“I will enchant the old Andronicus
With words more sweet, and yet more dangerous,
Than baits to fish, or honey-stalks to sheep.”
Columbine. This was anciently termed “a thankless flower,” and was also emblematical of forsaken lovers. It is somewhat doubtful to what Ophelia alludes in “Hamlet” (iv. 5), where she seems to address the king: “There’s fennel for you, and columbines.” Perhaps she regarded it as symbolical of ingratitude.
Crow-flowers. This name, which in Shakespeare’s time was applied to the “ragged robin,” is now used for the buttercup. It was one of the flowers that poor Ophelia wove into her garland (“Hamlet,” iv. 7):
“There with fantastic garlands did she come
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples.”
Cuckoo-buds. Commentators are uncertain to what flower Shakespeare refers in “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (v. 2):
“When daisies pied and violets blue,
And lady-smocks all silver-white,
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue
Do paint the meadows with delight.”
Mr. Miller, in his “Gardener’s Dictionary,” says that the flower here alluded to is the Ranunculus bulbosus; but Mr. Beisly, in his “Shakespeare’s Garden,” considers it to be the Ranunculus ficaria (lesser celandine), or pile-wort, as this flower appears earlier in spring, and is in bloom at the same time as the other flowers named in the song. Mr. Swinfen Jervis, however, in his “Dictionary of the Language of Shakespeare” (1868), decides in favor of cowslips:[485] and Dr. Prior suggests the buds of the crowfoot. At the present day the nickname cuckoo-bud is assigned to the meadow cress (Cardamine pratensis).
Cuckoo-flowers. By this flower, Mr. Beisly[486] says, the ragged robin is meant, a well-known meadow and marsh plant, with rose-colored flowers and deeply-cut, narrow segments. It blossoms at the time the cuckoo comes, hence one of its names. In “King Lear” (iv. 4) Cordelia narrates how
“he was met even now
As mad as the vex’d sea; singing aloud;
Crown’d with rank fumiter, and furrow weeds,
With burdocks, hemlock, nettles, cuckoo-flowers,
Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow
In our sustaining corn.”
Cypress. From the earliest times the cypress has had a mournful history, being associated with funerals and churchyards, and as such is styled by Spenser “cypress funereal.”