100 Flowers and How They Got Their Names
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100 Flowers and How They Got Their Names
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781565126855 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill |
| Publication date: | 01/02/1997 |
| Sold by: | Hachette Digital, Inc. |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Sales rank: | 872,598 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
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CHAPTER 1
100 FLOWERS
And How They Got Their Names
ABELIA
BOTANICAL NAME: Abelia. FAMILY: Caprifoliaceae.
Someone should do a scholarly survey and find out if plants whose names come at the beginning of the alphabet are more often found in gardens than those that are listed farther along in the catalogs. Abelia, with its fine glossy leaves and delicate flowers, is found in most gardens. Abeliophyllum, or white forsythia, is truly a beginning plant, for it bears fragrant flowers in early spring before its own leaves, or any other, appear. Either is a good start to a garden, but although they are not related (white forsythia is a member of the olive family) both are named after Dr. Clarke Abel, who accompanied Lord Amherst on a disastrous expedition to China in 1817.
Politics, stupidity, and natural disasters were always hazards that challenged plant collectors, and Dr. Abel was hampered by them all. British access to Chinese botanical treasures was still limited to the Portuguese island of Macao and whatever plants the Chinese deigned to offer them. The British wanted to explore the interior and take back what they could find, but the Chinese understandably resented British arrogance and involvement in the opium trade. Lord Amherst was sent to negotiate an agreement with the emperor. He was, Abel said, "urged to enter the imperial presence and to prostrate" (at 6:00 A.M.), but he "declared his intention not to perform the ceremony" and the embassy was dismissed. The British asserted that they were merely refusing to "kowtow" to what Abel called "every piece of yellow rag that they might choose to consider as emblematical of his Chinese majesty," but as a result the interior of China remained closed to them until gunboat diplomacy dictated the 1842 Treaty of Nanking.
Dr. Abel collected what he could along the homeward route, but the ship, Alceste, was wrecked; a box of seeds and plants that had been saved was then thrown into the sea to make room for the linen of an embassy "Gentleman." What remained was captured and burned by Malaysian pirates. Abel had, however, left a few plants at Canton, and eventually the Abelia chinensis reached England.
Abeliophyllum, so called because its leaf (Greek, phyllon) is like the abelia's, has white or faintly pink flowers. The abelia has red or pink flowers from midsummer through autumn. Neither comes in any shade of yellow — perhaps luckily for the memory of a man who would not bow to that color.
AFRICAN VIOLET
COMMON NAMES: African violet, Usambara violet. BOTANICAL NAME: Saintpaulia. FAMILY: Gesneriaceae.
There are probably more African violets in American bathrooms than in Africa. From a plant's point of view, in spite of chrome and toothpaste, warm steamy bathrooms are quite a good imitation of a tropical rain forest, and African violets flourish in them. They come from the humid forests of the Usambara Mountains in northern Tanzania. African violets grow naturally in rock crevices where small amounts of soil have been deposited and water drains away rapidly. Though they thrive on 80 percent humidity, they must not be overwatered. They get much of their water from the atmosphere through the fine hairs which cover the surface of their leaves. These hairs take in moisture from the air, like miniature roots, and also trap raindrops, separating them so the leaves don't suffocate. The roots themselves remain relatively dry.
African violets were sent to Europe in 1892, by Baron Adalbert Emil Walter Redcliffe le Tanneux von Saint Paul-Illaire, district governor of Usambara, in what was the German colony of Tanganyika. When the young governor, some say in the company of his future wife, Margarethe, was exploring his territory, he found these new plants. He collected plants or, more probably, seeds to send back to his father, Baron Ulrich von Saint Paul, a keen horticulturalist who took them to Hermann Wendland, director of the Royal Botanic Garden at Herrenhausen (Hanover). Wendland described the new plant as "of enhancing beauty ... one of the daintiest hot house plants" and he named it Saintpaulia, after the two barons, father and son. He added ionantha because of the purple, violet-like flowers (see "Violet"). Another African violet introduced at the same time was later called Saintpaulia confusa because it was confused with another species!
When the British took over the colony (later known as Tanzania) after World War I, more African violets were discovered. The flowers were soon available in purples, pinks, nearreds, whites, and bicolors, with single or double flowers. There are no yellows or oranges, and the leaves vary. They can be propagated by rooting a single leaf, although some people are better at this than others. But there is no shortage of the plants in American nurseries, supermarkets, and even dime stores. Sadly though, there is a shortage of them in their native Tanzania. They can only grow in the shady rain forest, and these days forests are being felled everywhere for agricultural needs and for modern houses — with modern plumbing.
ANEMONE BOTANICAL
NAME: Anemone. FAMILY: Ranunculaceae.
Anemones used to be called "windflowers," possibly because they grew on windy sites (anemos is Greek for "wind"). The herbalist Nicholas Culpeper said that "the flowers never open but when the wind bloweth; Pliny is my author; if it be not so, blame him."
A more compelling derivation is from "Naamen," which is the Persian for "Adonis." Anemones were associated with Adonis, with whom Aphrodite (Venus) fell passionately in love when he was born. She tried to protect him from harm by hiding him in the underworld, but was forced by Zeus to share him with the underworld goddess, Persephone. Aphrodite was afraid he might be hurt while hunting, but of course he would not listen to her, so she could only follow him in her swan-drawn chariot. One day Adonis tracked down a huge boar and wounded it. It turned on him and gored him. Aphrodite arrived in time to hold him in her arms and weep over him as he died. Some versions of the legend say the anemone grew up from her tears and some that it sprang from his blood as it soaked into the ground, but it became the symbol of protective love that could not protect and of adventurous youth and beauty that challenged life, and lost.
Anemones were also sacred flowers, possibly the "lilies of the field" mentioned in the New Testament. Some legends say that the red petals of these wild anemones came from the blood dripping down on them from Christ's cross, and that they sprang up miraculously in Pisa's Campo Santo cemetery after a Crusader ship had brought some earth for the graves back from the Holy Land.
There were various theories about breeding them. A Dutch herbalist, Van Oosten, said that if the wind was in a southerly direction when the seeds were sown, the flowers would come out double. The "French" anemones, one story says, were stolen by a parliamentary official from the Parisian breeder who had refused to share them. The official arranged to be shown round the garden just when the anemones were going to seed. His fur-lined cloak "accidentally" slipped off his arm as he was passing the anemone bed, and his servant (previously instructed) picked it up, rolling into it some of the precious seeds.
The "Japanese" anemones were sent back to England in 1844 by Robert Fortune, who saw them growing on tombs in China and called them a "most appropriate ornament for the last resting places of the dead." These get their color from their bracts, not their petals, and they bloom in autumn, not spring. But autumn-blooming flowers are a symbol of hope and resurrection too, for gardeners believe spring is rebirth and they prepare for spring by planting bulbs in autumn. Like Aphrodite, they are consigning their hopes to the underworld, and like Aphrodite, they will hover over the fragile blossoms when they emerge. They will not always be able to protect them, but still they hope and still they believe.
ASTER
COMMON NAMES: Aster, Michaelmas daisy, Chinese aster. BOTANICAL NAMES: Aster, Callistephus (Chinese aster). FAMILY: Asteraceae.
The English called European asters both "asters" and "starworts." Aster, Latin for "star," referred to the flower's star-like shape. "Wort" originally meant "root," and then was applied to plants that had healing properties. Asters, said the herbalist John Parkinson, were good for "the biting of a mad dogge, the greene herbe being beaten with old hogs grease, and applyed."
In 1637 John Tradescant the Younger brought North American asters back from Virginia. These do not seem to have been noticed much until they were hybridized with European starworts. They were later renamed "Michaelmas daisies" in Britain, because when the British finally adopted Gregory XIII's revised calendar, the feast of Saint Michael coincided with their flowering.
There were two botanizing John Tradescants, father and son. The elder, in 1618, traveled abroad as far as Russia. His account of the tripreveals that he had no sense of smell, and he remarks that rain leaking into the cabin had soaked and spoiled "all my clothes and beds," but his enthusiasm for flowers does not seem to have been dampened. His son, John the Younger, not only brought back the North American aster, but also collected from Barbados the Mimosa pudica, or sensitive plant, which, a hundred years later, may have made possible the acquisition of the annual Chinese aster. Callistephus chinensis, or "beautiful Chinese crown," from the Greek kallis- (beautiful) and stephos (crown), is only called an aster because of its star-like flower. The Jesuit Pierre d'Incarville had been sent to China to convert the emperor, Chien Lung, to Christianity. China at the time had mostly barred Westerners, but the emperor accepted d'Incarville, who was a skilled clock-maker as well as a botanist. The priest was frustrated in his attempts to collect new plants and only got round the emperor by presenting him with two plants of the Mimosa pudica that he had raised from seed sent from Paris. The leaves of the Mimosa pudica collapse when touched and this, we are told, "greatly diverted" the emperor, who "laughed heartily." D'Incarville was now given access to the imperial gardens and was free to export plants until he died, soon afterward, in 1757.
Michaelmas was always a date of beginnings: the academic year at Oxford and Cambridge, the quarterly court session, the day for debts to be settled and annual rents (often including a goose) to be paid. In the garden both Michaelmas daisies and Chinese asters bloom in autumn, magnificent curtain calls of summer but reminders too of new beginnings after winter's sleep.
ASTI LBE
COMMON NAMES: Astilbe, spirea. BOTANICAL NAME: Astilbe. FAMILY: Saxifragaceae.
The name "astilbe" probably refers to a lack of showiness in the original Chinese flowers, as it comes from the Greek a (without) and stilbe (brilliance). It is sometimes called "spirea" because it looks like Aruncus spirea (or Aruncus dioicus), commonly called "goats-beard." Modern hybrids of red, pink, and white flowers bloom even in deep shade and are not dull at all — and neither was the life of Père Armand David, who discovered the astilbe in China.
In 1860 French and British gun-boats secured a treaty from the Chinese allowing exploration of the interior and admission to Christian missionaries. Père David, a Lazarist monk, was sent to China to set up a school for a hundred boys in Peking. He was such an ardent and successful botanist that he was released from his duties so that he could collect plants. He sent thousands back to Paris, although only about one-third of his specimens survived. He cheerfully recorded his hardships in his diary: the danger of wolves obliged him to share his tent with his donkey, "though its presence there is not without inconvenience" (one wonders who got to lie down first), and the local food defied "all but the most ravenous hunger" and "must be eaten with courage," but "one man can live wherever another can."
Père David was once so ill that he was given the last sacraments, but he lived to return to Paris, where he died at age seventy-four. Other French missionary botanists were not as lucky. Père Jean André Soulié, caught between Tibetan and Chinese hostilities, was captured while packing his plant specimens and was tortured for fifteen days before being shot. Père Jean Marie Delavay caught bubonic plague and lost the use of his right arm. The plants that missionaries sent home seldom reached France or died by the time they arrived. Some of Père Delavay's boxes of plants lay unopened in a Paris museum for over fifty years.
The missionaries identified many botanical treasures that were rediscovered and introduced in the next century. Some of these were named after them. The beautiful davidia tree and the Buddleia davidii (see "Butterfly Bush") are called after Père David, as are Père David's deer. There is an Iris delavayi, and Père Soulié has primulas, a rhododendron, and a lily bearing his name. The priests' motives were not to become famous, though, or to perpetuate their own names, as some botanists have wished. These souls were driven by far different forces and, like the astilbe, their lives bloomed in the shade.
AZALEA
BOTANICAL NAME: Rhododendron. FAMILY: Ericaceae.
The difference between "azaleas" and "rhododendrons" can be as good a subject for dinner-table arguments as the difference between "hominy" and "grits" — either can amuse (or bore) the company for a whole evening, with no resolution. The name "azalea" comes from azaleos, Greek for "dry," and covers various species and hybrids of the Rhododendron genus. In fact, most azaleas do not thrive in dry ground and need to be well watered because of their shallow root system.
The first of what we now call "azaleas" to reach Europe seems to have been the Rhododendron viscosum, which we now call the "swamp azalea." It was sent by Reverend John Banister (see "Bluebell") to Bishop Henry Compton in London and described in 1691. In 1737 Linnaeus first applied the name to a shrub from dry habitats in Lapland, which he called Azalea procumbens, but which is now called Loiseleuria procumbens after Jean Louis Auguste Loiseleur-Deslongchamps, a physician and botanist in Paris. This first azalea, which isn't an azalea, has very small leaves and flowers and is not grown in gardens.
Meanwhile the name that was no longer applied to this shrub was applied, somewhat randomly, to some rhododendrons. On the whole, deciduous rhododendrons are often called azaleas, but evergreen "azaleas" are not necessarily called rhododendrons.
Native American azaleas are beautiful, usually deciduous, shrubs. William Bartram in his Travels described the "fiery Azalea, flaming on the ascending hills or wavy surface of the gliding brooks ... that suddenly opening to view from dark shades, we are alarmed with the apprehension of the hill being set on fire. This is certainly the most gay and brilliant flowering shrub yet known." Peter Kalm, who was sent to North America to study useful plants (see "Mountain Laurel"), said of azaleas, "The people have not found that this plant may be applied to any practical use; they only gather the flowers and put them in pots because they are so beautiful."
Azaleas are some of our most used, and abused, flowering shrubs. Their natural habitat is on wooded slopes, where they will bloom through the trees with almost mystical brilliance. Indeed the Japanese believed the Kurume azalea sprang from the soil of sacred Mount Kirishina when Ninigi descended from heaven to found the Japanese Empire. We, who also have our gods, tend to plant them in parking lots of banks or supermarkets. We surround them with shredded dead bark and prune them into neat globes. There they glow like giant tonsils at the entrances of mirrored glass buildings that are lit within by fluorescent lights. We see them when we cash our checks or buy our food in plastic bags, and they are supposed to cheer us as we pass.
BABY BLUE EYES AND POACHED EGGS
COMMON NAMES: Baby blue eyes, poached eggs, fried eggs. BOTANICAL NAMES: Nemophila, imnanthes. FAMILIES: Hydrophyllaceae, Limnanthaceae.
David Douglas was a tough Scottish explorer who botanized on the west coast of America in the 1820s. The Douglas fir is called after him. Two delicate cottage garden flowers were collected by him too. Baby blue eyes, named Nemophila from the Greek nemos (glade) and phileo (I love), is a bold, celestial blue which shrinks from the open sky and scorching sun. The insouciant poached egg covers itself with hundreds of flowers which are always crawling with bees and, unless you are a bee, looks a lot like its namesake. Its botanical name comes from the Greek limne (marsh) and anthos (flower). Neither of these flowers can cope with Yankee summers — they come from the damp northwest coast of America and thrive in misty English summer gardens.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "100 Flowers And How They Got Their Names"
by .
Copyright © 1997 Diana Wells.
Excerpted by permission of ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introduction,
Abelia,
African Violet,
Anemone,
Aster,
Astilbe,
Azalea,
Baby Blue Eyes and Poached Eggs,
Balloon Flower,
Bear's Breeches,
Beauty Bush,
Begonia,
Bleeding Heart,
Bluebell,
Bougainvillea,
Butterfly Bush,
California Poppy,
Camellia,
Candytuft,
Carnation, Pink, Sweet William,
Christmas Rose,
Chrysanthemum,
Clematis,
Columbine,
Crape Myrtle,
Crocus,
Cyclamen,
Daffodil,
Dahlia,
Daisy,
Datura,
Daylily,
Deutzia,
Dogwood,
Evening Primrose,
Everlasting Flower,
Forget-Me-Not,
Forsythia,
Foxglove,
Fuchsia,
Gardenia,
Geranium,
Gladiolus,
Gloxinia,
Hollyhock,
Honeysuckle,
Hosta,
Hyacinth,
Hydrangea,
Impatiens,
Iris,
Japonica or Flowering Quince,
Jasmine,
Kerria,
Lady's Mantle,
Larkspur and Delphinium,
Lavender,
Lilac,
Lily,
Lobelia,
Loosestrife,
Love-in-a-Mist,
Lupine,
Magnolia,
Marigold,
Montbretia,
Morning Glory,
Mountain Laurel,
Myrtle,
Nasturtium,
Orchid,
Oregon Grape Holly,
Oswego Tea, Bee Balm, or Monarda,
Peony,
Petunia,
Phlox,
Plume Poppy,
Poinsettia,
Poppy,
Primrose,
Red-Hot Poker,
Rhododendron,
Rose,
Rudbeckia,
Scarlet Sage,
Silver Bell,
Snapdragon,
Spirea,
Stock,
Sunflower,
Sweet Pea,
Tobacco Plant,
Trumpet Vine,
Tulip,
Violet and Pansy,
Water Lily,
Weigela,
Wisteria,
Yarrow,
Yucca,
Zinnia,
Further Reading,
Index,