowledge their lush materialities, as discussed by Anne F. Harris and Karen Eileen Overbey in their ‘manifesto’ on ‘Lush Ethics’, where they write: ‘This is a material moment, and we want a material future […] a future of abundant encounters with the material and natural worlds, a future of touching objects that touch us back’.

For over three centuries, while the attention of the government and population of the island was focused on matters of survival and improvement, St Helena played host to a succession of scientists pursuing research in a variety of fields, attracted by the island's isolated geographical location in the South Atlantic, the geological history locked in its rocks, the indigenous flora and insect fauna with which it was blessed (and subsequently robbed), or the denizens of its surrounding seas. Few places on the planet can have proved so popular a laboratory for the compiling and testing of scientific theories and for field surveys – a practice that survives today; recent years have seen the island used as a base for exercises as diverse as satellite tracking and deep-sea oceanography.

A constellation of astronomers

During the development of (on the one hand) modern astronomical practice in Britain from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century and (on the other) the extension of the British Empire into the southern hemisphere and the Far East, St Helena proved repeatedly inviting to aspirant astronomical observers. Despite its strategic location on the surface of the globe, however, the island's topography and the vagaries of its weather conspired on more than one occasion to frustrate the ambitions of would-be observers, however carefully-planned their expeditions.

Edmond Halley

Edmond Halley (1656–1742) arrived on the island in 1676, having just turned twenty-one but already with a respectable reputation as an astronomer. He had begun making observations while still at school and continued to do so at Oxford, publishing his results in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. It is from his correspondence with Henry Oldenburg, the society's secretary, that we first learn of Halley's ambitions to observe the southern stars and of his nervousness that a rival astronomer then preparing a book in Paris might pre-empt his aim to be the first observer in this field:

Admirable histories of St Helena have been compiled by a succession of extremely well-qualified authors over the past two centuries. In 1808, T. H. Brooke, sometime acting governor of the island, published his History of the Island of St Helena, from its discovery by the Portuguese to the year 1806 (a second edition of 1824 brought it up to the previous year): Brooke's work has provided a starting point for every author since that time. Alexander Beatson, again governor for a time, followed on with his Tracts relative to the Island of St Helena (1816), still frequently consulted – especially for its many recommendations for agricultural reform – and in 1875 John Charles Mellis's St Helena: a physical, historical, and topographical description of the island added a naturalist's perspective to the empirical surveys of the island's progress. At the more recent end of the spectrum, Philip Gosse's St Helena 1502–1938 (1938, reissued 1990) provided the ultimate chronological survey, up to the eve of our own period. Since that time the island has played a key role in a number of broader, context-setting surveys: in Richard Grove's Green Imperialism. Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (1995), St Helena features prominently in the development of a thesis that has given birth to an entire school of thought in economic geography and environmental history; Stephen Royle's The Company's Island. St Helena, Company Colonies and the Colonial Endeavour (2007) forms a masterly survey of the island's fortunes during what might be called its definitive period as an outpost of the East India Company; while in St Helena Britannica: Studies in South Atlantic Island History (2013) Alexander Hugo Schulenburg has brought together as editor a lifetime's work by the island's most recent resident historian, Trevor W. Hearl. The island is also host to a comprehensive website with information on almost every topic of historical or current interest: http://sainthelenaisland.info/islandinformation.htm. Alongside these key sources, papers in books and learned journals dedicated to a number of scientific disciplines have added depth and texture to the historical record, among which those of Q. C. B. Cronk on botany and Reginald A. Daly on geology stand out, while Wirebird, the journal of the Friends of St Helena, has evolved over fifty issues into an important platform for historical as well as current debate.

The towering impregnability of St Helena impresses itself upon every seaborne visitor to the island, any weaknesses in its natural defences having been buttressed over the centuries by successive campaigns of fortification by the East India Company and later garrisons. William Webster characterized it (somewhat whimsically) in 1829, shortly before it passed from Company control, as follows:

British ‘sovereignty of the sea’ must have seemed as secure as the rock itself in Webster's day, but it had not always been so. Before the British established a permanent foothold on the island, visiting seamen evidently had no thought of fortifying it against each other, although they might occasionally have hauled their cannon on shore to provide covering fire for vessels riding at anchor off Chapel Valley. We hear of an altercation in 1625, when a Portuguese (or possibly Spanish) carrack was surprised at its moorings by the arrival of a Dutch ship: some of the cannon were immediately landed and succeeded in beating off the Dutch, whose vessel sank nearby the following day. Having salvaged a good deal of the contents and the fabric, the Portuguese constructed a breastwork on which the captured cannon were mounted and used to good effect when a Dutch fleet of six vessels arrived shortly afterwards and was successfully repulsed by the shore-based bombardment.

The Dutch had proclaimed their aim to fortify and populate the place in 1633, but never actually did so; with the transfer of their attentions to the Cape, it fell instead to the British to establish a permanent foothold there.

All commentators agree that the first encounter with St Helena is best conceived from sea-level: so many chapters in the island's history open from this dramatic – even intimidating – perspective. The effect is well captured in one of the earliest representations of the island, that of 1601 by the German cartographer and engraver Theodore de Bry (Figure 1): although de Bry's view (evidently compiled at second hand, for he never ventured across the Atlantic) lacks accuracy in terms of detailed topography, it succeeds in capturing something of the drama of the mariner's experience, enlarged upon by a much later map-maker, Captain Edmund Palmer, in the introduction to his Military Sketch of the island, compiled in 1850–52:

Much reliance will be placed in the following chapters on similar personal impressions of the island by writers and artists (see also Plate 1). For the moment, these initial snapshots will serve to establish an image of its lowering bulk, erupting from the otherwise unbroken surface of the ocean, before something of its principal features are set out in more objective terms.

The island and its setting

The Mid-Atlantic Ridge, on which St Helena forms an outlier, runs (for the most part below sea-level) roughly from Jan Mayen Island in the north to the sub-Antarctic Bouvet Island. The ridge marks the junction of two diverging tectonic plates, pushed up from the ocean floor by the irregular escape of magma through the slowly expanding fissure, resulting at intervals in volcanoes that breach the ocean's surface. St Helena (like its nearest neighbours, Ascension Island and Tristan da Cunha) is one such volcanic island, formed some 14.5 million years ago but inert for the past 6 million years.