“Nasturtium” is not the right name for our plant with its many shields.
There is another plant which “convulses” our noses, and which the botany tells us is the nasturtium, but which we call water cress. We eat it in the spring of the year.
The right name of our garden nasturtium is “tropæolum,” which comes from a Greek word meaning “trophy,” its many shields probably being likened to so many trophies taken from the enemy.
Another name for it is “Indian cress,” and, like the water cress, it sometimes is eaten, only in this case it is the flowers instead of the leaves that find themselves converted into a salad. The fruits, too, share a similar fate. Like the rest of the plant, they are filled with spicy juice. This is a misfortune to them, since it tempts people to take these juicy, spicy fruits and pickle them to eat.
Perhaps the plant learned to store up this stinging, spicy juice to protect itself from being eaten by animals. But what can it do to protect itself from the pickle jar?
Perhaps, however, the stinging juice was but a result of the plant’s peculiar method of growth. Of course juice must have some sort of taste, and why not a stinging taste as well as any other?
This plant prepares another liquid which is not sharp and stinging, but sweet and spicy; with this delicious nectar it fills its long spur and keeps it full.
The bees collect it and convert it into tropæolum honey to fill their waxen cells.
This the plant does not object to. It makes the nectar for the bees, and when, they take it away and store it up for winter use the tropæolum suffers no loss. But when some one comes along and picks the fruits and stores them up for winter use, that is another matter!
We are tempted to call the spur of the tropæolum its “horn of plenty,” for that is the name of the horn overflowing with good things that never is empty.