SOME RUSTIC NAMES OF FLOWERS.
Who does not love the country names of old-fashioned flowers better than those by which botanists and florists call them? By old-fashioned flowers—if forms perennially renewed can ever be called old-fashioned—are meant the flowers our oldest poets praise, and whose simple charms find a place in the songs of modern ones—flowers, the roots of which the old Flemings and the proscribed of Nantes brought with them in their enforced migration to this country, and which, like the industries they introduced, flourished into brighter bloom and strength than in the Fatherland. Some of the rustic names of these old flowers have a quaint prettiness and meaning in them, like the pet names of little children, which are at once piquant and endearing; and as some are local, others little known, and others, again, nearly obsolete, and likely to be wholly so in another generation or two, one is interested in endeavouring to preserve them.
The ‘Falfalaries’ (checkered snake’s head) of old Shropshire people are properly spoken of by their children’s children as ‘Fritillaries;’[1] and bright-looking blushful ‘Pretty Betty,’ indigenous to the Kentish chalk, and familiar to many persons by this name, is now, thanks to botany and Board Schools, correctly known as ‘Red Valerian.’ We, however, who have known it from childhood by its homelier name, will know it by no other; for us, it will always be ‘Pretty Betty,’ and suggestive of the high bloom on the hypothetical maiden’s cheek in honour of whom it was so named. In Chaucer’s time, it was crudely called ‘Setwale,’ or ‘Set-a-wall,’ from its well-known habit of cresting old castles and other crumbling walls, and of growing above gray posterns and old garden-gates, whence, from the tender ‘Good-nights’ not unusual at such places, it probably got its Shropshire name of ‘Kiss-at-the-wicket,’ and its Surrey synonym, ‘Kiss-behind-the-garden-gate.’ The variegated ‘Ribbon-grass’ of our gardens, anciently called—but that was when the rood of Boxley flourished, and village maidens, knowing no other literature, read their saints’ calendar in flowers—‘Our Lady’s Laces,’ had become, when Parkinson wrote, ‘Painted’ or ‘Ladies’ Laces,’ which makes all the difference. In many places it has the common name of ‘Gardener’s Garters;’ but in a corner of Kent not far from the Weald, where many old-world ways and words are cherished, it has the pretty, pert, but apposite one of ‘Match-me-if-you-can’—a name that prompted the examination of a dozen blades of it, only to discover that, by some exquisite diversity of arrangement of the creamy white and pale-green stripes, not one of the delicately striated leaves exactly resembled another.
‘I won’t have it called “London-pride,”’ said the eighty-year-old proprietress of a garden, once fuller of bloom and colour and sweetness than any other we have known; but that was before sight failed its owner. ‘What have we country-folk and simple flowers to do with “London-pride?” For my part, I like it best by its old Kentish name of “None-so-pretty.”’ If any doubt the fitness of the sobriquet, let them take the trouble to microscopically examine the minute painted and jewelled corolla of this flower, and assure themselves how truly it deserves the appellation.
No country garden is without ‘Honesty,’ or ‘White Satin-flower’ as it is sometimes called, from the silvery lustre of its large circularly shaped saliques, which, when dried, were used to dress up fireplaces in summer, and decorate the chimney-mantels of cottages and village inns. Our aged friend had another name for this plant also, and called it ‘Money-in-both-pockets.’ The curious seed-vessels, which grow in pairs, and are semi-transparent, show the flat disc-shaped seeds like little coins within them, an appearance which no doubt originated the name.
Reminiscent of the times to which we just now alluded, when holy names hung about the hedgerows, and the blossoming of plants recalled sacred seasons and events, the lilac in Devonshire bears the name of ‘Whitsuntide Flower;’ the country-people know it by no other. There Cardamine pratensis, Shakspeare’s ‘Lady-smocks,’ the ‘Cuckoo-flower’ of old Gerarde, whose blossoms border the streams and rivulets in spring ‘all silver-white,’ like lengths of bleaching linen, is known as ‘Milkmaids;’ and in the same county the ‘Foxglove’ becomes ‘Folk’s-glove’ or ‘Fairy-glove;’ while in Ireland, children call the drooping tubular freckled bells ‘Fairy thimbles,’ and are careful not to meddle with them after sunset, on pain of being pinched by the ‘good-people.’
The milk-white ‘Candytuft’ (Iberis amara) grows plentifully on stony upland fields in Berkshire and Oxfordshire. Once, in the latter county, when we were gathering some of it from a field in which some women were weeding, one of them remarked to another that she should not have liked to have done so when she was a young woman; upon which we inquired its name, and was told, almost reluctantly, ‘Poverty’—a most expressive name; for it loves best a poor and arid soil, and has its botanical name from its intense bitterness. Evidently, village lads and lasses had from early times an unwritten language of flowers, and this was one of its phrases.
As our readers know, ‘Pansy’ is a very old name for the ‘Heart’s-ease,’ as old at least as Queen Elizabeth’s time, and probably older. Spenser writes of the ‘pretty pauncy;’ and Ophelia gives it ‘for thought.’ It is a plant of many names. Shakspeare twice calls it ‘Love-in-idleness.’ Poor, simple, pious folk, seeing its three lower petals rayed like a ‘glory,’ called it ‘Herb of the Trinity.’ The vagrant habit of the plant procured it the name of ‘Kit-run-the-streets,’ which appellation it has not wholly lost in country-places. Rustics also call it ‘Two-faces-under-a-hood.’ But it was as ‘Heart’s-ease’ we first knew it, a name that gives sweet force to that other old-world one, ‘Call-me-to-you,’ which without it had been meaningless.
Of local names for flowers, one of the prettiest we know is that by which a Dorsetshire girl designated the ‘Michaelmas Daisy’—a name full of unconscious poetry; she called it ‘Summer’s Farewell.’ ‘We shall not have many more nosegays this year, ma’am; I see “Summer’s Farewell” is blowing;’ and upon desiring to see the unknown flower, she pointed out the familiar ‘Michaelmas Daisy.’
In Wiltshire, the children give the names of ‘Rushlights’ and ‘Fairy-candles’ to the ‘Trip-madam’ of our ancestors, the small fleshy-leaved erect stems and terminal flowers with spreading anthers of the yellow sedum (or stonecrop), frequent on old walls and housetops; and to the subtle child-fancy, we have no doubt the resemblance is sufficiently strong to set them all alight on summer nights.
The ‘Danewort’ or Dwarf-elder is in some districts said to be so called because the people fancy it sprung from the blood of the Danes slain in battle; and that if, upon a certain day of the year, you cut it, it bleeds. It is noteworthy that the large terminal cymes of this plant, which loves waste places, are of a purplish colour, the berries black, and that the juice of the flowering stems, like the fruit, produces a blood-like stain.
The curious corruption of ‘Fritillary’ to ‘Falfalarie,’ with which we started, is easily understood; but who would recognise the poetically named ‘Narcissus’ under the homely guise of ‘White Nancies,’ the common name for it in Shropshire gardens? We had rather it kept its pretty rustic name of ‘daffodil,’ a name inwoven in many a garland of old English verse, and sweetly suggestive of woods, and nut-boughs sparkling with buds, and village children, and the fresh young joy of spring. The name daffodil is now generally applied to the species with bright yellow flowers.
Another old-world plant included in these days under the generic name of Campanula, and which in many parts was known as ‘Country-bells,’ keeps in its Kentish name of ‘Canterbury-bells’ a local legend; and is so called not only from the prevalence of the plant in the neighbourhood of the old sainted city, but because it was the type of ‘Becket’s bells,’ which pilgrims to his shrine carried away with them, in token of their having been there. Another of its tribe, better known than liked, has the quaint name of ‘Little-steeple-bell-flower,’ a picturesque name one would not willingly blot out from floral nomenclature; though its common one of ‘Rampions’ is quite good enough for it, and highly characteristic of the exuberant mode in which its fleshy and at the same time fibrous roots take possession of the soil and overrun it. It is a dangerous plant to admit into gardens, where its tall tapering stem, beset with little watchet blue-bells, is occasionally seen.
In the north of England, the wild hyacinth of the south—sometimes erroneously called ‘Harebell’—with its pendulous flowers underhanging each other on one side only of its drooping stem, has the curious name of ‘Ring-of-bells’ from a fancied resemblance (a writer in Notes and Queries tells us) to the bells on which King David is sometimes represented playing in old wood-engravings. In Shropshire, the fertile stems of the Horsetail (Equisetum arvenses), which shoot up like brown pencils out of the soil before the sterile ones appear, are called ‘Toadpipes’ by the children; and a similar name is applied to them in many parts of Scotland. In Shropshire, also, the chalk-white flowers of the rock alyssum have the pretty trivial name of ‘Summer Snow;’ and the scarlet pimpernel, that trusted hydroscope of hind and shepherd—of which Lord Bacon wrote: ‘There is a small flower in the stubble-fields which country-people call “Wincopipe,” which if it openeth in the morning, you may be sure of a fine day’—is ‘Wincopeep;’ which, methinks, to use his lordship’s idiom, is the more correct of the two, seeing the habit of the plant is to close its petals when a rain-cloud dulls the sky, and to open them wide in sunshine—alternations suggestive of the name ‘Wink-and-peep,’ which time has probably contracted. In some places it is known as ‘the poor man’s weather-glass.’
In the same district, that fine sour relish of our childhood, ‘Sorrel,’ is simply ‘Sour-dock;’ and the early Purple Orchis (O. mascula), with its dark-green leaves plashed with brown, and spikes of richly coloured flowers springing up in cowslip-covered meadows, is hailed as ‘King’s Fingers.’
The cowslip has in Shropshire the common name of ‘Paigle,’ a name the derivation of which no one appears to understand; but its old Kentish name of ‘Culver-keys’ is unknown. We have lately seen the meaning of this also queried. It had its origin most probably in the common country fashion of christening flowers, in Gerarde’s time, from some fancied resemblance in its drooping umbel of unopened flowers to a ‘bunch of keys’ hanging from a ring or girdle; just as the pendent clusters of ash-seeds are called—we presume from the same idea—‘Ashen-keys;’ and as a bunch of keys must belong to some one or some thing, why not to the ‘culver,’ or wood-pigeon? In this fanciful way we can imagine the pretty rustic name of ‘Culver-key’ coming about; an hypothesis wholly our own, and therefore open to correction.
It was after this fashion, Parkinson tells us, he named the ‘Wild Clematis’ (C. vitalba), ‘Traveller’s Joy,’ because it loves to spread green bowers in hedgerows near villages and the habitations of men. But whence came the name of ‘Roving Sailor?’—one of the trivial ones for the ivy-leaved Toad-flax (Linaria cymbalaria), the fine thread-like runners of which hang from old garden-walls—those of Hampton Court, for instance—bearing in their season little solitary blue or purple petaled flowers. No rustic would have so named it; to him, its other appellations of ‘Hen-and-chickens,’ or ‘Mother-of-thousands,’ would have been more natural. But ‘Roving Sailor’ savours of that other element with which the husbandman meddles not, and may have been bestowed by some maritime superannuant, whose imagination transformed the long streaming roots into cordage, and the tiny blue-jacketed flowers into sailors climbing it, while the straggling habit of the plant completed the similitude.
Traditions die hard in country villages, and faith in the specially remedial properties of plants once dedicated to holy names and anniversaries is by no means extinct amongst peasant-folk. Thus, we were gravely informed last summer by a cottager of our acquaintance, in the sweet hamlet of Harbledown, in Kent, that there was nothing for a green wound better than the leaves of our ‘Saviour’s Flannel’ (or ‘Blanket’), a startling name for the exquisitely soft, glaucous, green leaves of what some persons secularly call ‘Mouse-ear,’ and which—to liken nature to art—resemble in texture the finest silken plush, and retain their softness and pliability for months after they are gathered. It is often seen in borders, where its silvery leaves and pale mauve-coloured flowers render it effective.
Again, the great ‘White Lily’ (Lilium candidum), the ‘Sceptre Lily’ of our time, ‘Our Lady’s Lily’ in the past, of which the old masters made such effective use in their pictures of the Virgin, is in Shropshire still known as ‘Ascension Lily,’ an evident misnomer. It should be, remembering the time of its blooming, the ‘Lily of the Annunciation.’ In the neighbourhood of the Wrekin it has another name—it is the ‘Healing Lily;’ and the curative virtue of the whole plant is firmly believed in.
It was a pretty custom to name the plants after the saints and holy seasons about whose anniversaries they fell a-flowering. It saved some absurdities and vulgarities in christening them, and left us names so sweet and appropriate, that, like the gillyflowers and sops-in-wine, sweetbrier, &c., of the old poets, they will never become old or inapt. Who would exchange ‘Christmas Rose’ for ‘Black Hellebore,’ or ‘Lent Lily’ for ‘Pseudo Narcissus,’ or prefer ‘Anemone’ to ‘Easter-flower,’ or ‘Polygally’ to ‘Crosswort?’ (carried on wands in the ancient perambulations of Rogation-week). ‘Whitsuntide Flower’ is a prettier name than ‘Lilac,’ and ‘Michaelmas Daisy’ than ‘Aster Tradescanti,’ the one by which it was known when Charles I. was king.
But these are not the purely rustic names of plants with which we started. One more example—a local one—and our personally formed catalogue of them is ended. Any one who has observed the regular height to which the garden fumitory grows when planted against a wall, forming a background of its soft, finely cut, bright-green leaves, which overhang each other, and the seemingly equal distances at which its clusters of yellow or rose coloured flowers depend, will at once perceive the fitness of its quaint Shropshire name of ‘Ladies’ Needlework Flower.’ It has the richness, with some of the formality, of a flounce of old chenille embroidery, such as in other years exercised the industry and ingenuity of English ladies. This plant is said to be called fumitory (earth-smoke, fume terre) from the belief that it was produced without seed from vapours arising from the earth. This was an ancient and well-rooted belief as far back as 1485. In Kent it is called ‘waxdolls,’ from the doll-like appearance of its little flowers.