the phrase to take God’s name “in idle.” The flower referred to by Shakespeare is doubtless the pansy.
Some names recall the work of more modern people. Thus the wild chamomile was known in the Eastern counties as Mawther; and this, as all lovers of Dickens will remember, means not a mother but a girl; and the name is in fact a translation of the Greek Parthenion into the Suffolk dialect.
The elder used to be known as the bour-tree. I fear that the name is extinct in England, but a Scotch friend tells me that he was familiar with it in his youth. I love this name because it is associated in my mind with the words of Meg Merrilees [106] in Guy Mannering, the first English classic in which I took pleasure.
“Aye, on this very spot the man fell from his horse—I was behind the bour-tree bush at the very moment. Sair, sair he strove, and sair he cried for mercy; but he was in the hands of them that never kenn’d the word!”
The actual origin of the name is, however, not romantic; it is said to mean bore, and to refer to the fact that tubes were made from it by boring out the pith. It seems possible that such tubes were, in primitive times, used to blow the fire, and this would explain the name elder, which seems to mean kindler.
The dwarf elder, a distinct species, though not connected with an individual, commemorates a race,
being known as Dane’s blood. It grows on the Bartlow Hills, near Cambridge, where tradition says that Danes were killed in battle.
I add a few names as being picturesque, though without any literary associations.
There is an old name for the shepherd’s purse, viz., clapperde-pouch, which is said to allude to the leper who stood at the cross-ways announcing his presence with a bell and clapper, and begged for pennies to put in his pouch, which is typified by the seed capsule. Another name for the plant is mother’s heart, [107] and is no doubt referable to the shape of the seed pod. Children in England, also in Germany and Switzerland, used to play at the simple game of asking a companion to gather a pod, and then jeering at him for having plucked out his mother’s heart.
The name columbine comes from the flower’s obvious resemblance to a group of doves, and its Latin name aquilegia, meaning a collection of eagles, is a nobler form of the same idea.