100 Flowers and How They Got Their Names (14 page)

BOTANICAL NAME
:
Pelargonium
.
FAMILY
:
Geraniaceae
.

The name “geranium” was in use long before the flowers we usually call “geraniums” were known to the West. The garden geranium or cranesbill was named by Dioscorides from the Greek
geranos
(crane), referring to its long, beak-like seed pod, similar to a crane's beak. Dioscorides listed it as a medicinal plant, and its many forms, still called “geranium,” grow in the wild and in our gardens. What the rest of us sloppily call “geraniums,” pedantic horticulturalists and real gardeners refer to as “pelargoniums,” a genus of plants found originally in South Africa.

The South African plant was first called “geranium” by Jan Commelin, director of the Hortus Botanicus in Amsterdam and one of the three Commelins for whom the day-flower was named by Linnaeus (because two were prominent, like two of the flower's three petals, and one was inconspicuous and died “before achieving anything in Botany”). Soon geraniums started coming from the Cape in large
quantities, and naming began to be a problem. In 1772 Francis Masson sent hundreds of pelargoniums back to Kew, calling them “geraniums.” The director of Kew, Sir Joseph Banks, said, “We are principally indebted to Mr. Masson” for our geraniums, and indeed half of all known kinds were introduced by him. Other than this testimony, though, Masson got very little credit and suffered a great deal. He was chased through the African brush by a chain gang of escaped convicts, captured by the local militia to fight the French in Grenada, nearly killed in a hurricane off St. Lucia, and captured by French pirates on his way to North America. Eventually he made his way to Canada, where he is thought to have died on Christmas Day of 1805. He has no known grave. He did all this for a salary of one hundred pounds a year, and the only plant named after him is the massonia, a rare lily of which very few have ever heard.

By 1787, when Charles Louis l'Héritier de Brutelle (see “Gloxinia”) published
Geraniologia
, there were so many South African geraniums that he invented a new genus for them, which he called
Pelargonium
. This means “stork's beak,” from the Greek
pelargos
(stork). He divided the geranium family into three: the cranesbills, which retained the name
Geranium
; the erodiums, from the Greek
erodios
(heron), which are rock plants; and the pelargoniums, which are the South African geraniums.

Nursery catalogs, like A. A. Milne's dormouse, continue to call pelargoniums “geraniums”—except that the dormouse called them “geraniums (red)” and the catalogs call them “geraniums (pelargoniums).” Their proper name isn't exactly buried in an unknown grave, but it is seldom used, which is much the same thing.

COMMON NAMES
: Gladiolus, glad;
also (historical)
corn-flag, corn iris.
BOTANICAL NAME
:
Gladiolus
.
FAMILY
:
Iridaceae
.

The beautiful and the edible still tend to be divided by gardeners. We enjoy potatoes but would never, like Marie Antoinette, wear a corsage of their flowers. We grow millions of gladioli for their flowers but never think to eat their corms, which are said to taste like chestnuts when roasted and were certainly eaten in Africa, where many of them originated.

Before the African gladioli were common in the West, the Mediterranean and the rare British gladioli had been grown in gardens and used medicinally. John Gerard called them “Corne-flagge” or “Sword-Flag.” They were known in ancient Greece and some scholars think they were the original hyacinth because the wild Greek gladioli have markings on their petals similar to those on the hyacinth (see “Hyacinth”). The name “gladiolus” comes from the Latin
gladius
(sword), from the shape
of the leaves. An ancient name for the gladiolus (and the iris) was
“xiphium,”
from the Greek
xiphos
(sword). John Parkinson, with his usual vivid accuracy, described the “stiffe greene leaves, one as it were out of the side of another, being ioyned together at the bottome.” By the time he was writing, new gladioli had already been imported, and Parkinson said, “John Tradescante assured me, that hee saw many acres of ground in Barbary spread over with them.” It must have been a splendid sight. Barbary was the Mediterranean region of Africa, and gladioli are not what we hear about there nowadays.

By far the largest number of our modern gladioli come from South Africa. From the end of the eighteenth century they were imported in huge quantities, including many sent back by James Bowie, a disreputable adventurer who botanized with Francis Masson (see “Geranium”). Too many introductions and hybridizations of gladioli have been made to enumerate here, but one important one was made in 1820 by Robert Sweet, whose career as a hybridist ended when he was accused of stealing garden pots from Kew. Another was the ‘Maid of the Mist,' sent home in 1904 by Francis Fox, the engineer who built a cantilever railway bridge over the Zambesi River at Victoria Falls. This gladiolus was found flourishing in the waterfall's misty spray and had adapted to the constant moisture by developing a hooded upper petal which kept its pollen-bearing stamens dry. It introduced yellow and orange shades into the hybridized gladioli's color spectrum.

In most of Britain and North America gladioli have to be dug up and stored over the winter. Of course even if the climate is warm enough to leave the corms in the ground, mice share none of our compunctions about eating what is beautiful and can destroy a bed of gladioli as effectively as the severest freeze.

BOTANICAL NAME
:
Sinningia speciosa
.
FAMILY
:
Gesneriaceae
.

Gloxinias are not really gloxinias. True gloxinias are little-known plants from Brazil and Mexico of which there are about six species. We shall concentrate instead on how
our
gloxinias got their name.

It started in 1784 when Charles Louis l'Héritier de Brutelle, a French botanist, received a “true” gloxinia plant and named it as a compliment to Benjamin Peter Gloxin, who was a physician and botanical writer from Colmar. L'Héritier was the patron of Pierre Joseph Redouté, who illustrated much of his work, and was a respected botanist and wealthy man. He was entrusted with the herbaria of Joseph Dombey, which, in 1786, he took to London for “safe-keeping”—a move that provoked harsh criticism from some of his contemporaries. Dombey had been under the protection of the Spanish government on a botanical expedition to Peru. When he finally returned to France, the Spanish government demanded a large share of his collection, which the French would
not relinquish, so l'Héritier took it to England and Redouté joined him there. Both l'Héritier and Dombey became victims of the French Revolution. Dombey fled and died in jail in the West Indies; when l'Héritier returned from England, he was imprisoned, then released to live in poverty, then assassinated.

In 1817, our gloxinia, which appeared to be similar to the true gloxinia, was introduced and named
Gloxinia speciosa
. Nurseryman Conrad Loddiges first described it, calling the new gloxinia a “most splendid subject.” In 1825 things became more complicated. A new genus was established when a botanist at the University of Bonn, Christian Nees von Esenbeck, received a Brazilian plant and named it
Sinningia
after a gardener at the University, William Sinning. Then, in 1848 the genus
Ligeria
was established (called after a botanical author, Louis Liger), and it was decided that
Gloxinia speciosa
(our gloxinia) belonged in it, to distinguish it from the “true” gloxinia. Its name was changed to
Ligeria speciosa
. But in 1873 botanists decided that the genus
Ligeria
belonged in the genus
Sinningia
, and our gloxinia now became a
Sinningia
(
S. speciosa
), which it stayed. Except that everybody continued to call it a gloxinia!

Gloxinias are not really gloxinias.

If it were not a popular plant, botanists might have used its new botanical name and no one would have known much about all these changes. But since gloxinias are hothouse favorites botanists have had to compromise. Gloxinias are sometimes called
Gloxinia (Sinningia) speciosa
even in horticultural dictionaries.

BOTANICAL NAME
:
Alcea
.
FAMILY
:
Malvaceae
.

The common name comes from “holy” plus
hoc
, “mallow.” It may have been “holy” because it was brought back to Britain by the Crusaders, and it was possibly called “hock leaf” because it was used to reduce swelling in horses' hocks, but it has been grown and used for so long that it is hard to be sure of the origins of its name. Herbs found in the fifty-thousand-year-old grave of a Neanderthal man included the remains of hollyhocks.

The botanical name of the hollyhock is from the Greek
alkaia
, or “mallow.” Its relative, the marsh mallow, belongs to the genus
Althaea
, from the Greek
althaia
(a cure). Garden hollyhocks and marsh mallows are of the mallow, or malva (Latin for “mallow”) family. The wild marsh mallow was used medicinally; the root contains a mucilaginous juice said to be very soothing and that could be chewed by teething babies. Parkinson said hollyhocks “helpe to make the body soluble.”