Tennyson, who was saturated with Shakespeare, and a real lover and keen observer of flowers, says: 'Round thee bloom, self-pleached deep, And in both these cases the plant meant is the Long-Purples of the Eastern Counties, the Purple Loosestrife. In this instance the difficulty is easily explained, but there are many pleasant puzzles in English plant names which are not so easily solved, and a few of these are worth notice. Spenser has 'Her ruddy cheeks like unto roses red, Her snowy brows like budded belamours.' No one can say positively what the belamour is. It is possible without much straining to say that it is not a flower at all, for in two other places Spenser certainly uses the word to mean a lover of either sex, and it is so used by other writers; here, therefore, it may simply mean anything beautiful; but if it must be taken for a flower, the flower is unknown. Shakespeare's 'cursed Hebenon' is undoubtedly a plant. Gower speaks of 'Hebenus that slepy tre'; Spenser speaks of a 'heben'bow, spear, and lance, and heben sad'; and Marlowe, among a list of poisons, gives the juice of hebon.' Most of the commentators were content to take their choice between ebony and henbane, with a preference for henbane on account of its poisonous qualities. But when the passage came to be studied more closely, and by medical men, it was found that neither ebony nor henbane would produce the results that are so minutely specified by Shakespeare. The results of the poison were : The leperous distilment, whose effect The question, then, was, Is there any plant that produces these effects? and Dr. Nicholson in 1879, and the Rev. W. A. Harrison in 1882, in two exhaustive papers written for the New Shakespeare Society, brought forward sufficient proofs that the symptoms described were produced by yew poisoning, and by no other poison; poison; and that the name of the yew in many Northern tongues, especially in Denmark, was very similar to Hebenon. In his 'Comus,' Milton describes a plant given to him by 'a certain shepherd lad, well skilled in every vertuous plant and healing herb'; it had ' a small unsightly root, The leaf was darkish, and had prickles on it, Bore a bright golden flowre, but not in this soyl; We have already said that Milton is very vague in his plant names, and in his description of plants, he confuses the wild convolvulus and the honeysuckle, and no such name or plant as Hæmony is known. The most probable solution of the name is that agrimony is meant; that Milton somewhere found the Greek ἀγριμώνη, and fancied that the word meant wild hæmony. Culverkeys' has long been a puzzle. The word first appears in a delightful poem, The Secrets of Angling, by J. D.,' i.e. John Dennys of Pucklechurch, in Gloucestershire. It is quoted with approval by Izaak Walton, and by him attributed to John Davors. One of the stanzas that he quotes ends 'Purple Narcissus, like the morning rayes, And in the last day's angling we have the pretty word-picture of a meadow: 'Looking down the Meadows, could see here a Boy gathering Lillies and Ladysmocks, and there a Girl cropping Culverkeys and Cowslips.' The word has been a puzzle to all writers on plant names. Dr. Prior suggested the wild hyacinth; Messrs. Holland and Britten the columbine: but Dr. Murray has proved that the name is applied to many flowers, especially the cowslip, which however could scarcely be called 'azure,' and which is certainly distinguished by Walton. Dr. Murray says, Commentators on Dennys and Walton have wrongly guessed Columbine and Meadow Cranesbill'; but this may be said for the Meadow Cranesbill, that it is azure, that the keys or seedvessels resemble culvers' feet, and that it is abundant in the meadows of J. Dennys' county of Gloucestershire. Of all English plant names none has been so disputed as the Jerusalem artichoke. When first introduced into England, it was called Artichoke of Jerusalem, and so it was called by all writers up to the beginning of the present century; Gerard, Bacon, Parkinson, and so on to Dr. Johnson, have no other name for it than Artichoke of Jerusalem. But some clever guesser boldly said that the 'Jerusalem' was a corruption of the Italian Italian girasole. It is not known who first started this derivation, but we have found it nowhere earlier than in a forgotten yet delightful gardening-book, 'The Manse Garden,' written by Nat. Paterson, of Galashiels, in 1827, a book full of humour and excellent gardening instruction. It was an attractive derivation, and seems at once to have taken the popular fancy, being adopted without question by such writers of authority as Dr. Prior, Asa Gray, A. de Candolle, and even Dr. Murray. But there is absolutely no authority for it. The plant did not come to us from Italy, and the Italians did not call it girasole; furthermore the mistake could not have arisen if more attention had been paid to the flower. The Jerusalem artichoke is a sunflower, of which there are two sorts. The one to which the artichoke and our common sunflower belong is a helianthus, and derives its name from its resemblance to the heraldic 'sun in its glory.' In spite of Moore's assertion that 'the sunflower turns on her god, when he sets, the same look that she turned when he rose,' the helianthi have no such habit, and in a collection of sunflowers on a sunny day the flowers will be seen turned in every direction. But the other sunflower is the marigold, the heliotropium, solsequium, 'solsece vel sigel-hwerfe' (i.e. sun-seeker or sun-turner), the turnsole, whose praises and constancy to the sun were the theme of many an old poet and religious writer, who loved to draw from it the lessons of constancy and devotion, and to point the moral of the superiority of the constant flower to the inconstancy of man. The word 'Jerusalem' offers no difficulty; many plants were so named, none of which came from Jerusalem, and the name was given either honoris causâ or as a mark of exotic character, and sometimes perhaps under the idea that the plant came from the East, just as drugs were said to be of Constantinople, because that was their most celebrated mart. There are modern instances of the same practice of associating plants with places of which they are not really natives. The Cherokee Rose, for example, is a beautiful white rose, barely hardy in England, but growing well in Southern Europe, and reaching its fullest luxuriance in Madeira and Teneriffe. It is a native of China, probably a variety of our common monthly rose, and was at some unknown time imported into Georgia and other parts of the Southern United States. There it met with a congenial soil and climate, and thence came to Europe, bearing not only the trivial name of Cherokee Rose, but the scientific name of R. Cherokensis, which, however, has given place to that of R. lævigata. From their earliest days the Americans have shown a great talent for plant naming. The first settlers seem to have had few few ideas on the subject beyond that of connecting the plants of their new home with those of their native land, and they at once assigned English names to plants to which the English type was not allied. The same may be said of the names which they gave to their birds. In this way they gave the name of Mayflower to Epigea, of Crowfoot to a Geranium, of Dewberry to a blackberry very different to our dewberry, of Goat's-beard to a Spiræa, of Fig to the Opuntia, of Hemlock to a pine, of Cedar to several plants that were not even Conifers, and every plant that climbed in any way they called a Vine. Many of these names we have adopted, and in one instance at least the American name has entirely displaced the old English title. Until the beginning of the last century 'pine-apple' was the English word for what we now call a fir-cone; but the early American settlers, naturally enough, transferred the name to that which bore a likeness to a gigantic fir-cone, forgetting, or perhaps not knowing, that the plant was not a pine, and that the edible part could scarcely be called an apple; for the pine-apple is in no sense a fruit: it is but a collection of unopened flower-buds clustering round the stem, much in the same way as the shoots on a Brussels sprout, or the buds of the cauliflower. But the name was at once adopted, and with the curious result that the old English 'pine-apple' could no longer hold its own, and had to go back to the Greek, and call itself a fir-cone (κῶνος). Among all plant names probably none are more interesting than those of the Bible. An excellent little book on the subject appeared in England before the end of the sixteenth century: Newton's Herbal of the Bible,' taken chiefly from Lemnius. The whole subject has been well summarised in the 'Dictionary of the Bible,' where Sir Joseph Hooker clearly proved from his own observations in Syria that the oak of the Bible was not, as generally supposed, the terebinth, but a true oak, Quercus pseudo-coccifera, which is distributed through South and East Europe into Asia Minor and Syria. There it becomes a fine tree, but in England it seldom becomes more than a bush. The 'lilies of the field' have not been so clearly identified; many plants have been suggested, but the opinion which now finds most favour is that it is a general expression for all the beautiful flowers in which the Holy Land is so rich. The chief objections to this view are that there is no other instance of 'lily of the field' being used in that comprehensive way (as 'grass of the field' is used for all the green things upon the earth), and that κρίνον is almost too specialised a word to be taken in such a general sense. If it is a true lily, none can have a better claim to the honour than the scarlet Turk's-cap lily (L. Chalcedonicum), which abounds in Syria. With Bible names we may connect the Saints whose names have been given to plants from very early times. In 1591 John Bauhin published a little book, De Plantis a divis sanctisque Nomen habentibus,' in which he collected from different authors all plants which had been so named. St. Peter, St. John, and the Blessed Virgin Mary have, as might be supposed, by far the greater number; but it is rather startling to find a special place of honour in such a list given to tobacco. But so it is; by five different authors mentioned by Bauhin it is named, not indeed after any particular Saint, but as if it were a specially holy plant, herba sancta sana, Nicotiana sive Tabacum.* That it should have had such honour paid to it on the Continent is the more remarkable when we remember, that Shakespeare, writing at the same time and with the keenest eye to everything about him, never once mentions the plant, or makes the slightest reference to it. After Bauhin's time there seems to have been no book specially devoted to saintly plant names till 1828, when there appeared a remarkable book, The Circle of the Seasons,' by Thomas Forster, a very clever man, but one of the most successful literary impostors of the century. He allotted a Saint to every day in the year and almost a flower to every Saint, and supported his statements by quotations from poems of an antique character and by references to a work called Anthologia borealis et australis,' which, without any suspicion, was freely quoted by Hone, and then by the Rev. F. Oakeley, in a very pretty little book, The Catholic Florist.' But no one could find the 'Anthologia' or the poems so freely quoted, and it was not until Forster was almost on his death-bed that it was discovered that no such book or poetry existed, except in his own MS. Since that time many books have been written, attributing different flowers to the Saints, some of which rest on good authority; but the number of English flowers with saintly names is not large. From early times attempts have been made to popularize botany by insisting on the use of none but English names for all plants grown in England, whether native or exotic. It cannot be denied that the Latin names are, and always must be, a stumbling-block to many, and the number of scientific synonyms is another obstacle, though it will be largely removed by the 'Index Kewensis.' No one would wish to lose even one of the old names of our native plants; they are a precious inheri * Spenser also calls it 'divine Tobacco' (F. Q. III. v. 32). tance |