100 Flowers and How They Got Their Names (3 page)

The English called European asters both “asters” and “starworts.”
Aster
, Latin for “star,” referred to the flower's star-like shape. “Wort” originally meant “root,” and then was applied to plants that had healing properties. Asters, said the herbalist John Parkinson, were good for “the biting of a mad dogge, the greene herbe being beaten with old hogs grease, and applyed.”

In 1637 John Tradescant the Younger brought North American asters back from Virginia. These do not seem to have been noticed much until they were hybridized with European starworts. They were later renamed “Michaelmas daisies” in Britain, because when the British finally adopted Gregory XIII's revised calendar, the feast of Saint Michael coincided with their flowering.

There were two botanizing John Tradescants, father and son. The elder, in 1618, traveled abroad as far as Russia. His account of the trip
reveals that he had no sense of smell, and he remarks that rain leaking into the cabin had soaked and spoiled “all my clothes and beds,” but his enthusiasm for flowers does not seem to have been dampened. His son, John the Younger, not only brought back the North American aster, but also collected from Barbados the
Mimosa pudica
, or sensitive plant, which, a hundred years later, may have made possible the acquisition of the annual Chinese aster.
Callistephus chinensis
, or “beautiful Chinese crown,” from the Greek
kallis-
(beautiful) and
stephos
(crown), is only called an aster because of its star-like flower. The Jesuit Pierre d'Incarville had been sent to China to convert the emperor, Chien Lung, to Christianity. China at the time had mostly barred Westerners, but the emperor accepted d'Incarville, who was a skilled clock-maker as well as a botanist. The priest was frustrated in his attempts to collect new plants and only got round the emperor by presenting him with two plants of the
Mimosa pudica
that he had raised from seed sent from Paris. The leaves of the
Mimosa pudica
collapse when touched and this, we are told, “greatly diverted” the emperor, who “laughed heartily.” D'Incarville was now given access to the imperial gardens and was free to export plants until he died, soon afterward, in 1757.

Michaelmas was always a date of beginnings: the academic year at Oxford and Cambridge, the quarterly court session, the day for debts to be settled and annual rents (often including a goose) to be paid. In the garden both Michaelmas daisies and Chinese asters bloom in autumn, magnificent curtain calls of summer but reminders too of new beginnings after winter's sleep.

COMMON NAMES
: Astilbe, spirea.
BOTANICAL NAME
:
Astilbe
.
FAMILY
:
Saxifragaceae
.

The name “astilbe” probably refers to a lack of showiness in the original Chinese flowers, as it comes from the Greek
a
(without) and
stilbe
(brilliance). It is sometimes called “spirea” because it looks like
Aruncus spirea
(or
Aruncus dioicus
), commonly called “goats-beard.” Modern hybrids of red, pink, and white flowers bloom even in deep shade and are not dull at all—and neither was the life of Père Armand David, who discovered the astilbe in China.

In 1860 French and British gun-boats secured a treaty from the Chinese allowing exploration of the interior and admission to Christian missionaries. Père David, a Lazarist monk, was sent to China to set up a school for a hundred boys in Peking. He was such an ardent and successful botanist that he was released from his duties so that he could collect plants. He sent thousands back to Paris, although only about one-third of his specimens survived. He cheerfully recorded his hardships in his diary: the danger of wolves obliged him to share his tent with his donkey,
“though its presence there is not without inconvenience” (one wonders who got to lie down first), and the local food defied “all but the most ravenous hunger” and “must be eaten with courage,” but “one man can live wherever another can.”

Some of Père Delavay's boxes of plants lay unopened in a Paris museum for over fifty years.

Père David was once so ill that he was given the last sacraments, but he lived to return to Paris, where he died at age seventy-four. Other French missionary botanists were not as lucky. Père Jean André Soulié, caught between Tibetan and Chinese hostilities, was captured while packing his plant specimens and was tortured for fifteen days before being shot. Père Jean Marie Delavay caught bubonic plague and lost the use of his right arm. The plants that missionaries sent home seldom reached France or died by the time they arrived. Some of Père Delavay's boxes of plants lay unopened in a Paris museum for over fifty years.

The missionaries identified many botanical treasures that were rediscovered and introduced in the next century. Some of these were named after them. The beautiful davidia tree and the
Buddleia davidii
(see “Butterfly Bush”) are called after Père David, as are Père David's deer. There is an
Iris delavayi
, and Père Soulié has primulas, a rhododendron, and a lily bearing his name. The priests' motives were not to become famous, though, or to perpetuate their own names, as some botanists have wished. These souls were driven by far different forces and, like the astilbe, their lives bloomed in the shade.

BOTANICAL NAME
:
Rhododendron
.
FAMILY
:
Ericaceae
.

The difference between “azaleas” and “rhododendrons” can be as good a subject for dinner-table arguments as the difference between “hominy” and “grits”—either can amuse (or bore) the company for a whole evening, with no resolution. The name “azalea” comes from
azaleos
, Greek for “dry,” and covers various species and hybrids of the
Rhododendron
genus. In fact, most azaleas do not thrive in dry ground and need to be well watered because of their shallow root system.

The first of what we now call “azaleas” to reach Europe seems to have been the
Rhododendron viscosum
, which we now call the “swamp azalea.” It was sent by Reverend John Banister (see “Bluebell”) to Bishop Henry Compton in London and described in 1691. In 1737 Linnaeus first applied the name to a shrub from dry habitats in Lapland, which he called
Azalea procumbens
, but which is now called
Loiseleuria procumbens
after Jean Louis Auguste Loiseleur-Deslongchamps,
a physician and botanist in Paris. This first azalea, which isn't an azalea, has very small leaves and flowers and is not grown in gardens.

Meanwhile the name that was no longer applied to this shrub was applied, somewhat randomly, to some rhododendrons. On the whole, deciduous rhododendrons are often called azaleas, but evergreen “azaleas” are not necessarily called rhododendrons.

Native American azaleas are beautiful, usually deciduous, shrubs. William Bartram in his
Travels
described the “fiery Azalea, flaming on the ascending hills or wavy surface of the gliding brooks . . . that suddenly opening to view from dark shades, we are alarmed with the apprehension of the hill being set on fire. This is certainly the most gay and brilliant flowering shrub yet known.” Peter Kalm, who was sent to North America to study useful plants (see “Mountain Laurel”), said of azaleas, “The people have not found that this plant may be applied to any practical use; they only gather the flowers and put them in pots because they are so beautiful.”

Azaleas are some of our most used, and abused, flowering shrubs. Their natural habitat is on wooded slopes, where they will bloom through the trees with almost mystical brilliance. Indeed the Japanese believed the Kurume azalea sprang from the soil of sacred Mount Kirishina when Ninigi descended from heaven to found the Japanese Empire. We, who also have our gods, tend to plant them in parking lots of banks or supermarkets. We surround them with shredded dead bark and prune them into neat globes. There they glow like giant tonsils at the entrances of mirrored glass buildings that are lit within by fluorescent lights. We see them when we cash our checks or buy our food in plastic bags, and they are supposed to cheer us as we pass.

COMMON NAMES
: Baby blue eyes, poached eggs, fried eggs.
BOTANICAL NAMES
:
Nemophila, Limnanthes
.
FAMILIES
:
Hydrophyllaceae, Limnanthaceae
.

David Douglas was a tough Scottish explorer who botanized on the west coast of America in the 1820s. The Douglas fir is called after him. Two delicate cottage garden flowers were collected by him too. Baby blue eyes, named
Nemophila
from the Greek
nemos
(glade) and
phileo
(I love), is a bold, celestial blue which shrinks from the open sky and scorching sun. The insouciant poached egg covers itself with hundreds of flowers which are always crawling with bees and, unless you are a bee, looks a lot like its namesake. Its botanical name comes from the Greek
limne
(marsh) and
anthos
(flower). Neither of these flowers can cope with Yankee summers—they come from the damp northwest coast of America and thrive in misty English summer gardens.

Douglas was a wonderful mixture of sensitivity and grit. When longed-for letters from home arrived, he was so excited that he “never slept,” and got up four times in the night to reread them. He botanized in a suit of bright red Royal Stuart tartan, complete with vest, but half the time he had no proper shoes and suffered terribly from blisters. He used his gun freely to frighten everything from the Indians he encountered to the rats he caught making off with his inkwell, razor, and soap in the middle of the night, but he was accompanied everywhere by Billy, a favorite scraggy little terrier whom he adored. All his provisions had to be carried, including paper, ink, ammunition, and food. When his canoe overturned he lost everything and had to eat his plant collection. Once he wistfully noted in his journal that he had “dreamed last night of being in Regent Street, London,” but a little later left his party because he felt he “must scale a peak.” When he reached the top, he described the view as “beyond description striking the mind with horror blended with a sense of the wondrous.” He survived snow blindness, starvation, near drowning, hostile natives, until finally, at age thirty-five, he somehow fell into a bull trap while botanizing in Hawaii and was gored to death. The little terrier was sitting by the edge of the pit and was the only witness.