In Wiltshire, the children give the names of ‘Rushlights’ and ‘Fairy-candles’ to the ‘Trip-madam’ of our ancestors, the small fleshy-leaved erect stems and terminal flowers with spreading anthers of the yellow sedum (or stonecrop), frequent on old walls and housetops; and to the subtle child-fancy, we have no doubt the resemblance is sufficiently strong to set them all alight on summer nights.
The ‘Danewort’ or Dwarf-elder is in some districts said to be so called because the people fancy it sprung from the blood of the Danes slain in battle; and that if, upon a certain day of the year, you cut it, it bleeds. It is noteworthy that the large terminal cymes of this plant, which loves waste places, are of a purplish colour, the berries black, and that the juice of the flowering stems, like the fruit, produces a blood-like stain.
The curious corruption of ‘Fritillary’ to ‘Falfalarie,’ with which we started, is easily understood; but who would recognise the poetically named ‘Narcissus’ under the homely guise of ‘White Nancies,’ the common name for it in Shropshire gardens? We had rather it kept its pretty rustic name of ‘daffodil,’ a name inwoven in many a garland of old English verse, and sweetly suggestive of woods, and nut-boughs sparkling with buds, and village children, and the fresh young joy of spring. The name daffodil is now generally applied to the species with bright yellow flowers.
Another old-world plant included in these days under the generic name of Campanula, and which in many parts was known as ‘Country-bells,’ keeps in its Kentish name of ‘Canterbury-bells’ a local legend; and is so called not only from the prevalence of the plant in the neighbourhood of the old sainted city, but because it was the type of ‘Becket’s bells,’ which pilgrims to his shrine carried away with them, in token of their having been there. Another of its tribe, better known than liked, has the quaint name of ‘Little-steeple-bell-flower,’ a picturesque name one would not willingly blot out from floral nomenclature; though its common one of ‘Rampions’ is quite good enough for it, and highly characteristic of the exuberant mode in which its fleshy and at the same time fibrous roots take possession of the soil and overrun it. It is a dangerous plant to admit into gardens, where its tall tapering stem, beset with little watchet blue-bells, is occasionally seen.
In the north of England, the wild hyacinth of the south—sometimes erroneously called ‘Harebell’—with its pendulous flowers underhanging each other on one side only of its drooping stem, has the curious name of ‘Ring-of-bells’ from a fancied resemblance (a writer in Notes and Queries tells us) to the bells on which King David is sometimes represented playing in old wood-engravings. In Shropshire, the fertile stems of the Horsetail (Equisetum arvenses), which shoot up like brown pencils out of the soil before the sterile ones appear, are called ‘Toadpipes’ by the children; and a similar name is applied to them in many parts of Scotland. In Shropshire, also, the chalk-white flowers of the rock alyssum have the pretty trivial name of ‘Summer Snow;’ and the scarlet pimpernel, that trusted hydroscope of hind and shepherd—of which Lord Bacon wrote: ‘There is a small flower in the stubble-fields which country-people call “Wincopipe,” which if it openeth in the morning, you may be sure of a fine day’—is ‘Wincopeep;’ which, methinks, to use his lordship’s idiom, is the more correct of the two, seeing the habit of the plant is to close its petals when a rain-cloud dulls the sky, and to open them wide in sunshine—alternations suggestive of the name ‘Wink-and-peep,’ which time has probably contracted. In some places it is known as ‘the poor man’s weather-glass.’
In the same district, that fine sour relish of our childhood, ‘Sorrel,’ is simply ‘Sour-dock;’ and the early Purple Orchis (O. mascula), with its dark-green leaves plashed with brown, and spikes of richly coloured flowers springing up in cowslip-covered meadows, is hailed as ‘King’s Fingers.’
The cowslip has in Shropshire the common name of ‘Paigle,’ a name the derivation of which no one appears to understand; but its old Kentish name of ‘Culver-keys’ is unknown. We have lately seen the meaning of this also queried. It had its origin most probably in the common country fashion of christening flowers, in Gerarde’s time, from some fancied resemblance in its drooping umbel of unopened flowers to a ‘bunch of keys’ hanging from a ring or girdle; just as the pendent clusters of ash-seeds are called—we presume from the same idea—‘Ashen-keys;’ and as a bunch of keys must belong to some one or some thing, why not to the ‘culver,’ or wood-pigeon? In this fanciful way we can imagine the pretty rustic name of ‘Culver-key’ coming about; an hypothesis wholly our own, and therefore open to correction.
It was after this fashion, Parkinson tells us, he named the ‘Wild Clematis’ (C. vitalba), ‘Traveller’s Joy,’ because it loves to spread green bowers in hedgerows near villages and the habitations of men. But whence came the name of ‘Roving Sailor?’—one of the trivial ones for the ivy-leaved Toad-flax (Linaria cymbalaria), the fine thread-like runners of which hang from old garden-walls—those of Hampton Court, for instance—bearing in their season little solitary blue or purple petaled flowers. No rustic would have so named it; to him, its other appellations of ‘Hen-and-chickens,’ or ‘Mother-of-thousands,’ would have been more natural. But ‘Roving Sailor’ savours of that other element with which the husbandman meddles not, and may have been bestowed by some maritime superannuant, whose imagination transformed the long streaming roots into cordage, and the tiny blue-jacketed flowers into sailors climbing it, while the straggling habit of the plant completed the similitude.
Traditions die hard in country villages, and faith in the specially remedial properties of plants once dedicated to holy names and anniversaries is by no means extinct amongst peasant-folk. Thus, we were gravely informed last summer by a cottager of our acquaintance, in the sweet hamlet of Harbledown, in Kent, that there was nothing for a green wound better than the leaves of our ‘Saviour’s Flannel’ (or ‘Blanket’), a startling name for the exquisitely soft, glaucous, green leaves of what some persons secularly call ‘Mouse-ear,’ and which—to liken nature to art—resemble in texture the finest silken plush, and retain their softness and pliability for months after they are gathered. It is often seen in borders, where its silvery leaves and pale mauve-coloured flowers render it effective.
Again, the great ‘White Lily’ (Lilium candidum), the ‘Sceptre Lily’ of our time, ‘Our Lady’s Lily’ in the past, of which the old masters made such effective use in their pictures of the Virgin, is in Shropshire still known as ‘Ascension Lily,’ an evident misnomer. It should be, remembering the time of its blooming, the ‘Lily of the Annunciation.’ In the neighbourhood of the Wrekin it has another name—it is the ‘Healing Lily;’ and the curative virtue of the whole plant is firmly believed in.