The Folk-lore of Plants

Produced by David Starner, Tam and PG Distributed Proofreaders
1889
Apart from botanical science, there is perhaps no subject of inquiry connected with plants of wider interest than that suggested by the study of folk-lore. This field of research has been largely worked of late years, and has obtained considerable popularity in this country, and on the Continent.
Much has already been written on the folk-lore of plants, a fact which has induced me to give, in the present volume, a brief systematic summary—with a few illustrations in each case—of the many branches into which the subject naturally subdivides itself. It is hoped, therefore, that this little work will serve as a useful handbook for those desirous of gaining some information, in a brief concise form, of the folk-lore which, in one form or another, has clustered round the vegetable kingdom.
November 19, 1888.
In Apollonius Rhodius we find one of these hamadryads imploring a woodman to spare a tree to which her existence is attached:
Loud through the air resounds the woodman's stroke, When, lo! a voice breaks from the groaning oak, 'Spare, spare my life! a trembling virgin spare! Oh, listen to the Hamadryad's prayer! No longer let that fearful axe resound; Preserve the tree to which my life is bound. See, from the bark my blood in torrents flows; I faint, I sink, I perish from your blows.'
Aubrey, referring to this old superstition, says:
I cannot omit taking notice of the great misfortune in the family of the Earl of Winchelsea, who at Eastwell, in Kent, felled down a most curious grove of oaks, near his own noble seat, and gave the first blow with his own hands. Shortly after his countess died in her bed suddenly, and his eldest son, the Lord Maidstone, was killed at sea by a cannon bullet.
Into a cloven pine; within which rift Imprison'd, thou didst painfully remain, A dozen years; … … Where thou didst vent thy groans, As fast as mill-wheels strike.
Similarly Miss Emerson, in her Indian Myths (1884, p. 134), quotes the story of The Two Branches :