Remembering Darnel, a Forgotten Plant of Literary, Religious and Evolutionary Significance is the title of a paper by Howard Thomas, Jayne Archer and Richard Marggraf Turley, to be published in the Journal of Ethnobiology. The abstract is as follows:

This paper explores the complex interactions between people and the psychotoxic crop contaminant and wheat mimicker, darnel (Lolium temulentum L.). Bringing together knowledge from literary, historical, religious, medical and scientific sources, we trace the ways in which the plant’s cultural story has been informed by its cultivation (accidental and otherwise) by humans. Darnel is a man-made plant that evolved from a perennial progenitor and was subject to the same human-mediated selection pressures as the ancestral cereal species it infested. The toxicity of darnel grains is due to a cocktail of phytochemicals secreted by genetically complex endophytic fungi of the genus Epichloë, closely related to ergot (Claviceps purpurea (Fr.:Fr.) Tul.) We show how darnel’s reputation as a poisonous cereal mimic that corrupts the food-chain made the plant a symbol of malign subversion, notably invoked in crises around religious heterodoxy and political subversion. We consider the ways in which literary allusions, from Shakespeare to Dickens, identified the corrupting influence of darnel with psychological and social breakdown. Darnel is classified as extinct in the United Kingdom and other developed countries with intensive agriculture, and its significance as a food chain contaminant and literary and religious symbol is vanishing from experience and understanding. This paper, then, is intended to serve as a textual seed bank to collect darnel’s cultural traces, and to demonstrate the ways in which the plant has annotated key debates and moments of crisis in human history.

Here’s the abstract of a chapter to be included in the forthcoming volume titled Literature and Sustainability (eds L Squire, A Johns-Putra, J Parham) Manchester: University Press.H Thomas, R Marggraf Turley, J E Archer. 2015. The millers’ tales: sustainability, the arts and the watermill.

In the relationship between the arts and sustainability, the watermill is important, but often neglected. Frequently sentimentalized and abstracted from its historical moment, the watermill was the point at which food entered most transparently and immediately into the world of politics and governance. It was a complex institution within which communities were created and negotiated, through cultural as well as material relationships. The present essay tells the stories of four watermills, actual and (re-)imagined: Trumpington Mill in Cambridgeshire, setting for Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale (c.1390); Flatford Mill in East Anglia, often associated with John Constable’s 1821 painting now known as ‘The Hay Wain’; Dorlcote Mill, home to the Tulliver family in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860); and Felin Ganol in Llanrhystud, Ceredigion, a building with medieval origins and recently restored to working order by the owners. The stories of these watermills, their loss and recovery, mediates important (sometimes inconvenient) truths about our fraught relationship with the land and remind us of the central role of the creative arts in reimagining alternative, more sustainable interconnections between land, water and communities and the food chain they support.