While this story serves as an introduction to the rest of this project, it was adapted from the following folktale: "Origin Of The Pleiades And The Pine", from Myths of the Cherokee by James Mooney (1900). In this source story, there were seven boys who played more than they worked, and their mothers tried to teach them a lesson about the importance of working for reaping the benefits of that work. This upset the boys, however, and so they went and danced and called upon the spirits to help them escape their situation. The boys began to float up off the ground, and drift toward the skies. The mothers, running out to pull them back down, were only able to grab one of the seven. However, yanking him toward the earth made him sink into the ground. Meanwhile, the other six were raised to the sky and became stars. The mothers wept over him for the loss of all the boys, and from that spot grew a pine. Thus, the pine tree and the stars are made from the same stuff. I tried to bring most of the same elements from this tale into our introduction, but I wanted to focus on the material relationship between stars and biological life - the matter that we share. So, I wrote about star-like forms that weren't quite yet stars as we know them: they were the matter and lack of form that came before the stars and everything else. I wanted to mirror both this origin tale and the coalescence of matter into form. I felt that this would serve as a introduction into the Origin of All Origins - as this collection of stories is all about the beginnings of plant-forms, I felt I needed a Very Beginning. It's not too explicit in this intro who the caretakers are, what form they've taken, but I figured I would save this for the epilogue, for a very important reason that will be demonstrated to the reader when they get there.
I based this story primarily on the idea of the fern-flower present in Slavic folklore, and the story of the origin of the (maidenhair) fern. In this latter story, a woman is killed by her lover and left by a creek, where her hair turns into fern. Concerning the former, the fern-flower is a mystical entity which is said to bloom only on St. John's Night/Eve (the night of the summer solstice) - the flower is said to imbue whoever finds it with good fortune or magical abilities like invisibility, animal speech, and is associated with fertility. Young couples go out into the night, searching for such a flower. I had decided already that instead of a maiden being killed by her lover, I wanted to write about a maiden waiting for her lover, and being so loyal in her patience that she died where she was. However, when I started writing the story, I realized that I would prefer to focus on the bond between a caretaker and the tree, as this bond is ultimately what I wanted to emphasize in the storybook. Towards the end of the tale, during Maiden's transformation, I invoke the name of another genus of fern: bracken. While this refers to a different genus of the fern family than the maidenhair, I wanted to include it in the story to introduce the idea that this isn't just the origin of a kind of fern, but of the whole family of ferns as we know it. Ferns are some of the earliest plants to have been established on land, and they notably do not flower: instead, they reproduce via spores. Which is precisely what makes the fern-flower so illusory. I hope the reader doesn't find these ambiguities confusing.
Ch. 2: Sweet Rose When writing this tale, I was mostly drawing from the relationship between the nightingale and the rose present in various folklores, and wanting to craft an account that would explain why the scent of rose is so alluring. In doing so, I thought it would be interesting to incorporate two elements of rose-lore: there is a hadiththat attributes roses as having arisen from the sweat of Muhammad, and there is a strong association between the nightingale's song and the rose's bloom. As the concept of the siren can attest, there's not much more alluring than a sweet song, so I thought one possibly fruitful notion could be the idea of the rose getting some of its sweetness from a song. Moreover, the idea of a rose being born from a drop of sweat seemed too appealing to ignore, and there's a sort of mustiness that we associate with sweat that I saw as an enticing parallel. Additionally, in speaking of the nightingale, I thought it best to give a name to this caretaker that wasn't quite so literal, and felt inclined to evoke the story of Philomel, whose sad story ultimately led to the Greek gods turning her to a nightingale - moreover, there is a folk etymology that maintains the -mel part of her name is derived from the same root as melody. All material regarding the rose came from Plant Lore, Legend, and Lyricsby Richard Folkard (1884).
Ch 3: Tobacco This origin tale is inspired by the various accounts of the emergence of the Tobacco plant that I've found in Native American mythologies. There is, of course, quite a bit of variation regarding where the tobacco plant came from depending on which region and group of tribes one is basing their account on. However, the first account I came across was the Creek telling of how this plant came to be; in these stories, no matter the circumstances (as these surely vary by telling), the plant arises from the spot where a man and a woman "lay together." In some accounts, the tobacco comes from the man's semen, in other accounts it's said that the plant sprouted "where the woman was sitting," and in some accounts these two individuals are from different tribes, in others they are both lost and looking for their horses. One story in particular shaped my own retelling; the Muskogee tale "The Origin of Tobacco" features an elaboration on how we should interpret the significance of this account of tobacco's origin: "since this man and woman were very happy when they were there and were very peacefully inclined toward each other tobacco has ever since been used in concluding peace and friendship among the Indian tribes" (Creation Myths, p. 240). It was this understanding that I tried to incorporate into my own retelling, but imagining this account under the precedent established in my own mini-mythos.
Epilogue: Caretakers Here is where I have tried to make it clearer the mechanisms that drive the births (and rebirths) of the caretakers of the Tree, and how this relates to the survival of the tree itself. I was in part inspired by the Conference of Birds, or Bird Parliament, by the Persian poet and mystic Attar. In this epic poem, a group of 30 birds set out to seek a great wise bird to be their leader. When they finally arrive to the supposed abode of this great mythic bird, they learn that in truth it is their combined being that makes up the great wise leadership that they seek. I was also inspired by the Tejas legend, "The Pecan Tree's Best Friend," particularly by the idea of a sense of companionship between birds and trees, or other plants (like the Nightingale and the Rose, or the Hummingbird and Tobacco). So in this epilogue, I attempted to weave together two senses of stewardship between animals and plants: that of storytelling coming with its own kind of stewardship, a sense of keeping some traditions alive, while also addressing the steward-like role that humans have created for themselves in their relationship with the environment.