Work Text:
Experiments Regarding the Utility of the Spell to Conjure a Field of Flowers
Serie
Abstract: The spell to conjure a field of flowers is used solely as decoration, only creating purely ornamental flowers. However, many flowering plants have nutritional or medicinal qualities. Should these be retained when conjuring flowers with this spell, it quickly becomes useful, able to conjure rations for a small group or herbs for medicine within seconds. This research explores that possibility, and compares the efficacy of conjured flowers to naturally grown ones in both metrics where applicable.
Methodology: Natural-grown flowers from the forests around Äußerst were selected, specifically dandelions, catslipper, and red clover to test nutritional value, and dark moon weed, forestsweet, and nettle to test medicinal value. These were chosen not only for their utility, but also for their commonality in the current era, in order to have a large enough sample size for a reliable experiment. Notably, these plants are not known to be related to each other, to attempt to account for variables such as certain families of plants reacting differently to being magically grown. This will ensure that the results can be generalized to plant-growth magic related to this spell as a whole, rather than only leading to conclusions about one type of flowering plant.
The experiment was conducted over a series of three months, to ensure flowers that opened at slightly different times of year were at the peak of their nutritional or medicinal value when the comparisons were made. Furthermore, the sample size of each species was relatively small–250 naturally-grown flowers and the same amount of magically grown ones–to prevent long-term ecological damage. Medicine for injuries was tested on mild injuries sustained by mages living in Äußerst, who consented to furthering magical research, and medicine for illness and infection was tested on respiratory illnesses transmitted during the winter, with a priest present to ensure that the patient would not die should the treatment made from magically-grown flowers fail and the illness be more serious than anticipated.
Efficacy was measured by how long subjects were satiated, as meals that are more nutritious tend to cause subjects to become hungry more slowly. In the case of medicinal plants, efficacy was measured by how quickly the wounds healed or illnesses were cured. In both cases, a spell to accurately measure time was used, with precision of one-thousandth of a second.
Experiment:
Figure 1: Two graphs comparing the efficacy of magically conjured flowers to that of naturally-grown ones. In all graphs, naturally-grown flowers are represented by a plain bar, and magically conjured ones are represented by a shaded one.
Comparing efficacy for food, both natural-grown dandelion and red clover perform significantly better than their magically conjured counterparts. While conjured dandelion has merely mediocre performance, with satiation lasting two hours forty-five minutes compared to natural-grown dandelion’s four hours, conjured red clover merely kept subjects satiated for an hour, as opposed to three hours fifteen minutes for its counterpart. Conjured catslipper, while still performing worse overall, is an outlier in that it kept those who consumed it satiated for a mere ten minutes fewer than those who consumed the natural-grown counterpart.
Comparing efficacy for medicinal use is more complicated, as even when it can be proven that the same illness is affecting multiple people, some individuals tend to fight off illness faster than others, and some peoples’ wounds heal faster than others’ so that can influence the results of this part of the experiment far more than mere appetite differences influenced that of testing satiation. That being said, within the realm of curing illness, conjured dark moon weed takes on average almost twice as long to help cure respiratory illness as its natural-grown counterpart, and forestsweet has an even worse average time discrepancy when used to attempt to break fevers. Conjured nettle, when made into a poultice for injury, performs the best, wounds of similar severity treated with it only taking slightly over one and a quarter the amount of time to heal as when treated with its natural counterpart.
Limitations: The main limitation of this experiment is the small variety of flowers tested on, as various plants respond to magic differently, best exemplified within this study when comparing the performance gap between conjured catslipper and its natural-grown counterpart and that of the other edible plants and their counterparts. While they are not known to be related and were chosen as a result, the experiment was conducted in Äußerst, and thus only plants native to the northern part of the continent were part of the experiment. Thus, it is possible that certain flowers from the southern region of the continent may retain more–or perhaps even gain–medicinal or nutritional value when grown magically, compared to ones from the northern region.
Conclusion: In conclusion, the spell to conjure a field of flowers has little to no known utilitarian value, even outside of battle, and is only helpful in dire emergencies a skilled mage should be able to avoid in the first place. While this was a predictable outcome despite this spell being the favorite of the Legendary Mage Flamme, it is useful to have a study to prove it, so that magic academies can either avoid wasting time teaching this spell or use it as a jumping off point to teaching more practical, combat-oriented nature-controlling magic.