The author | Yu Tianyi
I happened to see a friend posting a picture on Weibo to identify plants in anime works, so I remembered the very popular cartoon "The Story of the Mole" in my childhood, which was my earliest impression of real plants showing their faces in animation, but unfortunately, the films are common species in Europe, which is not very familiar to us who grew up in East Asia. However, when it comes to "The Mole's Story", many people have memories of the blue five-petaled floret that the mole used to make pants, which shows that it successfully implanted the image of a plant in the minds of children. This may be the first thing we know about plants, and it will also affect our attitude toward plants and even other things when we grow up.
Just like the obsessive-compulsive disorder of examining specific plant species, the producers of animation also have the obsessive-compulsive disorder of drawing specific plant species, and European and Japanese picture books and animations pay special attention to the details in the scene, and try their best to restore plants, animals, regional landscapes and even traditional decorations, on the one hand, because the makers have a very serious attitude towards the artworks they create, and on the other hand, they have a naturalistic spirit. We can feel the intimacy of real nature in works that are immersed in naturalism, and at the same time we can also receive the creator's love for nature when creating.
Throughout the world, films like "The Mole's Tale" that focus on plant species are also rare. The appearance of the plants has been artistically treated, but the shadow of the prototype can still be seen. Originally from the Czech Republic, The Mole Tale is a series of films directed by Zdnek Miller, and because there is no language restriction for narration, the film and the image of the mole are loved all over the world, especially in Eastern Europe and Asia. Jak krtek ke kalhotkám přišel (The Mole and the Pants), the first installment in the Mole Story Series, still has a narration (but not very influential on understanding the plot), in which the image of the mole has just been created. Like Mickey Mouse, the mole at this time differs from the image in most of the later works, and the film's depictions of other animals and background plants differ from those in later works. The variety of plants that appear in this film is particularly numerous and plays an important role, so let's first look at the plants that appear in this work.
The flowers and plants next to the exit of the mole's burrow that appear at the beginning of the film hint at some information. First look at the plants in the background: Cardaria draba, a cruciferous plant that is wildly distributed in Xinjiang in China, living in river beaches or fields; Tripolium pannonicum, which, as the name suggests, is a species very close to the genus Aster distributed in saline areas, coasts or lakes. It is found in northern and eastern China; Plantago media, a common type of psyllium on the water's edge of Europe, is found only in Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang in China. The appearance of these plants lets us know that the place where the mole's head is exposed is roughly near the water.
Look at some of the plants in the foreground: Anagallis arvensis, a small herb of the primrose family common in European meadows or gardens, native to Europe, West Asia and North Africa, and has now been brought to various tropical and subtropical countries by humans, as well as along the southeast coast of China. There are two colors of glass, but these two shades belong to the same species, red is more common, blue is less; Campanula rotundifolia, a wildflower common in European meadows, very typical basal leaves and stems of different types of plants (lower round and fine) plants; Galium odoratum, commonly found in the darker parts of the forest, lara vine species, widely distributed in Eurasia, also in northern China. These three plants suggest that perhaps the place is a meadow near the forest.
Glass wisps
Glass wisps (blue)
At the beginning of the story, the mole finds three "rags" that he likes, but can't free his hands (front paws?). Take them all away. Several plants that we are very familiar with appear in the picture - dandelions, cabbage and daisies. Then the mole's destined pants appeared; the mole looked at the pants like a fool. Next to the yellow is Hypericum perforatum, which prefers to grow on sunny grass. Forsythia perforatum is widely distributed and is famous in Europe as the traditional herb St John's-wort, and is also commonly used in Chinese herbal medicine.
Perforatum forsythia
In addition, there are pink caryophyllus and blue porcupine. The mole went to ask the butterfly, but the butterfly had no vocal cords, could not speak, and flew away.
Let's take a look at where the mole and the butterfly are: the thorny plant with the leaves at the bottom of the picture has also appeared before, and it is somewhat similar to the common domestic spiny vegetable, in fact, this is another thistle genus - The Silk Road Thistle (Cirsium arvense), which is basically distributed along the Silk Road in China, and the Latin name literally translates to field thistle, which is a widely distributed species in Europe. The small white floret is achillea millefolium, which is widespread in North Africa, Europe and Siberia, and is a widely cultivated ornamental plant in China, with a wild distribution only in the northernmost provinces. The species of the genus Yarrow was used for divination in ancient China, and the sawgrass that inspired Lu Ban to invent the saw may also be a species of the genus yarrow.
Silk Road Thistle
Yarrow
Moles fall into the water while chasing butterflies, and European crayfish crawl out in protest. Next to the crawfish are several common wetland plants, the small blue flower is myosotis scorpioides, the chinese wetland is another wetland do not forget grass (Myosotis caespitosa), and the cultivated ornamental forget-me-not is another forest forget-me-not grass (Myosotis sylvatica); the yellow big flower is the donkey hoof grass (Caltha palustris), Widely spread in the cold, temperate and alpine regions of the Northern Hemisphere, wetlands in the mountains of northeast and southwest China are common, and they are not watery plants, but live in waterside wetlands.
Swamp forget me
Donkey hoof grass
The crayfish said to the mole, you have to have a cloth for me to cut, so the mole finds the reed warbler (not the weaving bird translated in many imported versions of the "Mole's Tale" picture book), and the reed warbler says you have to have a cloth for me to sew. The mole was crying, and where to go to find the cloth, when he heard the sound of Linum usitatissimum. Flax let the mole look after it and use it to make cloth, and that's how the domestication of crops began. Flax is native to Europe and is now cultivated in many parts of the country for the extraction of oilseeds and fibers. Because linen cloth is strong but hard, it has been less used as lining, and now oil painting is most inseparable from linen, the toner oil is mainly flaxseed oil, and conventional canvas is also linen. The cultivation we can see in the park is the perennial Linum perenne, with drooping branches and larger flowers than flax.
flax
Root flax
The water bowl used by moles to water the flowers is the fruit of the European horse chestnut tree split in half. The European horse chestnut is one of the most common street tree species in Europe, and can grow very thick and tall, unlike several smooth-fruited horse chestnut trees in China, which are full of thorns on the fruit.
European horse chestnut trees are often mistaken for chestnuts when their fruits fall in autumn, but in fact it is very different from chestnuts: the spines on the shell of the European horse chestnut tree are short and sparse, and the leaves are palm-shaped compound leaves with about 7 small leaves; the spines on the chestnut shell are long and dense, and the leaves are single leaves.
European horse chestnut
The mole encounters a frog by the pool, and the story develops to a crucial step in making linen. Flax fibers are present in the phloem tissue of flax stems, and need to be extracted from the glue to remove part of the gum, so that the adhesion fiber bundle is loose, and then processed into "beaten into hemp" by pressing and beating hemp. Frogs help moles push stones into the water to crush the flax to degulate, and at the edge of the pool is the Helianthemum nummularium of the family Helianthemum nummularium.
The half-day flower family is mainly distributed in the Mediterranean, the money half-day flower is one of the few species commonly found in the Mediterranean outside the Mediterranean in Europe except the Mediterranean, and only Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia in China have a helianthemum songaricum, which is a remnant of the ancient Mediterranean period.
Half Day Flowers
The mole then asked the white stork to help roll, and then found the hedgehog to turn the flax into flax fibers, let the spider spin the fibers into yarn, and then dye the yarn.
The dyeing process is very creative, with the mole wrapping the fibers around a stick to make it roll into a blueberry bush. The blueberries here are not the blueberry varieties of North American origin that we can buy in supermarkets, but the Vaccinium myrtillus, which has the oldest history. Black fruit bilberry is a typical small understory shrub, often growing in pieces, and is only distributed in Xinjiang in China. Behind the blueberries is Amanita pantherina, a well-known relative of Amanita muscaria, both of which are highly poisonous and hallucinogenic when eaten. 【For hallucinogenic plants, see Plants of the Gods (The Commercial Press 2021) – Editor's Note]
The mole handed the dyed yarn to the ants and mobilized the ants to weave cloth. In the picture we can see the widespread wild strawberries (Fragaria vesca) in Europe, the strawberries we can eat (Fragaria) × (ananassa), also called pineapple strawberries, are a cross of two American species (Fragaria virginiana native to North America and Fragaria chiloensis native to South America), and wild strawberries have been cultivated in Europe until the strawberries were selected.
Strawberry
Wild strawberries
Finally, in the end, the mole's pants were finally made! The viewing guide to the botanical version of "The Mole's Tale" ends here, and there may be a next series.
This article is excerpted from The First Issue of the Review of Chinese Naturalism, The Commercial Press, 2017. The second series (The Story of the Mole [Part 2]) was published in the Second Issue of the Chinese Naturalist Review.