100 Flowers and How They Got Their Names (29 page)

Humboldt and his fellow naturalist Aimé Bonpland returned in 1804 to a Paris where Napoleon Bonaparte had just become emperor and where the world's greatest scientists and philosophers were on hand to applaud their discoveries. Goethe said that “my natural history studies have been roused from their winter sleep” by Humboldt. Thomas Jefferson wrote, “You have wisely located yourself in the focus of the science of Europe. I am held by the cords of love to my family and country or I should certainly join you.”

The scarlet sage, as brilliant as the man who brought it back with him, may be gaudy, and is too often used in a way that reflects the superficialities of our civilization, but the little hummingbirds that dart to it, back and forth, come each summer from a faraway world that still, as Humboldt said, has much to teach us.

COMMON NAMES
: Silver bell, snowdrop tree.
BOTANICAL NAME
:
Halesia
.
FAMILY
:
Styracaceae
.

The silver bell is a small flowering tree native to South Carolina. It was discovered and described by Mark Catesby, who explored the South from 1712 to 1719 and wrote a
Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands
. It is a beautiful little tree with white flowers hanging like tasseling bells along the underside of the branches, but it was not named for Catesby, who is immortalized instead in the bullfrog,
Rana catesbeiana
. The halesia is called after the Rev. Stephen Hales.

Hales was curate of Teddington and rector of two parishes, as well as being a fellow of the Royal Society and chaplain to the Prince of Wales. He helped Princess Augusta lay out the botanical gardens at Kew and designed the flues for heating the Great Stove, or greenhouse, there. In an alarming experiment, he made the first measurement of animal blood pressure. A white mare was tied to a gate, then
thrown down, and blood was taken out of her neck through a goose's windpipe, joined to a glass tube where, as the reverend gentleman observed, it rose to a height of eight feet and three inches.

Hales was an eccentric, with streaks of brilliance and a certain cold-bloodedness (by our standards at least).

Taken in context, Hales's animal experiments were not as brutal as they seem to us now. At that time animals were not considered to have feelings. The circulation of the blood in humans and animals had been demonstrated by William Harvey in 1628, but until Stephen Hales's experiments, showing that root pressure, transpiration, and capillarity forced sap up plants, many thought that plant sap circulated like animal blood. Hales also concluded that “one great use of leaves is to perform in some measure the same office for the support of vegetable life, that the lungs of animals do for the support of animal life,” but it was not until after his death that plant respiration could be properly studied. After Joseph Priestly discovered oxygen in 1774 (and Lavoisier named it), photosynthesis began to be understood. Hales, however, had done the groundwork. It is reassuring to know that he was also enthusiastic about his milder discovery that “an inverted tea-cup at the bottom of . . . pies and tarts [can] prevent the syrup from boiling over,” and that he was seen just before he died painting “with his own hands the tops of the foot-path posts, that his neighbors might not be injured by running against them in the dark.”

The halesia tree is deliciously pretty and should be more widely grown. Bishop Henry Compton, who was Catesby's patron, called it the “Snowdrop Tree,” and that name really suits it better than its botanical one. For botanical names do not always suit those they honor. Catesby seems to have been a simple character. He illustrated his
Natural History
himself and excused “some faults in perspective and other niceties” because “I was not born a painter.” One can't see him sticking tubes into struggling mares. The snowdrop tree, with its beautiful flowers, would have suited him fine. Hales was an eccentric, with streaks of brilliance and a certain cold-bloodedness (by our standards at least). It might have been better if he had been honored with the name of the frog.

The halesia tree is deliciously pretty and should be more widely grown.

BOTANICAL NAME
:
Antirrhinum
.
FAMILY
:
Scrophulariaceae

Snapdragons were favorite flowers in the earliest gardens, but the date of their introduction is not known. John Parkinson says they were found wild in Spain and Italy but in England they were “nourished with us in our Gardens,” although “seldome or never used in Physicke by any in our days.” They must have been grown then more for their beauty than their usefulness. John Gerard, however, quotes Dioscorides as saying that “the herbe being hanged about one preserveth a man from being bewitched, and that it maketh a man gracious in the sight of people.” Snapdragon's botanical name is
Antirrhinum
, from the Greek
anti
(like) and
rhin-
(nose), referring to the snout-like shape of the flower. It was also called “calves' snout.”

Gerard says that “the women have taken the name Snapdragon.” Dragon plants might well have been named by women. John Parkinson described a “Dragon Flower” which he called
Lamium pannonicum
, or “Hungary Dead Nettle.” False dragonhead (
Physostegia
) is often
grown in gardens and called “obedience plant.” The interesting thing about these plants is that, unlike real nettles, they are
tamed
dragons, dead and stingless, and can be played with and will obey (the flowers of the obedience plant can be moved around the stem and will stay just where they are pushed).

Children will play with what is around, even in bombed-out buildings and stinking streets, if that is where they live. In rural Britain, before toys were cheap and widespread, children played with flowers, leaves, and sticks. Sometimes rural play was not so sweetly bucolic. They played with living creatures too, for they were taught, by the Church and everyone else, that nature's resources were the playthings of mankind. Boys had battles with plantain leaves and nuts, and girls made dolls with flower skirts (maybe boys did too, more discreetly). They made cowslip balls and daisy chains. For those too young or too gentle to capture frogs or other wild creatures, snapdragons made pets. As any child still lucky enough to have them in the garden knows, if you squeeze the sides of the flower gently, the dragon's mouth, complete with lashing tongue, will open and close.

Women, even of few resources, looked for ways to amuse children. Dragon flowers were fun, and they were also a way of taming and quieting dragons that very likely might still lurk in the wild and certainly walked in nightmares. Maybe they were vestigial memories of times when monsters really roamed the earth, “the inherited effects,” as Charles Darwin said, “of real dangers and abject superstition during ancient times.” Even today, when most children play with toys, not flowers, cute cartoon dinosaurs, sometimes stuffed and “huggable,” are given to our children and convert the horrors of the past into acceptable history. If we wore snapdragons round our necks, we might feel even safer.

COMMON NAMES
: Bridal wreath, spirea.
BOTANICAL NAME
:
Spiraea
.
FAMILY
:
Rosaceae
.

John Loudon recommended spirea for the “American gardens” popular in his time. These were gardens consisting of imported American trees and shrubs, and it was believed that a separate site was necessary for them because, as Loudon put it, they “do not harmonize remarkably well with European species.”

Some nurseries, notably those of the Waterer family from Knaphill, Surrey, specialized in imported American plants. John Waterer had a nursery at Bagshot that was known as “The American Nursery,” specializing in plants for “the Nobility, Gentry and others.” The nursery continued in business until 1914, when it amalgamated with Bernard Crisp's nursery in Berkshire, and particularly specialized in rhododendrons and azaleas. One azalea, ‘Pink Pearl,' was almost lost when stolen from the nursery but was found later in a cottage garden a mile away, demonstrating that even then (1897) theft was one of the hybridizers' problems. In our own more brutal era nurseries are often heavily guarded.

The spirea ‘Anthony Waterer' came from Knaphill at the end of the nineteenth century, and it is still the most popular grown. It was bred from a Japanese spirea, introduced in 1870. It has reddish young foliage maturing to dark green, and the flowers are crimson-pink.

Spireas grow worldwide and were imported to Europe from America, Japan, China, and elsewhere in Asia. The Chinese reputedly used the flexible branches to make whips. Alice Coats observes that one Chinese name for spirea means “driving horse whip.” They were well known in ancient Greece, where their whippy branches were used to make wreaths and garlands. The name “spirea” comes from the Greek
speiraia
, which was a plant used in garlands, presumably named from the Greek word
speira
(a spiral).