On this particular July day the large field scabious was perhaps the most noticeable flower; its mauve-blue blossoms high above all the rest; its long stalks always determining to out-top everything else that grows in the delightful medley.
“Please, ma’am, I’ve brought you some flowers,” said a little pinafored girl to me one day, when I had just arrived. She is an especial favourite of mine, and lives in a cottage along my lane. This is her way of just being neighbourly. In her hand was a large bunch of scabious and grasses.
“These are very pretty,” I said. “What do you call them?”
“Please, ma’am, I call them ‘Queen Mary’s Pincushions,’” she said shyly.
The country names for the flowers are often so much more interesting than the ones you find attached to them in books. After all, “Queen Mary’s Pincushion” has something real and understandable about it for just ordinary people like myself; whereas Scabiosa arvensis (its proper name) doesn’t stir my heart the least little bit. It was easy to see the process by which the child had got the name—the flowers are wonderfully like plump round pincushions, with the stamens for the pins: but anything so delicately beautiful would not be suitable for aught save a royal lady’s dressing-table; hence Queen Mary was, of course, the one to whom they were dedicated.
And isn’t the name “Lady’s Laces” most suggestive? That is what we call the white filmy flowers of the hedge-parsley. I seldom see a fine white lace evening gown without thinking of the soft mist of white over green that surprises us in June, and smothers the orchard when the Lady’s Laces suddenly burst into billows of bloom.
Some of the local names are more material and prosaic than idealistic, however. There is another flower that grows all about the orchard, in close company with the scabious; it has bunches of bright yellow flowers of the daisy family, growing in compact heads at the top of a tall stem. I am very fond of this flower; it gleams sunshine all over the place; but I don’t care to call it Senecio Jacobœa, which is its proper name; it’s so mortifying when people look at you puzzled and inquiring, and then ask, with a patient sigh, if you would mind spelling it! I never could spell.
Neither do I care for its other slightly less official name, “Common Ragwort.” So one day when an old man was passing, who is fairly well-up in flowers, I asked him if he could tell me the name of this Sunshine plant. To which he replied—
“Wealluscallsemards’m.”