100 Flowers and How They Got Their Names (28 page)

BOTANICAL NAME
:
Rosa
.
FAMILY
:
Rosaceae
.

The rose represents love, magic, hope, and the mystery of life itself. Its name, ordinary enough, refers to its color (
rosa
is Latin for “red”). But that's like saying the heart is a muscle situated on the left side of the rib cage. The flower's mysterious associations date to the earliest civilizations—the Persian word for rose,
gul
, also meant “flower” and was close to
ghul
, the word for “spirit.”

From earliest times the rose symbolized love and passion. The Greeks associated it with the blood of Aphrodite's beloved Adonis; the Romans used roses in feasts and orgies with such abandon that on one occasion the guests were actually smothered by rose petals falling from the ceiling. From an image of pagan love the rose was transfigured to an emblem of Christian mystical and spiritual love—connected with the Virgin Mary, with Christ's blood, and with the crown of thorns.

Before the sixteenth century there were a few basic roses in the West. The Apothecary rose, or
Rosa gallica
, native to Europe, was
used by healers for almost any ailment, from barrenness (cured by swallowing a rose petal) to washing “molligrubs out of a moody brain.” A striped Gallica called ‘Rosa Mundi' commemorated Henry II's mistress, Rosamund, who was hidden by him in a labyrinth at Woodstock, near Oxford, but was tracked down by the jealous Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine and murdered. The Damask rose, which flowered twice a year, was thought to come from Damascus and was used to make rosewater. The Dog rose, or
Rosa canina
, was said to cure the bite of a mad dog.

From an image of pagan love the rose was transfigured to an emblem of Christian mystical and spiritual love.

Hybrids and descendants of roses included the white
Rosa
×
alba
, which represented the House of York in the Wars of the Roses; the famous French ‘Maiden's Blush' or
‘Cuisse de Nymphe Emue'
(which is a seductive fleshy color); the spiny Eglantine (from the Latin
aculeatus
, “prickly”); the sweet-smelling Musk rose; and the Centifolia, or hundred-leaved rose, developed in Holland, with huge, sterile, cabbage-like flowers. During the sixteenth century the first yellow rose arrived from Persia.

At the end of the eighteenth century China roses came to Europe.

These, unlike the old roses that at best only bloomed twice a season, bloomed continually. Among these were the Tea roses, which do not seem to have smelled of tea—some theorize that they were in the boxes along with imports of tea. They were tender plants that could not be grown out of doors until crossed with Hybrid Perpetuals, but afterward became the basis of nearly all our modern roses. The first
pink Hybrid Tea rose, bred in France, was called ‘La France' and was the rose most often given to our grandmothers by their “beaux.”

All this breeding and rose history has left us many names of people and places, as well as their dreams. The Chinese, who have grown roses from prehistory, tended to name roses for poetic concepts, such as
‘Yu-go-tain-tsing'
(‘Clear Shining after Rain'). Many French roses, especially those bred during the time of the Empress Josephine, who had the most famous rose garden of all, were named after distinguished men, their wives, or their mistresses. Their identities often live on only in the roses that are named for them. Madame Testout, for example, was a dress designer in Paris; Madame Isaac Pereire was the wife of a French banker; Madame Hardy was the wife of the superintendent of the Luxembourg Gardens; Madame Plantier was the wife of Josephine's head gardener. All are now resurrected as roses. Josephine herself is perhaps more often mentioned as a rose than as Napoleon's sad ex-wife, who carried a rose with her always so she could hide her bad teeth behind it when she laughed. She caused ships carrying roses to be allowed through the battle lines unscathed by both French and English for the garden at Malmaison, also remembered in a rose.

Today's roses can tell us of the dreams and glamor of a bygone era, the magical people whom
everyone
knew (like Grace Darling, the brave coastguard's daughter), but they make us wonder, will our great-grandchildren ask who Grace Kelly or Princess Di were? Will Chrysler Imperial be as obscure as a spinning Jenny? Will Peace be a general hope or dream, rather than a commemoration of a rose bred in France and smuggled out to America just before the Nazis invaded? At least these names will be mouthed with delight each season, as the roses bloom again.

COMMON NAMES
: Coneflower, black-eyed Susan.
FAMILY
:
Asteraceae
.

The best-known rudbeckia, a native of North America, is affectionately known as “black-eyed Susan,” who figures in many ballads and songs. In the “Ballad of Black-Eyed Susan” by John Gay, she goes aboard a ship to ask the “jovial sailors” where her sweet William has gone. The plant's descriptive name,
hirta
(Latin for “hairy”), refers to its hairy stem.

Linnaeus called the coneflower
Rudbeckia
after Olof Rudbeck the Younger, who taught at Uppsala University and whose father had founded its botanical garden. In 1730 he offered Linnaeus a job tutoring his three youngest children.

Both Rudbeck and his father were leading scientists and botanists. Together they compiled a volume, called
Campus Elysii
, of all
plants known at the time, illustrated with thousands of woodcuts. It was lost in a fire that destroyed much of the town of Uppsala in 1702. Rudbeck the Younger, still energetic although in his sixties, was working on a giant thesaurus of European and Asiatic languages when he met Linnaeus.

Teaching botany had to be × rated, and by 1808 the bishop of Carlisle wrote despairingly that “nothing could equal the gross prurience of Linnaeus's mind.”

Linnaeus had just written a paper introducing his revolutionary theory on the sexuality of plants. His system had the beauty of simplicity. By counting male organs (stamens) and female organs (pistils), anyone who could count could sort plants into one of twenty-three classes. It became the most widely used system of classification until the early nineteenth century. Of course its blatant sexuality caused its own problems. Linnaeus referred to the stamens as “husbands” and the pistils as “wives,” and the flower itself became the “marriage bed.” Teaching botany had to be × rated, and by 1808 the bishop of Carlisle wrote despairingly that “nothing could equal the gross prurience of Linnaeus's mind” (see “Love-in-a-Mist”).

Linnaeus had been so poor he used to block the holes in his shoes with paper and he was frequently short of food. But in Rudbeck's house, his days of poverty were over. He named the coneflower after his patron, saying, “So long as the earth shall survive and as each spring shall see it covered with flowers, the Rudbeckia will
preserve your glorious name.” He added that he had chosen a noble, tall plant that flowered freely and that “its rayed flowers will bear witness that you shone among savants like the sun among the stars.”

There is another floral black-eyed Susan, the greenhouse vine
Thunbergia alata
, which was introduced from South Africa in 1772 by Thunberg (see “Japonica”) and is often grown in America as a summer annual. It was named by Verduyn den Boer, who said, “As long as in our Paradise of flowers there wanders a single botanist, so long will the name of Thunberg be held in honoured remembrance.”

Mostly neither botanist is remembered, and those black eyes of Susan have taken over. Even if we use their botanical names, we often do not remember whom they represent. But Rudbeck, who enjoyed three wives and fathered twenty-four children, seems, like Linnaeus, to have been no prude—and he is well commemorated by saucy Susan's flower.

COMMON NAMES
: Scarlet sage, salvia.
BOTANICAL
NAME
:
Salvia
.
FAMILY
:
Lamiaceae
.

Scarlet sage is, like culinary sage, a member of the mint family. The name “sage” is the English corruption of
salvia
, derived from the Latin
salvus
(healed or saved). No garden of the past would have been complete without the medicinal or culinary sage,
Salvia officinalis
, but the scarlet sage is often rejected by gardeners nowadays as being too gaudy. Hummingbirds do not share this perception. When the scarlet sage was introduced to Britain in the 1820s, it immediately became a popular bedding “annual,” although it is actually perennial in its native Brazil and Mexico. Most of the garden salvias grown today descend from it. Along with lobelia and ageratum, it could be part of a patriotic carpet bed—the kind of thing the Victorians loved. It is often still used in this way, thereby enhancing its reputation for vulgarity. But amongst other flowers in an informal bed, with hummingbirds darting in and out, its real beauty can be appreciated.

Baron Alexander von Humboldt, the German aristocrat who sent back the
Salvia splendens
from South America, wanted to go with Napoleon to Egypt in 1798 (see “Montbretia”) but grew impatient waiting. So he went to Spain to organize and pay for his own voyage to South America. Humboldt had a theory that the immense vegetable richness of South America was to be explained by an unusually high level of magnetism in the area. “In the interior of this new continent,” he said, “one almost grows accustomed to seeing man as not essential to the order of nature.” This was a new concept and a new world that his writings opened up to contemporaries such as Charles Darwin. Plants, seeds, theories, and accounts of hair-raising adventures came back home. He experimented with curare, almost killing himself when a jar of it leaked over his stockings and was only discovered just before he put them on over feet raw with chigger bites. Another time, seven horses in their team were killed by electric eels when they were crossing the Orinoco River.