Read 100 Flowers and How They Got Their Names Online
Authors: Diana Wells
100 Flowers and How They Got Their Names
Also by DIANA WELLS
100 Birds and How They Got Their Names
Lives of the Trees
And How They Got Their Names
DIANA WELLS
Illustrated byÂ
Ippy Patterson
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
For my sister Sheila (1936â1995)
and her nephew, my darling son, Quin (1971â1995)
Baby Blue Eyes and Poached Eggs
Carnation, Pink, Sweet William
Oswego Tea, Bee Balm, or Monarda
Thanking family and friends would be as superfluous as thanking peristalsis, the essentiality of which I take for granted, but there are some whom I would particularly like to thank. Frances Greene, Janet Evans, Ellen Fallon, and all the other librarians whom I pestered mercilessly for information and seemingly unobtainable books, which they obtained and I grumpily returned, weeks after they were due. Betsy Amster and Angela Miller, my agents. Elisabeth Scharlatt, Robert Rubin, Amy Ryan, and Tammi Brooks for their skill and encouragement. Pat Stone and the readers of
Greenprints
for their heart-warming enthusiasm. Dr. Candido Rodriguez Alfageme and Dr. Erik A. Mennega for invaluable assistance. Dr. Peg Stevens for her gentle and unfailing help and kindness. Gratitude also to my word processor, so hated at first but finally respected if not loved, even though it never did give me back those pages that disappeared. Additional thanks to Claire Wilson and Vic Johnstone for recent corrections.
We do not read of flowers in the Garden of Eden, but of treesâtrees that (except for one) were given to us as food. Nevertheless, those of us who plant flowers have, perhaps, a sneaky longing for Eden, made for our delight, a garden in which Adam was allowed to give names to everything. To name is to possess, as conquerors know. Or so we might wish.
As to when we first became aware of plants not essential for food, the Old Testament doesn't help much, but it must have been early on. Some plant names go back to before we have records, when flowers were used for charms and protection; their names are the stuff of myths, answering our deepest fears and longings, our earliest whimpers in the dark for comfort. The Greek gods, we are told, usually to preserve love (love being what we most crave), had the power to turn humans into plants so they would not die. So it is that Daphne and Hyacinth and Narcissus, and all the poignancy of their loves, are still with us in our gardens.
Other flower names go back to the fear of illness and the mystery of healing, even if the connections now seem irrelevant. “Lungwort,” with its spotted leaves, reportedly cured lung diseases; “liverwort,” from the shape of its leaves, helped the liver. Some were not so clearly named, although their use was clearâthe brain-shaped walnut was used for injuries to the head, tongue-shaped leaves helped mouth disorders, asparagus and fennel assisted in growing hair.
For the sixteenth-century compilers of the first English herbals, books meant to identify plants and their uses, names still reflected the idea that flowers were here for our use. John Gerard, who wrote a
famous herbal in 1597, believed that flowers were “for the comfort of the heart, for the driving away of sorrow and encreasing the joy of the minde.” The names he gave were often descriptive and unfixed. “Herb impious” is so called because it is like “children seeking to overgrow or overtop their parents (as many wicked children do).” “Devil's bit” is named because “the Devil did bite it for envie because it is an herbe that hath so many good vertues and is so beneficent to mankind.” “Cloudberry” grows where clouds are lower than mountaintops.
Recently introduced flowers from the New World sometimes carried the name of the person who had brought them, their place of origin, or even their native names. While fewer than a thousand new plants were introduced to Britain in the seventeenth century, by the end of the eighteenth century there were nearly nine thousand new introductions. The Americas proved that the number of plants existing was vastâbotanists could no longer describe a few hundred of them and think they had them all, nor could the Garden of Eden, containing all the plants known to the world, be re-created in a European botanical garden, as had once been hoped. Philosophically this was tremendously important, as theorists began to acknowledge that not every plant had necessarily been created in limited quantities with a specific use for man.
The seventeenth century had seen the creation of scientific institutions and new botanical gardens. Botanists from these institutions had tried to find ways of sorting the enormous influx of plants. In the eighteenth century, the time of Carl von Linné (better known as Linnaeus), we see many new plants named after people. Descriptive names were running short, and the more detailed they were, the more cumbersome they became. Nor were medicinal virtues paramount any
longer. Linnaeus proposed a revolutionary way of classifying plants with just two names: genus and species. Not all the names were given for reasons of science or respect, and Linnaeus sometimes demonstrated human weaknesses as well as strengths when he named plants. For the ambitious botanist Gronovius he named
Gronovia
, being “a climbing plant which grasps all other plants.” Another name,
Monsonia
, was for Lady Ann Monson, of whom Linnaeus asked that he might “be permitted to join with you in the procreation of just one little daughter . . . a little Monsonia, through which your fame would live for ever in the Kingdom of Flora.”
Nowadays we think of botanists as funny old men with magnifying glasses, but during the great age of scientific exploration they were the brightest and the best, the young, the brave, and the ambitious. All of them risked their lives and many of them died for the plants they sought. William Sherard narrowly escaped being taken for a wolf and shot while creeping after a plant. John Lawson was tortured and burned to death by Indians. Richard Cunningham was killed in Australia by aborigines. David Douglas died in a bull pit in Hawaii. George Forrest hid from Tibetan bandits for days while on the brink of death. Discomfort, illness, loneliness, and attacks from animals, insects, and hostile natives were all routine, and yet the men ventured on, because botany was the frontier of knowledge, as new as outer space is to us.
As methods of collecting became safer, and there were fewer new frontiers to explore, botany more often became the pursuit of scholars than adventurers. Nomenclature became a fussy science with its own pedantic rules, and we became more casual about the flowers we grew. It was easy to forget that someone had died for a potted plant
we could pick up at our local nursery, even if we still called it by his name. Flowers became abundant and cheapâpleasing but unnecessary appendages to our more important lives. So by our success we have come full circle, and what was the unknown and the mysterious is now provided for our pleasure, as it was in the Garden of Eden.
Just after I started writing
100 Flowers and How They Got Their Names
, and within a few weeks of each other, both my older sister and my son died. My sister had always been there for me. My son, I had believed, always would be. So it was that I was tumbling through space, with the past and the future gone.
Flowers did not console me, although there were enough of themâon graves, on cards, and in sympathetic bouquets. Even the reality of their beauty, as I glanced at it and hurtled past, had no meaning. I knew with certainty it did not exist to comfort meâI was incidental to it, as I was to the universe itself.
