#xenophon

Here in Victoria we have the Dandenong Ranges Botanic Garden in Olinda, formerly the National Rhododendron Garden - I understand that the Australian Rhododendron Society (ARS) established the garden upon their founding in 1960, and it still boasts a huge collection of rhododendrons and azaleas (which are Rhododendron species by another name), including some very rare native species, such as R. viriosum and R. lochiae, recently obtained from mountain tops in North Queensland.

Another rhododendron fancier of fame was the British banker Lionel Nathan de Rothschild, known by regular people for literally everything else apart from rhododendrons, but whom within the hobby is known for his horticultural passions instead. Drawn to azaleas, when he purchased his Exbury estate in Hampshire in 1919, he set his great wealth and influence to their pursuit, sponsoring missions to the Himalayas to collect new varieties and creating over a thousand new hybrids. The collection and the estate endure, and I am advised are considered splendid to this day.

This matter, of rhododendron fancying, is complicated by the toxicity of the plants. It is this characteristic, the poison within these beautiful flowers, that makes them the emblem of danger in Victorian language of flower books. Like many of these sentiments, this appears quite straightforward, but this is not the end of the story. The reason rhododendrons are emblematic of danger, say our authors, goes back to antiquity.

Mad Honey

In my naïveté, I had assumed the rhododendron was called such after Cecil Rhodes, one of history’s great villains, who I had supposed was himself a rhododendron fancier. Not so - and it does not appear to stem from the island of Rhodes, either.

The word is mentioned as far back as Pliny the Elder (this guy again!), and is a combination of ῥόδον (rhódon, ‘rose’) and δένδρον (déndron, ‘tree’). There is restrained debate about what plants Pliny was actually speaking to, as he uses two different words to refer to apparently interchangeable plants: ῥοδόδενδρον, rhodódendron, and αἰγόλεθρος, ægolethron, meaning ‘goat’s bane’. The opinion of the Victorians, as it seems to be of classicists today, was that he meant by the former Nerium oleander, the oleander or rosebay, and by the latter the Pontic rhododendron, Rhododendron ponticum. As both flowers are similar in appearance, toxicity and range, this conflation is natural enough.

Zwei Mädchen mit Oleander, painting by Gustav Klimt (1892) via Wikimedia.

For the full story with Pliny the Elder on rhododendrons, oleander and 'mad honey', and Xenophon writing on an illness that befell the mercenary Ten Thousand after gorging on honey on their return from Babylonia in 401 BCE, read on at my Substack.