St Joseph and the Two-Flower Mystery

 

This is the final post in the series about St. Joseph leading up to the Solemnity of St. Joseph, Spouse of the Virgin Mary on March 19.

Today's entry is about certain flowers other than the usual white lilies used in St. Joseph iconography.

That is, in some Hispanic cultures, a flower called "nardo" is associated with St. Joseph, but which flower is it?  Is it spikenard (above)? Or is it tuberose (below)?

 A Benedictine nun, Mother Hildegard, presents the mystery in a charming blog post.  She points out that in Spanish the tuberose is called nardo or Vara de San Jose (Staff of St. Joseph). But nardo is often depicted in Hispanic iconography as spikenard.

Both plants are highly fragrant (although their scents are different), so the solution might be that the word "nardo" over time became associated with blooms that are fragrant such that both tuberose and spikenard came to be known as "nardo" even though the obvious linguistic association is with spikenard.

Tuberose is native to Mexico but spikenard is not.  Most Mexicans in colonial times had likely never seen a spikenard plant.  But a possible explanation is that in Mexico and other Spanish colonial countries, Catholics started calling tuberose "nardo" simply because of its fragrance.  The wonderful fragrance of spikenard is mentioned several times in sacred scripture including the story of Mary Magdalene anointing the feet of Our Lord. Thus, they might have used the word simply to describe the intense scent element of tuberose without any relation to its appearance or conventional nomenclature.