Garden of the Kalenqyods

The Garden of the Kalenqyods is a walled compound on the landward outskirts of Andymalon which has, for over a century, been the base of operations of a family of botanists and thaumatologists dedicated to exploring and extending the medicinal properties of plants.

Origins

The garden was established by Yngyana Kalenqyod after the death of her husband, Torres, during an outbreak of the Spitting sickness that occurred in Andymalon in the summer of 497 AWC. Always a keen gardener, and a writer of prose poetry on the aesthetics of flowers, Yngyana was disgusted by the clinical calm the healers of the city showed to her husband, and developed the notion that the failure of their plant-based tonics was due to a lack of emotional involvement in their preparation. Plants, she wrote, require care and affection to produce the perfect flower, and thus require similar engagement to achieve proper medicinal potency. Medicine, she argued, was an art rather than a science.
Refusing various offers of remarriage the widow poured much of her husband's wealth (he was a senior functionary of a business importing food from Pholyos to Andymalon) into the purchase of several acres of land outside the city, ordered a high brick wall be built around the estate, and promptly left the city by ship, spending the next two years travelling widely in the southern cities and the alluvial plain beyond. She arrived home with a shipload of seeds, tubers and cuttings and several large volumes of notes related to their alleged medicinal significance to the people of the plain. Planting these in the estate, she began rearing them in keeping with the notes she had taken from interviewing farmers on the southern plain.

Operation

Yngyana died in 516 AWR, reputedly from a seizure while working in her garden. By this stage her three children were adults and had joined her in her work rearing and experimenting with the gradually expanding collection of plants and fungi in the garden. This work has been ongoing throughout the sixth century AWR; the great-grandchildren of Yngyana herself are now working in the garden with the aid of their own children.
The Kalenqyod family are quite open about the general thrust of their work, which remains the same as that established by Yngyana the previous century: to practice the cultivation of plants as an art form and thus maximise their medicinal potential. The details of how this is done, however, is a closely-guarded family secret. Records of their methodologies and experiments are apparently kept, though reputedly at an undisclosed location elsewhere in Andymalon.
Few can argue with their success, however. The family has grown wealthy through the sale of various medicinal tinctures and infusions, which enjoy a startling success rate in curing or treating a variety of illnesses, most notably the Spitting sickness and Lover's complaint. These cures are never available in the quantities that the epidemiological atmosphere demands, however. As the owners of the garden repeatedly make clear, their methods simply do not allow them to manufacture the tonics in the way an ironmonger might produce screws or nails; they claim, for example, to be able to produce a cure for the Great Bruise, but at a rate of only one or two gills a year of a fluid of which any individual patient would likely need to drink several pints before it took effect. They are working on a solution to this problem, but for the time being to produce this tonic more quickly would rob it of any potency.
Accusations are occasionally made that these gardeners are deliberately creating shortages to drive up prices, though these are easily countered by the peculiar business model the Kalenqyods employ, which involves selling not to the highest bidder but to the patient whose recovery seems to make the most effecting story. Three years ago, for example, they declined an enormous sum from a well-positioned member of society - an employee of the same concern that Yngyana's husband worked for, in fact - for a dose of their treatment of Lover's complaint, instead handing the tincture to a sailor who, afflicted with the illness, was ashamed to return to his wife in Ramoros. The price was supposedly the cost of the bottle the tonic came in (four brass stars) and a solemn undertaking to bring his wife to Andymalon within two years and confess his infidelity to her in the presence of the gardeners. This meeting is known to have taken place, and although details have never been made public widespread rumour has it that the wife told the gardeners her husband had in fact confessed the moment he arrived home, and that she had overcome her initial anger and forgiven him in light of his obvious concern for their welfare. The Kalenqyods obviously charge more conventional prices to cover their high overhead costs - making a healthy profit selling joss sticks, for example - but to simply flog off their products at market prices, they say, would be akin to forcing a rose to bloom in winter. Despite, or perhaps because of, this eccentricity, the gardeners are regarded as a benevolent institution within the society of Andymalon.
The Kalenqyods also dispatch expeditions - always led by a member of the family - to the southern plains in search of new botanical wisdom among the farmers there. Similar delegations have also been sent to the cities of Chogyos and Oluz for less clear reasons. Members of the family have also sent kinfolk further afield, to the great western jungle and the lands beyond the northern sea, looking for new and promising plants. They happily admit to having a thriving crop of Western liverlilies in their compound, for example, in the shade of what they claim is the only tree producing Urchin apples south of Oluz. They have also been known to pay generous prices for novel or rare seeds, though only after such seeds are carefully examined and accepted as genuine. It is said that nobody ever tries to cheat the Kalenqyods twice - not because swindling them once prompts any retribution, but because the disappointed statements made to those who attempt to do so are so effective at inspiring remorse.
The Kalenqyods are a famously well-preserved family. The current patriarch, Treyoj Kalenqyod, a grandson of Yngyana, is 90 but looks not a day over 60. This prompts suggestions that the family have developed some sort of life-extending tonic, though nobody has yet put the suggestion to them.

Founding Date

498-500 AWC

Type

Garden