In his Reveries of a Solitary Walker, Rousseau was depressed nearly all of the time until he was rescued by botany. The study of plant diversity in nature saved him from complete depression. It works for me, and I highly recommend it. Botany is, among many other things, the pursuit that saved Rousseau from insanity.
Rousseau did not just glance at flowers and grass and say, yeah, they are pretty. He looked closely at them. He observed them and thought about them. Above all, he wanted to know what they were. In Walk 2, he describes his joy at seeing Picris hieracioides the hawkweed; Bupleurum falcatum, the hare’s ear; and Cerastium aquaticum, the mouse-eared chickweed. These are all very common weeds, but Rousseau noticed their beauty. Alas, in Walk 2, he slipped back into depression, and these flowers just reminded him of how much of his life he had wasted by not being a botanist. I think.
Rousseau spent the two happiest months of his life on St. Peter’s Island in Lake Bienne in Switzerland. He thought that, on that isolated island, he was free from the condemnation of the government authorities in Berne. In Walk 5, he describes his “botanical fervor.” He was particularly enchanted by the alder-buckthorn (Frangula alnus), the willow-weed (Epilobium ciliatum), and wild thyme. He also mentioned the toothwort (Dentaria), wild cyclamen, the bird’s-nest orchid Neottia nidus-avis (which has no chlorophyll), Laserpitium gallicum, and the lycopodium clubmoss. He ate the very tart berries of the sea buckthorn tree (Hippophae rhamnoides). I tried them, and didn’t like them, but they are raised commercially for cosmetics. He was as happy as a child playing with the exploding capsules of the Himalayan balsam (Impatiens glandulifera). I can attest to the surprising joy of having these capsules explode in my hand, and my grandkids liked it even more. Rousseau briefly returned to childhood happiness. This was his one happiness, aside from sex.
I got lucky. My job (as a university botany professor) required me to spend a lot of time looking at and for plants in natural habitats, and leading students on field trips.
But Rousseau’s stresses could not be completely forgotten, even in paradise on St. Peter’s Island. Actually there were two islands, and Rousseau imagined that, because the big and the powerful always consume and destroy the small and weak in this world, the big island would someday consume the small one. My own experience coincides with Rousseau’s. When I was sitting on a rock in the middle of a rushing stream in Wyoming, in the middle of teaching a field botany course to some of the best students I have ever had, I could not ignore the pain I felt from the office politics back at the university where I worked, where our department chair enjoyed making people feel bad about themselves (according to other people who knew him).
Rousseau would use his botanical ecstasies to launch into thinking about other topics. Walk 6 begins with a wildflower hike near Fontainebleu. He was enjoying doing this good thing—but did it really count as personal goodness if he enjoyed doing good things? He wanted his enemies to suffer—but he could think of no greater suffering to visit upon them than for them to know he was happy in spite of them.
He wished he could know all the plants on Earth. They are, he said, the clothing of the Earth. They are the only spectacles of Nature of which we cannot grow weary. He much preferred the Greek philosopher-botanist Theophrastus, who loved plants for their own sake, over Dioscorides, for whom plants were only valuable because of the medicines they contained.
I find this 1888 line drawing fascinating. Notice the botanist, despite his serious demeanor and despite the shabbiness of his house, is happy explaining a flower to two fellow seekers of wisdom. One of them is a winsome young woman. The wonders of botany can, in fact, attract a mate—worked for me. But notice also that Karl Marx is listening to him! I didn’t think Karl Marx listened to anyone! Oh, the wonderful things that botany can do!
It turns out that St. Peter’s Island was actually part of Berne, and the authorities made Rousseau leave. He went back to being depressed. But years later, he would look at his herbarium (pressed plant) specimens and relive his erstwhile joys. I have done this also. I could not bring my specimens with me to France, so I left them in university herbaria, as shown in these photos.
These specimens are: Ipomopsis (Oklahoma), Rumex venosus (Nebraska), and Umbellularia californica, Alnus rhombifolia, and Acer macrophyllum (California).
“I see only animosity on the faces of men, whereas nature always smiles at me,” Rousseau wrote.
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