#eivors herbarium

[lycomorpha]

Eivor's herbarium: Page 5 - grasses and yarrow from a cursed zone meadow

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“From a hill-top meadow west of Grantebridge, where the land breathes again”.

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Before changing county, I've been thinking about meadows and how agriculturally important they would have been to settlements like Grantebridge or Ravensthorpe. Handily there's a meadow not far from our previous stop outside Soma's longhouse, on a cursed hill-top just west of town.

Cursed zones are small areas on the map where a black roiling fog gathers, horses freak out, and Eivor talks of malevolence and cursed troll magic.

This horse is questioning its life choices...

To dispel the curse you need to find and destroy a skull covered in glowing symbols. Shoot it and the dark fog dissipates, with Eivor saying that the land can breathe again.

The cursed troll magic symbol

Cursed zones are a slightly odd feature, in that it’s not clear how the ‘magic’ of the curse works. There isn’t an obvious link to Isu tech. We find some notes/snippets of story around suggesting they’re being placed there by Saxons in an attempt to hex away the Danes. In the Wrath of the Druids DLC, the druids are using a recipe that creates hallucinogenic vapor to induce visions of werewolves etc, so the cursed zones could work in a similar way, with the fog being part of the mechanism. But it’s not clear to me unless I’ve missed something.

However they’re supposed to work, cursed zones are good places to find fungi, plants, and honking great big trees. So I quite like them. (I know some gamers hated them and felt they were pointless collectibles; if that’s you, maybe some video game botany will improve them?!)

Aerial view of the hill-top cursed zone west of Grantebridge

The hill-top cursed zone west of Grantebridge has a particularly nice view from above and is surrounded by meadow. Since Eivor is helping run a settlement with farms, I’m sure she’d appreciate the importance of hay meadows to agriculture, and as a source of herbaceous plants for medicinal uses.

In the long grass

What is a meadow?

A meadow is an area of grassland where the vegetation is allowed to grow tall and isn’t cut in spring and summer. In late summer/autumn, the meadow is mowed to make hay, which then feeds farm animals over the winter. Until then, cut meadow is grazed by animals (sheep, cows, maybe goats) which poop as they go, dropping some handy fertiliser around the place. When gets too cold and wet for livestock to be out grazing, animals are brought in and fed on the hay, with the meadow left until spring for the cycle to start over again. This is in contrast to pasture, which is grazed in the growing seasons rather than allowing grasses to get long.

The un-cursed meadow, ready for hay-making

Hay meadows are full of diverse grasses and wildflowers. In AC Valhalla we particularly see yarrow, ox-eye daisies, and grasses like Yorkshire fog (4th pressed grass from the left) and meadow foxtail (2nd from left.)

On this page I’ve centred yarrow, mainly because I’m saving the daisies for another page! The grasses are from a couple of square metres in my back garden that I keep as a veeeery smol meadow. I’m lucky enough to have some outdoor space, and my priority in life is generally insects. So I leave some grass to get tall, and encourage a range of local wildflowers and grasses that serve as food for bees, moths, and beetles. In the un-cursed meadow, Eivor might have also seen clover, yellow rattle, lady’s bedstraw, and I’d bet on sweet vernal grass and crested dogstail too (3rd grass from the right.)

Ox-eye daisies in my local cemetery meadow

Hay meadows are an amazing reservoir of wild plant and insect species, but are now a rare habitat. Apart from the obvious changes in agricultural practice, capitalism doesn’t value biodiversity in spaces it could build on, extract from, or intensively farm the crap out of. But hope is not lost for meadow species. Many conservation organisations here work with farming communities to restore former meadows or to create new ones. Churchyards and church lands that haven’t been developed are also important spaces for meadow preservation – and in AC Valhalla we see meadows around the monastery at Meldeburne.

Meadow grasses and flowers around Meldeburne monastery

Yarrow (Achillea millefolium)

Super-common and very tough, yarrow is a component of meadows but is found anywhere grassy – it’s found in lawns and verges all over the UK. In my area you'd be hard pressed not to see any in summer.

Yarrow in my backyard

Feathery, finely divided leaves gave it another common name, milfoil or millefoil, meaning 1000 leaves. It has clusters of small white or pinkish flower heads with an interesting structure. The flat-topped clusters of flowers look like they’re made out of daisy(ish) shaped individual flowers...

...But take a look at those daisy shapes and you’ll see that each is actually a cluster of many smaller tiiiiny flowers that just LOOK like a daisy. The centre is made of a bundle of tube-like ‘disc’ flowers that have 5 petals fused together. These are surrounded by a few ‘ray’ flowers, each with one large petal. So cool!

Yarrow: flowers inside flowers

Ecologically, it’s an important source of nectar and pollen for bees, and a food plant for many other insects, including moths and beetles. Some cavity-nesting birds use it as lining material. I encourage it to grow in my lawn along with clover, self-heal and black medick, because it’s a lot hardier and more drought tolerant than any lawn grass.

Historically, yarrow used to be used medicinally to staunch bleeding, but weirdly was also called ‘nosebleed plant’ because of a myth that it caused nosebleeds. It also used to be used as a good luck charm.

Yarrow and ferns

I'm going to move onto the autumnal ferns of Ledercesterscire for page 6, but I'll probably come back to Grantebridgescire for some of the other mysteries.

[vikingnerd793]

@lycomorpha I found this in Wessex and thought you might be interested in this. I’ve not seen a tree anywhere like this in Valhalla, but maybe I just haven’t been noticing!

[lycomorpha]

Finished my Leicestershire/Ledercestrescire fern page for Eivor's herbarium after the WIP I posted last wkend! Will tidy up the scan and write the things later. Just glad to have finished somthing tbh... Life is a bit fkd up rn. So I am taking comfort in video game botany as always :)

It was kinda hard to pick words (I ain't no poet) and to keep the lettering consistent on this page. The pressed fern was large and didn't fit in one piece either. But it still made me happy to do.

Other plants I want to include for this county are flowers from Skari's island at Repton, and wood avens from the ruins at Venonis

[lycomorpha]

It's been a while old friend...

Getting back to my ACV video game botany today. Mostly creating carnage trying to outline things in pencil on my Ledercestrescire ferns page tbh, but still, having fun relearning the way I wrote on the other pages!

Maria decided what I needed for Christmas was another game to fixate on, so I've also been sketching plants, lichen and fungi as I come across them in BG3. And Starfield. And started getting our HZD art back together ahead of HFW coming out for PC soon. So now I have soooo many video game botany things to not have time to finish 😂😂😂😭🙃🤣

[lycomorpha]

Video game botany: Eivor's herbarium

In the autumn I collected some fern fronds and pressed them to use on the first herbarium page for leicestershire/ledercesterscire. In game the county is perpetually autumnal, so I wanted to try and capture the colours. I haven't seen any of the ferns here turning as red as they do in ACV until they're too far gone and crispy to press, so the yellow/orange colours are as good as I can get.

These fronds are mostly too big for my scanner, which means they're going to need trimming to fit on the book pages! Which frond do you think will look best?

[lycomorpha]

Eivor's Herbarium: P4 - Raspberries from Grantebridge

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Outside the fine longhouse of our new ally, Soma, stand these delicious red berries. Octavian claims the Romans brought this berry here & into cultivation. I am surprised he thinks it grand enough for "the Empire!"

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As @vikingnerd793 recently pointed out, this game is a comfort game for a lot of us. And although it's a weird-ass hobby, video game botany is a comfort thing for me, especially in ACV. Set in places where I've lived but hundreds of years ago, it's a safe place away from the illustration I make for work & the current UK hellscape... So... I was properly pissed off when the sketchbook I'm making this herbarium in got water-damaged in recent studio mayhem. As if the leaking radiator wasn't enough.

The book dried out OK in the end - the water missed the plants on all the pages so far. This page is just a bit crinkly and writing the text I could see that the ink spread a little on that part of the paper. But it left me feeling a bit unsure of the whole thing for a minute...

Eivor spent a lot of time at sea, though. I'm sure she'd be chill about minor mishaps like water damage, wiping the blood of her enemies of plant specimens, etc. So I'm sticking with it.

Why are there giant raspberries in 9th century England anyway?

School history class told me the Romans brought raspberries around Europe, and that raspberry seeds have been found in Roman forts here. Raspberry plants (Rubus idaeus) are related to the cloudberries we also see in game, and are part of the same family as roses. Although spread far and wide as a food plant (since well before the Romans, apparently) it's thought that the domestic raspberry originated in Turkey. As Maria loves to tell me, raspberries are not actually a berry (a fruit with seeds scattered throughout the pulp) but an aggregate fruit made up of drupelets (sections of fruit, each with one seed).

The kind of big juicy raspberries seen in Grantebridge didn't exist until a lot more recently thanks to hybridisation & selection (sorry, Eivor!) Golden raspberries are a real thing though - not common in the UK, but found throughout AC Valhalla's version England.

Ravensthorpe has its own Roman empire fanboy in the form of Octavian, aka Osbert of Lunden. (It's impossible to get a pic of him looking anything but a biiit creepy, so sorry about that.) Anyway, his main issue with the house Eivor gets built for him is that it "lacks the grandeur of the empire at its peak." Rude, frankly. So I couldn't resist having Eivor reference his gripes about Ravensthorpe.

You can also find raspberries at the monastery in Grantebridgescire, and Gratian's villa ruins to keep up with the Roman theme.

I'm already working on the next page to finish up Grantebridgescire. It's going to be wildflowers from the cursed zone on the hill.

[lycomorpha]

Attaching the fern frond to the first of the Ledercesterscire (Leicestershire) pages of Eivor's herbarium. Need to get a hand making some more of these homemade bar weights so I don't have to switch to rocks when I run out!

The pressed frond is attached with small strips of neutral gummed linen tape. The hat pin is super useful for propping things up as you thread the tape through, but I have absolutely no fkn idea where it came from or how it got into my herbarium kit... It's just always been there 🤷🙃

Anyway. Ferns. And heather. That's the first thing you see when you sail into this county. (This is also the slowest fanart project ever, but idc, idcccc lol)

[lycomorpha]

This is 120x timelapse of pressed grass & yarrow going into my ACV book herbarium. It's a slow thing to do but just what I need after a ridiculously busy month or two 🌿💚

This is the last page for Grantebridgescire - the meadow around the cursed zone on the hill. The grasses I pressed came out so well, they're so ✨prettyyy✨. In the end I decided not to trim them to be the same length, though. Like... If this was Eivor's herbarium, I can't see her giving AF about that over getting at least one of each kind of grass. & I imagine she'd know the value of the un-cursed area as hay meadow or pasture for tasty cows.

Ngl I'm looking forward to starting Leicestershire pages though, because the bracken I pressed for that in the autumn came out sooo fkn well 🪴💚🪴

[lycomorpha]

Links

My store - Mailing list & free zine sign-up - Linktree (incl workshop ticket links)

Video game botany posts index

Also a smol reminder: I'm neither from nor living in the USA. Most of the moths/plants/lichens I post are from the UK, sometimes mainland Europe - so pls don't start yelling if it's a problematic species in the US, cos I don't live there. Very occasionally lichens are from other places which I'll try to note. TY 💚🦋🌿

[lycomorpha]

Eivor's herbarium - P4 WIP: Grantebridge raspberries

Got some time to work on the next page of Eivor's herbarium today. Next up is raspberries from outside Soma's longhouse in Grantebridge (Cambridge in the present day). Extremely pleased that I actually managed to press at least one RIPE raspberry (just don't ask about the casualties along the way...) All the pieces have been attached to the page and weighted down. Just need it to dry and then I can add text.

The last plant from Grantebridgescire on P5 will be ox-eye daisy/marguerites, which you can find looking extra purdy around the cursed zone east of Besuncen Tor (but I'm saving those pics,) and in the graveyard at Meldeburne (if you can get past all the bloody cows there, heh.)

Ox-eye daisy (among other things) in Meldeburne graveyard in-game

Ox-eye daisies irl, growing in my local graveyard (I'm further south in England, but we get a similar mix on wildflowers)

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Ngl though, I'm looking forward to starting Ledecestrescire because I pressed some fkn amazing ferns for the woods there.

[lycomorpha]

Eivor's Herbarium - P3: Silver Birch

WIP posts for this page are here and here. See a video of mounting the pressed birch here]

Page text:

"Silver birch from Grantebridgescire

In the fens, where we first met with Soma, stand ghostly birches"

"It gives many gifts

this familiar friend;

paper, sap, wood,

tar that mends"

Silver birch (Betula pendula)

This is a common tree here in the UK, but it would have been familiar to Eivor from Norway too. Around the world, including in Scandinavia, birches of many kinds have long a history of use in many forms. Birch makes an excellent firewood and a strong timber, but other uses of birch include;

Use of birch tar extracted from bark as an adhesive e.g. in fletching arrows and making boats, as waterproofing to treat leather, and as a chewing gum (according to ~5000 year old finds from Finland and Denmark)

Birch sap can be drunk as birch water, and a syrup made from boiled sap has been used for thousands of years and is still in use today across Europe

The peeling bark has long been used as paper - key historic examples include Sanskrit texts from Afghanistan and East Slavic birch bark letters found in Russia

Extracts of buds, leaves, and bark have been used in traditional medicines for wound healing and as antiseptics; extracts contain betulin and betulinic acid, and there's one EU approved topical treatment for wounds, Episalvan, which contains birch extract

Birch bark was used in making a variety of textiles, and the inner bark is also edible, though most references seem to suggest it was eaten as a famine food (and as with edible lichens like rock tripe, this usage doesn't suggest it tastes great... 😬)

So I've no doubt Eivor would know this tree well. It's found all over the landscape of AC Valhalla, but I noticed it most in the Grantebridgescire (Cambridgeshire) arc on the riverbank looking across to Duroliponte, and in the marshy fens of Middletun where we first meet Soma. A quick look around the encampment in the fens shows trees of various ages. Stumps bearing turkey tails, bracket fungi, and lichens can also be found all around the place. This is a nice touch - I see similar fungi growing on birch often, so it helped make the environment seem realistic to me.

Birch stumps/trunks with various fungi and lichens in ACV

Bracket fungi and lichens on birch IRL

Other beautiful places to find birch looking good in game are the autumn woods of Ledecestrescire (Leicestershire), the Forest of Denu (Dean), Glowercesterscire (Gloucestershire - sorry, but it's weird AF just using the Olde names when you live here lol.) There's some nice examples in and around Ravensthorpe too.

Birch trees in Ravensthorpe

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Other pages in Eivor's herbarium

Front page: small plants - yarrow

Page 1: Oak - the Ravensthorpe marker tree

Page 2: White clover

[lycomorpha]

Treated myself to some video game botany time in between all the post-covid work catch up mayhem 💚🌿

AC Valhalla - finished the birch page in Eivor's book herbarium and started the wild raspberry page. Planning to write about the use of birch paper, tar, sap, and wood in Eivor's era once I've scanned it.

Hoping to get back to my next HZD page soon🤞

A birch stump in-game, complete with turkey tail fungi

Birch trunk with lichens, in the woods at Llennrych

[lycomorpha]

Eivor’s herbarium P2: white clover (completed)

'Forage for cattle & beloved by bees - do only they & I notice it’s fragrance? For so humble a plant it’s potent perfume is a marvel. I took some to Randvi & we shared its sweet scent...’

Finally completed the next page in Eivor’s Herbarium - white clover. (Cover page is here, P1 on on the Ravensthorpe marker oak is here)

I wanted the text to reference Randvi and kinda trail off without saying too much... This is one of the first plants Eivor might encounter on arrival in Ravensthorpe, after all. It’s pretty much everywhere in and around the longhouse, settlement, riverbanks, etc.

I was extremely slow to draw the writing on this. After a long gap without working on this, and current chronic pain problems affecting my hands... I was kiiinda irrationally terrified about fucking it up. The writing isn’t even twiddly or exciting - Eivor is a busy vikingr & a botanical hobby is one thing, calligraphy is another. Anyway it’s done. Whew!

Now... Which plant do I do for the next page - the journey to Grantebridge? I have Silver Birch ready to go, maybe that?

Recap: White clover (Trifolium repens)

This small plant is easy to overlook. It has a really amazing scent, but not many ppl notice it, since it’s very close to the ground. There’s a species of moth - the marbled clover - that feeds on it, which I’ve drawn for something else I’m making. A zine about moths of Ravensthorpe - species that Randvi might see drawn to the light while she’s up late working at the alliance table.

This clover is grown as a forage crop for grazing animals, with a long history of agricultural cultivation. It’s super common in pretty much any grassy area here in the UK…

…including in my back yard like this plant.

The individual flowers within each flower head look similar to pea flowers - because it’s a legume (same family as beans and peas.) Probably the only thing I remember about them from biology class is that legumes fix nitrogen via nodules on their roots that contain symbiotic bacteria. Because they add nitrogen to the soil, they reduce the need for fertiliser and improve grazing pastures. So that’s why they’ve historically been an essential crop.

As well as around the settlement of Ravensthorpe, clover is also seen in-game in grassy areas too. It seems to have a fairly realistic distribution! Below it’s mixed in with other wildflowers in meadows…

…and here it’s scattered around this weird deer-skeleton-bees-nest-honeycomb… thing? (I am as confused as the person in the pic tbh.)

You can also see some white clover on the cover page for Eivor’s herbarium below.

The easiest place to find it in game is right outside the Ravensthorpe longhouse.

[lycomorpha]

My video game botany project to make Eivor's herbarium had a brush with disaster - water damage in the studio again. As if the leaking radiator last time wasn't enough 😭

Thankfully this one survived. One corner of this page is a little wobbly but the water missed the plants and the linen tape. Overall the book dried out ok with the help of a dehumidifier 😅😌

So. Today I'm gonna finish the page on raspberries outside Soma's long-house, before anything ELSE happens!

[lycomorpha]

Picked out which pieces to include on the silver birch page of Eivor's herbarium... All the twigs pressed rly well but they don't all fit on there! Above are screen caps from Grantebridgescire (Cambridgeshire in the modern day) and a birch trunk I saw IRL that had similar bracket fungi growing on it to the kind we see in game.

Gonna try to video attaching these plants to the page with gummed linen strips. It'll be a bit finicky with the bark though. Will use some archival adhesive to stick down the seeds directly on the page... Eivor might have used sth like rabbit skin glue though, which you can still buy or make - but I'm vegetarian sooo nope lol.

Separated some of the bark layers to show how many there are. I had to trim the thicker, licheny ends of the bark, so that they won't damage the pages above when the book is pressed shut.

Also tried out writing on it - I've never used birch paper before but it worked pretty well!

There are so many plants in this game that I recognise, and that have interesting historical uses, but I won't be able to collect. Might have to think of some excuse to draw them. Maybe a zine? I could shamelessly include plants and fungi from places in games that I'll never get to see IRL or species that aren't suitable for pressing if I made a general video game botany zine 🤔

OR... maybe my video game botany habit is getting out of hand, lol. Everyone needs a hobby though, right?? 😳

[lycomorpha]

Video game botany: completed pages & links

Yes, it's a weird-ass hobby, but it's my hobby...

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Horizon Zero Dawn

Medicinal valley's blush (Nora)

My posts

Part 1 - the ancestor of medicinal valley’s blush

Part 2 - art materials for our imaginary Nora healer

Part 3 - because of course there’s a moth

Part 4 - the final artwork for our Nora healer’s journal

Wrap-up

Maria’s posts

Why video game botany?

How do we scientifically describe a fictional plant?

If the Nora kept written records, what would they look like?

Our audio blog about our process for this plant is here, and a transcript link can be found here or grab the transcript PDF here

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Current WIP - Freeze rime root

Post on work so far here

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AC Valhalla

Eivor's herbarium

Front page: small plants - yarrow

Page 1: Oak - the Ravensthorpe marker tree

Page 2: White clover (Ravensthorpe)

Page 3: Silver birch (Grantebridgescire)

Page 4: Raspberry (Grantebridgescire)

Currently working on: wildflower meadow from Grantebridgescire cursed zone

Flora of AC Valhalla

Currently walking through the game from the start looking at the flora:

From the beginning - Karmøy, Norway

Random recent posts

Sherwood forest IRL vs AC Valhalla

Older posts

AC Valhalla: botanical considerations in-game

Botanical location: a walk through the Temple of Ceres

Sketches from the Temple of Ceres

Fungi of ACV: blackish purple russula

Fungi of ACV: destroying angel

Plants in ACV vs IRL

Wood sorrel

Map lichen

Hart's tongue fern