100 Flowers and How They Got Their Names (10 page)

The Romans believed the daffodil's sap could heal wounds.

The daffodil has filled the time of as many poets as botanists, and almost everywhere people have traveled they have taken daffodils. Oscar Wilde said, “They are like Greek things of the best period,” which is a way of saying that nothing really surpasses them and if possible they should be taken wherever we go—even to the Underworld.

BOTANICAL NAME
:
Dahlia
.
FAMILY
:
Asteraceae
.

Dahlias are called after Dr. Anders Dahl, a Swedish botanist. Until recently they were also called “georginas,” after the botanist Johann Georgi of Petersburg. The name is still used in Eastern Europe.

The history of their introduction is confused as well. They originated in Mexico and were grown by the Aztecs, who called them
“cocoxochitl.”
Spanish invaders sent them home to the Old World, but dahlias did not, like some floral imports, take European gardeners by storm.

One story recounts that dahlia tubers were stolen from the royal gardens in Madrid and taken to the Jardin du Roi in Paris. Another nice story says that they were imported directly to France by a Thierry de Menonville, who had been sent to Mexico by the French government to smuggle out cochineal insects (a precious source of red dye, protected by the Spanish). Menonville reputedly sent the tubers home to Paris as food for the insects on the journey. The cochineal insects
died, but the tubers were then sent on to the Jardin du Roi, whose curator, André Thouin, saw the dahlia as a possible edible substitute for the potato. Although it is not the proper food for the cochineal insect, the dahlia is said to be edible and the Aztecs had indeed used it for food. One Victorian described dahlias as having a “repulsive, nauseous peppery taste [which] inspires equal disgust to man and beast.”

After Thouin's brief interest in the dahlia as a food source, the plant seems to have disappeared until several decades later. There had been no place for them either in the French formal gardens or the great English landscaped estates of the eighteenth century. But in the early nineteenth century seeds were sent to Berlin, where they were named for the botanist Johann Georgi; they were also sent by Lady Bute, wife of the British ambassador in Spain, to England, where they were named after Dahl, a physician and a pupil of Linnaeus. When they returned to the New World, they were known as “Mexican georginas.”

The Empress Josephine uprooted her precious dahlia cultivars after some were stolen from Malmaison by a lady-in-waiting; we are not told what happened to the lady-in-waiting. Soon dahlias became immensely popular. In 1826 a prize of one thousand pounds was offered for a blue dahlia, and one dahlia tuber was reputedly exchanged for a diamond. Victorians enjoyed a showy lack of discretion in their material surroundings, and the contemporary style of gardening now fitted dahlias admirably. They now could connect the fashionable new shrubberies with the formal beds of flowers raised in hothouses and “bedded out.” Perhaps this flamboyance was a way of compensating for discretion in so many other spheres of Victorian life.

COMMON NAMES
: Daisy, marguerite, ox-eye daisy.
BOTANICAL NAMES
:
Bellis perennis, Chrysanthemum
.
FAMILY
:
Asteraceae
.

Chaucer, writing about the English daisy, said that there was no “English rhyme or prose / Suffisant this floure to praise aright.” Its botanical name comes from the Latin
bellus
, “beautiful.” The English name comes from the Old English
daeges-eaye
or “day's eye,” referring to the way the flowers open and close with the sun.

Flowers that open or close at certain times of the day were perhaps more noticed by our ancestors than by us, with our surfeit of timepieces. Andrew Marvell observed that the garden “computes its time as well as we,” and Linnaeus actually made a floral clock whose flowers could accurately show the time throughout the day, according to when they opened. English daisies would not have been good in this respect, as they do not open on cloudy days.

Ox-eye “daisies,” or marguerites (which are really chrysanthemums), may have got their name from their pearly color, from the Greek
margaretes
(pearl), or, some say, from the name Margaret.
Margaret of Anjou is the most likely candidate for this honor, and she had daisies embroidered on her personal banner. She was the wife of Henry VI who, in 1422, succeeded to the thrones of both England and France. Henry was supposed to have been saintly and ineffectual, but Margaret was ruthless and extremely ambitious to obtain the throne for her son. In the end both Henry and their son died and Margaret was exiled to France.

We associate daisies with simplicity, but the composite blooms are tube-shaped floral groups surrounded by petals, not one simple flower. An insect attracted to a composite pollinates dozens of flowers at once. The ox-eye daisies, which came with the colonists to America, were loved by poets and hated by farmers because their roots give off toxic substances that damage crops even as they fill great expanses with their beauty. Luther Burbank crossed them with a Japanese “daisy” to obtain, in 1890, the famous Shasta daisy. Apart from the Burbank potato it was his most successful hybrid and substantiated his belief that “man can modify, change, improve, add, or take away from any plant he chooses.” He called the new daisy after the magnificent Mount Shasta near his home. It has remained a garden favorite ever since.

The daisy continued its tradition of modesty, and in Victorian times it was a popular name for sweet young girls. But although beautiful, like Margaret of Anjou, marguerites, which are the “daisies” grown in American gardens (the climate is not right for English daisies), have another side, just as she did. In a vase they will make the other flowers wilt. But a field of them looks like a sky studded with millions of stars—stars whose beauty for once is not inaccessible and that we can reach for and hold in our hands.

COMMON NAMES
: Angel's trumpet, thorn apple.
FAMILY
:
Solanaceae
.

Daturas, most often seen in elegant New York vestibules, are expensive, showy plants with a sinister history. The botanical name comes from the plant's Arabic name
“tator,”
or its Indian name,
“dhat.”
Indian thugs used it to poison their victims, and it was officially used to execute criminals. Linnaeus did not want to use the “barbaric” (Indian) name for the plant, so he modified it to the Latin root of
dare
(to give), because datura was given to those whose sexual powers were weakened.

Datura was one of the powerful ingredients of witches' ointments, rubbed onto their thighs and genitals to induce trances in which they soared above the world. Native Americans employed it more gently as an anesthetic and narcotic medicine. In South America, slaves and wives were given it before being buried alive with their lord and master. The herbalist John Parkinson called daturas “Thorne-Apples”
and warned that “the East Indian lascivious women performe strange acts with the seed . . . giving it [to] their husbands to drinke” (he does not elaborate on the acts). Thomas Jefferson said he avoided datura and other poisonous plants because “I have so many grandchildren and . . . I think the risk overbalances the curiosity of trying it.” He goes on to say that during the Reign of Terror after the French Revolution “every man of firmness carried it constantly in his pocket to anticipate the guillotine. It brings on the sleep of death as quietly as fatigue does the ordinary sleep.”

The datura of elegant atriums is closely related to jimsonweed or “Jamestown weed,” so called because soldiers sent to Jamestown to quell Bacon's Rebellion in 1676 ate datura leaves, thinking they were salad greens. They were intoxicated for eleven days, reportedly sitting stark naked like monkeys, blowing feathers in the air, tossing excrement, kissing and gibbering. Nathaniel Bacon, who believed in unlimited territorial expansion, had led an unauthorized expedition against the Native Americans and taken over much of Virginia. He and the rebellion died that year, so the soldiers' intoxication did not turn out to be historically important, but the name of Jamestown stuck with the plant.

Indian thugs used it to poison their victims, and it was officially used to execute criminals.

Datura contains scopolamine, used these days as a remedy for motion sickness—useful in perilous seas or even when really flying. Otherwise it welcomes those who enter tall buildings, on business of their own.

COMMON NAMES
: Daylily, tawny lily, lemon lily.
BOTANICAL NAME
:
Hemerocallis
.
FAMILY
:
Liliaceae
.