100 Flowers and How They Got Their Names (13 page)

The secret recipe for “Forsyth's Plaister” turned out to consist of cow dung, lime, wood ashes, and sand mixed to a malleable paste with soapsuds and urine.

Of course Forsyth may have believed that his plaster was truly effective—or it may even have worked. His instructions included cutting away the diseased parts of the tree before applying the cure and, as we are discovering increasingly, plants as well as people have selfhealing powers we do not fully understand. The trees, with the canker removed, may simply have recovered as they would have without the plaster.

The forsythia asserts itself every spring with brilliant blasts of yellow, even sometimes where the house it adorns has fallen into ruins. Occasionally this bold showiness is devastated by an extra early frost, but mostly forsythia gets away with it, and cheers us all up with its very audacity.

COMMON NAMES
: Foxglove, fairy-bells, ladies'-thimble.
BOTANICAL NAME
:
Digitalis
.
FAMILY
:
Scrophulariaceae
.

Foxgloves, native to Britain and Europe, have always been considered fairy flowers. There are dozens of fairy names for them, as well as some more sinister ones like the Gaelic
ciochan nan cailleachan marblia
, or “dead old women's paps.” In 1542, Leonhard Fuchs named the foxglove
Digitalis
from the Latin
digitus
(finger).

The name “foxglove” comes from the Old English
foxes glofa
, and the flowers do look like the fingers of a glove. Foxgloves tend to grow on woody slopes where foxes' burrows are often found. Foxes are wily creatures who may have needed magical gloves when they slunk out of the shadows and spirited away chickens. English foxes were brought to America in the eighteenth century by hunting club purists in Philadelphia, but soon those foxes interbred with native foxes. Foxglove plants were imported to America in the eighteenth century too, after their medicinal properties had been discovered, and they naturalized
somewhat, but they do not fill the woods as they do in Britain. Foxes were protected for hunting in Britain and, like the flower, are commoner over there than here.

Foxglove was known to local healers like George Eliot's character Silas Marner, who gave an old woman foxglove tea “since the doctor did her no good,” with miraculous results. This scene may have been inspired by William Withering, a Birmingham physician and member of the Lunar Society (a scientific club that met on the nearest Monday to each full moon), who in 1785 wrote
An Account of the Foxglove
in which he described how he had cured a patient of dropsy with foxglove tea using a recipe he had obtained from a healing woman. Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles) belonged to the same club and later tried to claim credit for the discovery of digitalis, a potent cardiac stimulant made from the plant's seeds and dried leaves. It is still used today. Of the old women who first used the formula we know nothing. In 1787, Caspar Wistar (see “Wisteria”) wrote that “dropsies are so often fatal we must try everything” but cautioned that one of Withering's patients in Edinburgh had died after being given foxglove tea.

Foxgloves are beautiful as well as useful. William Curtis, whose illustration of a foxglove was the frontispiece to Withering's book, compared the flowers to spotted wings of butterflies, which “smile at every attempt of the Painter to do them justice.” The common ones are purple, but foxgloves now come in many colors. They are biennial but will self-seed profusely if they like where they are planted.

COMMON NAME
: Lady's ear drops.
BRAZILIAN
NAMES
:
Thilco, molle cantu
(beautiful bush).
FAMILY
:
Onagraceae
.

If Gertrude Jekyll, the expert on garden color, had designed the fuchsia, she might not have come up with so flashy or wonderful a flower, because fuchsias, like Chinese mandarins, do not know that scarlet and purple should not be juxtaposed. They are an exception to other rules too. They look more like bright plastic jewelry than flowers and are well named “lady's ear drops.” They have “about eight” stamens, unlike most flowers whose constant number of stamens Linnaeus depended upon for his system of classification.

Most fuchsias originate in South America. The botanical name refers to the opinionated Leonhard Fuchs, a doctor at the University of Tübingen, whose summary of medicinal plants,
De Historia Stirpium
, written to correct “illiterate” botanists, turned out to be widely successful. In 1703 Charles Plumier (see “Begonia”), published
Nova
plantarum americanarum
and in it first described the
Fuchsia coccinea
named in tribute to Fuchs (see also “Lobelia”).

It is not clear exactly how fuchsias came to Britain in the 1700s, but they were first sold by James Lee, a Quaker, owner of the Vineyard Nursery, which specialized in exotic plants. In 1831 the
Lincoln Herald
published an account of Lee's supposed acquisition of the fuchsia. He was told of a plant in Wapping with “flowers hung in rows like tassels, their colour the richest crimson, in the centre a fold of deep purple.” Lee “posted off” at once to ask the owner if he could buy it. “Ah sir,” said the lady, “I could not sell it for no money, for it was brought me by my husband, who has now left again and I must keep it for his sake.” The story goes on to say that Lee offered eight guineas for the “loan” of the plant—which he took back to his nursery where he pulled off “every vestige of blossom and blossom bud.” He then divided and redivided it into cuttings until by the next year he had three hundred of them. He gave the original owner two plants, and sold the rest for a guinea each!

Fuchsias are popular houseplants in America and the more exotic varieties are not hardy. Some hardy fuchsias were so successful in British gardens that in the 1890s Canon H. N. Ellacombe described “houses covered with them from the ground to the roof, with spaces cut out for the windows.”

As James Lee discovered, fuchsias are easy to raise from cuttings, and nurserymen have made plenty of money from them. Even so, they can never be commonplace, retaining always the exotic individuality which made Lee rush, posthaste, to that windowsill in Wapping.

BOTANICAL NAME
:
Gardenia
.
FAMILY
:
Rubiaceae
.

John Ellis, who was a merchant and botanist, insisted that Linnaeus call the gardenia after his friend, Dr. Alexander Garden. Ellis first suggested that Linnaeus call the Carolina allspice after Garden, but when the gardenia, or “Cape jasmine” as it was then called, arrived in London, he wanted that named for him instead. Linnaeus objected, saying that an American plant, discovered by Garden, would be more suitable, and that he was being criticized already for naming plants after his friends. Ellis simply told him that Dr. Garden already thought the plant had been named in his honor. And so it was.

Linnaeus was right about its unsuitability, because the gardenia, far from being American, came from South Africa. It is a member of the same family, Rubiaceae, as the madder, whose root yields a red dye, but its closest relative is the randia, a tropical shrub named for
Isaac Rand. The gardenia was discovered, in 1754, by Captain Hutcheson of the
Godolphin
, en route home to England from India. Hutcheson said he had gone for a walk on shore, become aware of a sweet, heavy scent, turned around, and seen a mass of huge, double white flowers. Even if you know what you are getting, a gardenia in full bloom is breathtaking. It is hard to imagine what it would be like if it seemed to have dropped from Heaven. Hutcheson dug it up and took it back to London. This time carrying the vision home worked; the plant survived and was propagated.

Garden, a Tory, eventually had to leave America during the Revolution, and his granddaughter (who was named “Gardenia”) was never allowed to meet him.

Dr. Garden was English but settled in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1751. He worked as a physician, collected plants, and kept in close touch with European botanists. He was opinionated as well as brilliant. He seems to have been a skilled and compassionate doctor, selflessly vaccinating patients during a smallpox epidemic, but he could be scornful, describing his fellow citizens as being as stupid as oxen and asses, and he objected to John Bartram's appointment as king's botanist because, he said, Bartram could hardly spell. Garden, a Tory, eventually had to leave America during the Revolution, and his granddaughter (who was named “Gardenia”) was never allowed to meet him.

Before he left America, Garden was sent two gardenia plants by Ellis; however, one died on the voyage from England, and the other died soon after. Gardenias are known to be tricky to grow. They are fussy about temperature and attract bugs. In 1767 Peter Collinson wrote to John Bartram about his gardenia, or Warner's Jessamin, “Who could think that fine plant had travelled so soon to your world . . . this Engaging Vegitable exercises the skill of all our Naturalists and yett I dont know any one has hit its Culture, for a year or Two it seems prosperous and then flags and Declines.” Dr. Garden said he took the death of his plants as a bad omen for the perpetuation of his name. If, like the plant, his name did die out he said he would “make myself happy in some other acquisition if it should only be, like the former, imaginary.” However, although they are tricky, people continue to grow gardenias—the reward of their beauty being worth the struggle.