It is generally supposed that the wild blue hyacinth, or harebell (Scilla nutans), a flower associated with pure and faithful love, is the crow-flower; and authority is given to this theory in the old ballad, which, of course, Shakespeare knew, called "The Deceased Maiden Lover":
Then round the meddowes did she walk
Catching each flower by the stalk,
Such as within the meddowes grew,
As dead man's thumb and harebell blue,
And as she pluckt them still cried she,
"Alas! there's none ere loved like me."
Some critics have objected to the blue harebell because it is a spring flower, and it is midsummer when Ophelia drowns herself. These authorities suggest the Ragged Robin for Ophelia's crow-flower, and others again the buttercup, also called creeping crowfoot (Ranunculus repens). Bloom writes:
"It is generally assumed that the flowers are those of the meadow and that a moist one. Why? It is equally probable they are those of the shady hedge bank and that the crow-flowers are the poisonous rank Ranunculus reptans and its allies; that the nettles are the ordinary Urtica dioica not necessarily in flower, or if this be objected to on account of the stinging qualities which the distraught Ophelia might not be insensible to, its place could be taken by the white dead nettle Lamium album L. The daisies may be moon-daisies and the long purples Arum masculatum, another plant of baleful influence, with its mysterious dead white spadix bearing no very far fetched resemblance to a dead man's finger wrapped in its green winding-sheet and whose grosser name, cuckoo-pint, is ready at hand. With this selection we have plants of the same situation flowering at the same time and all more or less baneful in their influence."
PLEACHING AND PLASHING, FROM "THE GARDENER'S LABYRINTH"
SMALL ENCLOSED GARDEN, FROM "THE GARDENER'S LABYRINTH"
The crow has given its name to many flowers. There are, indeed, more plants named for the crow than for any other bird: crowfoot, crow-toes, crow-bells (for daffodil and bluebells) crow-berry, crow-garlick, crow-leeks, crow-needles, and many others.
LONG PURPLE (Arum masculatam or Orchis mascula) is very closely related to our woodland Jack-in-the-Pulpit. It has many names: Arum; Cookoo-pint, Cookoo-pintle, Wake-Robin, Friar's-cowl, Lords-and-Ladies, Cow-and-Calves, Ramp, Starchwort, Bloody-men's-finger, and Gethsemane, as the plant is said to have been growing at the Cross and to have received some drops of the Savior's blood. This flower is mentioned in Tennyson's "A Dirge":