TAGUR (Tabernoemontana Coronaria).--A white flower having a slight smell.
TARU LATA.--A beautiful creeper with small red flowers. It is used in native gardens for making hedges.
K.G.
Pliny in his Natural History alludes to the marks of time exhibited in the regular opening and closing of flowers. Linnaeus enumerates forty- six flowers that might be used for the construction of a floral time- piece. This great Swedish botanist invented a Floral horologe, "whose wheels were the sun and earth and whose index-figures were flowers." Perhaps his invention, however, was not wholly original. Andrew Marvell in his "Thoughts in a Garden" mentions a sort of floral dial:--
How well the skilful gardener drew
Of flowers and herbs this dial new!
Where, from above, the milder sun
Does through a fragrant zodiac run:
And, as it works, th'industrious bee
Computes its time as well as we:
How could such sweet and wholesome hours
Be reckoned, but with herbs and flowers?
Marvell[106]
Milton's notation of time--"at shut of evening flowers," has a beautiful simplicity, and though Shakespeare does not seem to have marked his time on a floral clock, yet, like all true poets, he has made very free use of other appearances of nature to indicate the commencement and the close of day.
The sun no sooner shall the mountains touch--
Than we will ship him hence.
Hamlet.