Currents of Melancholy

A Plant on the Run

The second edition of Catalogus plantarum (1673) was published in 1683 and supplemented with the illustrated volume Icones novae.

In the spring of 2025, melancholy drifts through Mellunmäki.

Each year, forgotten remedies surge from the ground: thick green stems rising and opening into cup-shaped blossoms. Petasites, as the ancient physician Dioscorides named it – from the Greek petasos, a broad-brimmed hat – was recommended for ailments ranging from digestive troubles and asthma to, quite literally, use as a rain hat.

Along the banks of the Mellunkylä stream, or Mellunkylänpuro, grows butterbur (Petasites hybridus), a perennial, spring-flowering fugitive from cultivation. In this eastern Helsinki suburb, its reddish flowers bear witness to the ways in which belief shapes the landscape. In Finnish, the plant is known as ruttojuuri, meaning ‘plague root’, and it carries the memory of monastic herb gardens, plague doctors and faith in the healing power of scent. Originating in West Asia and spread across Europe by monks during the Middle Ages, butterbur reached Finland in the seventeenth century and now grows wild across the country. Its seeds drift with flowing water, carrying echoes of miasmic air and the dark currents of black bile.

This is the story of a fugitive.

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Butterbur’s journey to the suburbs of eastern Helsinki follows routes once darkened by plague. In the autumn of 1710, smoke hung over the streets of Turku: tar, juniper, and sweet grass burned in homes and infirmaries, as protection against disease relied above all on the belief that illness travelled on foul air. Between 1708 and 1712, the plague of the Great Northern War swept across the Baltic region and eastern Central Europe, reaching Finland in 1710 – first Helsinki, then further up the coast to Turku, a town of some 6,000 inhabitants.

Decades earlier, Turku had received another arrival. Butterbur had been brought to the city and cultivated in the university’s medicinal herb garden. Its first documented appearances in Finland are linked to Elias Tillandz (1640–1693), a central figure in early Finnish botany and the founder of the country’s first botanical garden. After Tillandz’s death in 1693, the garden fell into neglect, but butterbur had already escaped cultivation. When the plague emptied pharmacies in the autumn of 1710, townspeople turned to the riverbanks, gathering the plant from the garden’s rewilded plots along the Aura. Its sharp, pustule-like odour was read as a sign of strength, and with it, a glimmer of hope.

Herbs served as both remedies and rites. They carried symbolic weight: burning them promised not only bodily healing but spiritual shelter. The wealthy masked fear with incense and perfumes; the poor endured the acrid fumes of sulphur and saltpetre.

Smell, then, was not merely a matter of hygiene but of power. From antiquity through the nineteenth century, disease was understood as the consequence of ‘bad air’, or miasma, until germ theory revealed microbes as its cause. Yet fear of foul air reshaped cities all the same, indirectly curbing contagion by unsettling the habitats of rats that carried Yersinia pestis.

For centuries, urban space was reorganised in the name of breath. Cemeteries, hospitals, and theatres were pushed to the margins; waste was set in motion, sewers dug deep. London’s sewer network followed the Great Stink of 1858; Paris was opened by Haussmann’s boulevards. The message was clear: all odour was illness.

Industrialisation hardened these divisions. The elite claimed light and air along broad avenues, while the working class remained confined to dense, unhealthy quarters. The hygienist movement and, in the twentieth century, modern planning shaped by the Athens Charter (1933) extended this logic, binding air, openness, and health into a single promise. These old fears, inflected by class struggle, persist in contemporary cities, carved into street grids and modernist towers rising from green landscapes.

Past beliefs continue to govern the urban present.

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As Finland entered the early modern period, the herbal garden of the Royal Academy of Turku, introduced earlier, served for some two decades as a key medical centre for emerging botanical knowledge. Its founder, Elias Tillandz, published Finland’s first flora, Catalogus plantarum (1673); a second edition followed in 1683 with the illustrated supplement Icones novae, presenting 159 plants, including butterbur under the name Petasites. Plant nomenclature still leaned on ancient and biblical authority, while most illustrations were copied or adapted from Central European works.

For over a millennium, Dioscorides’ De materia medica governed medical knowledge, until vernacular herbals and empirical observation began to challenge classical authority. Leonhart Fuchs listed five hundred plant species in 1542; by the end of the following century, more than ten thousand were known. Otto Brunfels and Rembert Dodoens laid the foundations of the botanical Renaissance. John Gerard’s Herball (1597), drawing heavily on earlier sources, popularised butterbur as a plague remedy:

“The roots dried and beaten to powder and drunk in wine is a sovereign medicine against the plague and pestilent fevers…” (6)

Butterbur takes us back to the contemplative spaces of mediaeval monasteria. For centuries, botanical knowledge remained rooted in medieval monasteries and the belief in the healing power of scent. Monastic gardens functioned as centres of exchange, sustaining body and soul through healing, charity, learning, and contemplation. Alongside miasma theory, medical thought was shaped by humorism: health was understood as balance among bodily fluids, and plants such as butterbur were used to treat fevers, respiratory illness, and melancholy. Melancholy—once a marker of genius—blurred the boundary between illness and insight. Hippocrates defined it as an excess of black bile (melas, ‘black’, kholē, ‘bile’); Galen systematised it; Aristotle associated it with exceptional talent. Butterbur’s warming qualities were thought to restore humoral balance.

In the late Middle Ages, low mood acquired a specific meaning within monastic life. Monks worn down by conscience and spiritual labour suffered from acedia, the ‘noonday demon’ – a precursor to melancholy, though without its later associations with creativity (1). During the Renaissance, Marsilio Ficino recast melancholy as the condition of genius, and in early modern Europe it came to be understood as both curse and gift. Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy described it as an almost universal affliction binding mind, body, and soul in restless imbalance, aligning melancholy with genius, privilege, and piety (2).

Though its meanings have shifted, melancholy endures. Giorgio Agamben has described the period from the fourteenth to the twentieth century as the age of melancholy (3), while Juliana Schiesari observes that Renaissance culture celebrated male melancholy as creative genius while suppressing women’s mourning rituals (4). In the early twentieth century, psychiatry reframed melancholy as pathology: Emil Kraepelin introduced diagnoses such as ‘involutional melancholia’ in 1907, and in 1917 Freud severed melancholy from temperament and black bile, redefining it as a psychic sore – ‘the melancholic complex behaves like an open wound’ (5). This marked the emergence of modern depression as prolonged sorrow and hopelessness.

Today, melancholy appears in subtler, systemic forms. Emotions are commodified across economies, stock markets, and social media.

Cities generate anxiety and nostalgia, while the same systems that produce instability pathologise low mood. In architecture, melancholy takes material form as decay and impermanence – emptied post-industrial cities, faded signs, crumbling walls. These landscapes of loss are built expressions of societies living with their own melancholy.

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By August at Mellunkylänpuro, the plague root’s flowers have vanished. Its leaves unfurl towards the sun, broad as elephant ears, while slugs feast in their shade. The plant’s fugitive journey continued over time. In eighteenth-century Finland, medicinal cultivation persisted in parsonages and pharmacies, as gardening spread among the gentry. Only in the late nineteenth century did popular gardening take hold among ordinary people, when butterbur was even used ornamentally. Hardy plants endured in old yards – and with them, butterbur kept moving. From monastic gardens to plague-stricken cities, and northwards along disturbed soil and flowing water, it has found its way into an eastern Helsinki suburb.

Today, Mellunkylänpuro flows through forest and suburb, gathering water from mossy springs and motorway edges before reaching the sea. Its currents carry layers of land use: sediment, seeds, and centuries of human traces.

The stream has been piped, straightened, and dredged, accelerating flow, increasing erosion, and intensifying hydrological fluctuation. During heavy rain and snowmelt, it carries sediment and nutrients into Vartiokylänlahti and onwards to the Baltic Sea. The area has been inhabited since the Bronze Age, reflecting both post-glacial natural history and deep cultural stratification. Mellunkylänpuro, together with the connected Broändanpuro, has long supported hunting, fishing, and agriculture, though its channels were profoundly reshaped by nineteenth-century drainage and twentieth-century piping.

Moist urban environments also favour invasive and escaped garden species. Along the stream now grow southern and Japanese butterbur, spreading through rhizomes, forming dense stands, and displacing other vegetation. While southern butterbur is not legally classified as harmful, it is a strong competitor. Control is slow and labour-intensive; without sustained effort, once-diverse stream banks risk becoming species-poor green expanses.

Humans, too, can behave like invasive species, commodifying complex environments for singular use. As James C. Scott observes, humans, like other species, have a right to river environments, but that right is not without limits (7).

Though melancholy and miasma have vanished from medicine, the traces of past beliefs remain visible – in our cities, and along the human-modified streams that through them.

The second edition of Catalogus plantarum (1673) was published in 1683 and supplemented with the illustrated volume Icones novae. On the final pages of the work appears an illustration of a peculiar skull accompanied by the text Usnea Muscus in Cranio. From the mid-sixteenth century to the eighteenth century, Usnea – also known as Muscus in or ex Craneo, a lichen growing on the surface of a human skull – was regarded as a medicinal substance. In Finland, it was known as vainaan-naava (“corpse lichen”). According to prevailing beliefs, a special vital force condensed in the skulls of those who had died violently, and macrocosmic forces caused the lichen to grow on the exposed bone. Skull moss was even thought to possess healing powers that acted at a distance. In the eighteenth century, the plant’s reputation began to erode. Its efficacy came to be seen as a product of credulity and imagination, and by the end of the century skull moss had shifted from medicinal substance to historical curiosity. The history of medicine is replete with beliefs later proven ineffective.

This article is part of a series of texts documenting the findings of Grassroots City, an art and research project examining how communities respond to a changing climate. You can read more about the project on our website: https://vokal.fi/

Notes

1. Drew, D. (2019). ‘Between the Angel and the Dog: Dürer’s Melancholy Community’. In The Persistence of Melancholia in Arts and Culture. (2019). Eds. Bubenik, A. Routledge. Drew writes: A medieval cultural formation, Acedia names the form of sorrowful despair at one’s own salvation, which was thought to be an occupational hazard in monastic communities when religious persons perhaps ambushed by the noonday demon while at prayer alone would allow the sheer spiritual labour of regulating their conscience to overwhelm them with a miserable sense of the impossibility of salvation or the inaccessibility of grace. […] Acedia is an occupation-specific precursor to Melancholy, but it is not weighted with the associations of genius, inspiration, and contemplative and meditative thought that, thanks to pseudo-Aristotle and then to Ficino, added flame and momentum to the dry and cold humour of black bile. (p. 36)

2. Burton, R. (1621). The anatomy of melancholy. Oxford University Press eBooks (s. lxi). https://doi.org/10.1093/oseo/instance.00006619

3. Agamben, G. (1992). Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western culture. Medical Entomology and Zoology. http://ci.nii.ac.jp/ncid/BA19211027

4. Schiesari, J. (1992). The gendering of melancholia. In Cornell University Press eBooks. https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501718373

5. Freud, S. (2005). “Mourning and Melancholia”, On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia. Kääntänyt englanniksi Shaun Whiteside. Penguin Books. Alkuperäinen teos ilmestynyt 1917.

6. Gerard, J. (1633). The herball: or, Generall historie of plantes. The original work was published in 1597. https://www.loc.gov/item/44028884/.

7. Scott, J. C. (2025). In Praise of Floods. Yale University Press. Scott writes: … ­ [H]umans are also riverine mammals with their own modest claim to a riverine livelihood—short of totally remaking the river to do our ­ human bidding: for example, as a navigation channel, a series of irrigation ponds and reservoirs, a sewage pipe, or a series of hydroelectric dams. […] In short, it involves transforming the river into a disciplined, predictable, regulated, one-­commodity machine. (p. 185-186)