I can contribute to plant lore one fantastic notion in regard to Love-lies-bleeding—though I can find no one who can confirm this memory of my childhood. I recall distinctly expressions of surprise and regret that these two old people in Worcester should retain the Love-lies-bleeding in their garden, because "the house would surely be struck with lightning." Perhaps this fancy contributed to the exile of the flower from gardens.
Terraced Garden of the Misses Nichols, Salem, Massachusetts.
There be those who write, and I suppose they believe, that a love of Nature and perception of her beauties and a knowledge of flowers, are the dower of those who are country born and bred; by which is meant reared upon a farm. I have not found this true. Farm children have little love for Nature and are surprisingly ignorant about wild flowers, save a very few varieties. The child who is garden bred has a happier start in life, a greater love and knowledge of Nature. It is a principle of Froebel that one must limit a child's view in order to coördinate his perceptions. That is precisely what is done in a child's regard of Nature by his life in a garden; his view is limited and he learns to know garden flowers and birds and insects thoroughly, when the vast and bewildering variety of field and forest would have remained unappreciated by him.
It is a distressing condition of the education of farmers, that they know so little about the country. The man knows about his crops and his wife about the flowers, herbs, and vegetables of her garden; but no countrymen know the names of wild flowers—and few countrywomen, save of medicinal herbs. I asked one farmer the name of a brilliant autumnal flower whose intense purple was then unfamiliar to me—the Devil's-bit. He answered, "Them's Woilets." Violet is the only word in which the initial V is ever changed to W by native New Englanders. Every pink or crimson flower is a Pink. Spring blossoms are "Mayflowers." A frequent answer is, "Those ain't flowers, they're weeds." They are more knowing as to trees, though shaky about the evergreen trees, having little idea of varieties and inclined to call many Spruce. They know little about the reasons for names of localities, or of any historical traditions save those of the Revolution. One exclaims in despair, "No one in the country knows anything about the country."
This is no recent indifference and ignorance; Susan Cooper wrote in her Rural Hours in 1848:—
"When we first made acquaintance with the flowers of the neighborhood we asked grown persons—learned perhaps in many matters—the common names of plants they must have seen all their lives, and we found they were no wiser[Pg 290] than the children or ourselves. It is really surprising how little country people know on such subjects. Farmers and their wives can tell you nothing on these matters. The men are at fault even among the trees on their own farms, if they are at all out of the common way; and as for smaller native plants, they know less about them than Buck or Brindle, their own oxen."
