COUNTRY NAMES OF FLOWERS.
NIV-HO was it that first quoted the saying of the old countrywoman, that "as soon as a thing gets into print it dies" ? She meant, of course, that as soon 118 the old country stories became "immortalised" in print, they
ceased to be the live oral tradition of the village. There was no need.to repeat them, even if anybody in these learned days would be so simple as to believe them : there they were on the
Many, we admit, have been preserved- in the books written on
gardening and on wild flowers, but how many have the country people themselves forgotten ? If print could kill
anything, it would kill the old names. The new generation of gardeners would read Latin side by side with English properly spelt, and " low-bellies " and " castle-areas " would vanish as surely as snapdragon is changing to antirrhinum.
It would be interesting to put into the hands of a cottager or gardener of the old school a list of flowers taken from an Elizabethan garden or herbal, and see what he would make of it. Perhaps the shepherd's speech in Ben Jonson's masque,
Pan's Anniversary, would do as well as any other. It is a long list of flowers, and is delightful reading in itself. Three
nymphs precede the shepherd on the stage, each strewing flowers from her prickle, or open wicker basket. The shepherd addresses them :—
"Well done, my pretty ones ! rain roses still, Until the last be dropped : then hence, and fill Your fragrant prickles for a second shower. Bring corn-flag, tulips, and Adonis' flower, Fair ox-eye, goldy-locks, and columbine, Pinks, goulands, king-cups, and sweet sops-in-wine, Blue harebells, pagles, pansies, calaminth, Flower-gentle, and the fair-haired hyacinth ; Bring rich carnations, flower-de-laces, lilies, The checked, and purple-ringed daffodillies, Bright crown imperial, king-spear, hollyhocks, Sweet Venus-navel, and soft lady-smocks ; -Bring, too, some branches forth of Daphne's hair,
• And gladdest myrtle for these posts to wear, With spikenard weaved and marjoram between, And starred with yellow-golds and meadows-queen."
Row many gardeners could put modern English names to the whole list ? Even with Gerard's "Herbal" to help, the identification need not be very easy, for Gerard's index is by no means complete, and search of the index alone would leave half-a-dozen at least unmentioned. Many of Ben Jonson's field and garden flowers bear the same names to-day that he knew; there should be no difficulty with
ox-eye daisies, columbines, pinks, king-cups, pansies, carnations, and hollyhocks. But would everybody under- Stand that the corn-flag is a gladiolus, and when Gerard explains that Adonis' flower is " maythes," or "red camomill," would most gardeners be further enlightened by learning that "our London women do call it Rosearubie" ? Goldy-locks is another name for more than one flower. Gerard gives the name to maidenhair moss, and to mothweed, but goldilocks in our modern books of field flowers is wood crowfoot, ranunculus auricomus, one of the many flowers known vaguely as buttercups. Goulands are another kind of 'crowfoot, but the country name that survives for goulands to-day is bachelors' buttons. The root seems to be somewhere in." golden" and in the Scottish "gowan," which is the yellow- centred ox-eye daisy. But sops-in-wine, and flower-gentle, and yellow-golds,--who would be certain of these ? Pagles, spelt ."paigles," still survive on village tongues, though they were
called cowslips in Shakespeare's day, too. Sops-in-wine Gerard explains as carnations, though Jonson apparently thinks them different flowers ; Gerard adds two other names for the clove carnation,—horseflesh and blanket. Flower- 'gentle is the amaranth, our Love-lies-bleeding ; flower-de-luce is, of course, fleur-de-lys, the conventional lily formed from the iris; king-spear is asphodel; Venus-navel is navelwort, or wall pcanywort; Daphne's hair presumably is a branch of bay; meadows-queen is our meadow-sweet; and Gerard's note on lady-smocks, or milkmaids, is pretty. They are called "in English cuckow flowers," he writes. "At the Namptwich, in Cheshire, where I had my beginning, Ladle smockes, which bath given me cause to christen it after my countrie fashion." He adds an odd little touch, too, to what he writes on daffodils. Daffodil was always a vague name, and the purple-ringed daffodil is our pheasant's-eye narcissus with the crimson ring to its yellow cup. But the checked daffodil is not a daffodil at all; it is our purple fritillary, and Gerard's " ginny lien flower." It is "checkered most strangely, in so much that every leafe seemeth to be the feather of a ginnie hen, whereof it took its name." When did it begin to be called the 'snake's-head fritillary? Plants and flowers named from their resemblance in shape to familiar country objects are, of course, some of the commonest of all. There are the crane's-bills and the stork's. bills, and it is a long step back into the past to find cranes and storks familiar birds of our countryside, though herons are still vaguely miscalled cranes'. But is there in any county glossary a herres-bill ? Shepherd's-needle and shepherd's- purse are two names obviously bestowed because of the form of the seedpod, and other flowers are named from the shape
of the leaves. All the crowfoots are called after their spreading, spiky foliage, and the moneyworts and pennyworts suggest the notion of coins with the flat circular green leaves which they strew on the ground or trail over the wall. Herb-twopence is a vivid name for the better-known creeping Jenny; the reason for it is plain at once if you look at the pairs of green discs set opposite each other along that most persistent stem. Other instances are obvious, and one or two better than the more frequent name; foxglove, snapdragon, tiger-lily, lady's cushion, which is an old name for scabious, and lady's lace, which is certainly much prettier than dodder. But some of the resemblances which our forefathers saw are difficult to discover. The leaf of hound's-tongue has just- sufficient likeness to a dog's tongue hanging out to justify the name, but lamb's-tongue, the country name for the ribwort plantain, is much further from the mark. The really interesting name for lamb's-tongue is kemps, which is possibly derived from the Anglo-Saxon word for soldier. . Kemps are the wiry-stemmed plantain flowers with which • country children fight flower-duels, slashing at each head of blossom in turn. It is something to-day to be able to look on at a battle which has been waged intermittently for two or three thousand years. Now and then, again, a flower will be named partly from its shape and partly from some distinctive property which it possesses, and it may be difficult to tell which is the earlier name. Goat's-beard, for instance, the shape of whose half-opened blossoms would certainly justify its name, is also called go-to-bed-at-noon, and it certainly closes its petals about mid-day. But the resemblance in sound between go-to-bed and goat's-beard can hardly be a mere coincidence. Here and there, too, you find different flowers with a common name sometimes a little difficult to understand. Eggs-and-bacon and butter-and-eggs seem to be interchangeable names for one of the double daffodils, and codlins-and-cream is another daffodil name; but codlins-and- crea.m, too, is an old name for willow herb. Gilliflower, with all its various explanations, "July-flower," and " giroilier " and " caryophyllum," belongs as often to the wallflower as to the clove; but why should one necessarily seek a common derivation for all the names ? The strange thing is that so few flowers, comparatively speaking, should have been given the easy, familiar names of men and women, as the birds and beasts have been given them. There is creeping Jenny, and Jack-in-the-hedge, and ragged Robin and herb-Robert, and sweet-William who is also sweet-John, but how many more are there ? The country custom rather has been to name the children after the flowers. Perhaps the most fascinating names of all are those which are not merely fanciful or casual, but which bring through all the years the sense of intimate friendship and knowledge of travelling and toiling men of the common plants of wayside and field. It must have been a ploughman who first called the wild pink vetch "rest-harrow," or "wrest-harrow," when it stopped his horses in the fallow, and the pimpernel has been the shepherd's weather-glass ever since the nomad farmer first noticed that it shut its red petals in rain. Two flowers belong less to farm work than to journeys and pilgrimage : the speedwell for those setting out in morning sunshine, and the traveller's joy for the high-road on August afternoons.
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