100 Flowers and How They Got Their Names (31 page)

As the flowers grew larger, their scent was sometimes neglected in breeding. With the sudden influx of tropical, often scentless, plants into their gardens, Victorian horticulturalists were often more preoccupied, as indeed we have been, with splashes of color than subtle scents. The romantics still talked about sweetly scented cottage gardens and even the medicinal benefits of flower scents—Oliver Twist recovered his health in a garden of flowers that “perfumed the air with delicious odours.” But fashionable flowers got bigger and brighter and often less fragrant at the same time. Sweet peas became larger and frillier and began to be bred in the colors of butcher's offal. Then there was a reaction. Cottage gardens and sweetly scented flowers began to be treasured, and earlier varieties of sweet peas were revived. Gardening, like all fashions, is apt to come round full circle.

COMMON NAMES
: Tobacco plant, nicotiana, flowering tobacco.
BOTANICAL NAME
:
Nicotiana alata
.
FAMILY
:
Solanaceae
.

Jean Nicot, who was the French consul in Lisbon in 1560, “wente one daie to see the Prysons of the kyng of Portugall” and was given a tobacco plant by the keeper of the prisons, who had obtained it “as a strange Plant brought from Florida.” Nicot planted it in his garden where “it grewe and multiplied marveilously,” and used it to cure a young man of an ulcer in his nose. He then applied it to the ambassador's cook, who had “almoste cut of his Thombe, with a greate Choppyng knife,” and “from that tyme fourth the fame of that same hearbe encreased in suche sorte, that manye came from all places to have that same hearbe.”

The garden tobacco plant,
Nicotiana alata
, is a close relative of the
Nicotiana tabacum
, or smoking tobacco. It is called
alata
(Latin for “winged”) from the way the petioles, or leaf stalks, are set onto the plant. When tobacco was introduced to Europe, it was brought “to adornate Gardeines with the fairnes therof, and to geve a pleasunt
sight,” and then acclaimed as a medicinal plant and grown “more for his vertues, than for his fairenes.” Nicolas Monardes named it after Nicot, “to the ende that he may have the honour thereof, accordyng to his desert.” He devoted fifteen pages of his book about New World plants,
Joyfull Newes out of the Newe Founde Worlde
(see “Nasturtium”), to its uses and virtues.

We grow nicotiana in our gardens mainly because of its wonderful fragrance, especially in the evening, when the huge white flowers open to attract night pollinators. Anyone making an evening garden will want to include it. It is actually a perennial, but it is usually planted indoors early and treated as an annual, although Victorians sometimes kept it as a perennial houseplant.

The tobacco family hybridizes with ease, and presumably one could smoke petunia leaves or use the night-scented tobacco plant to make the healing ointment that John Gerard recommended to give to “thy wounded poore neighbor.” Linnaeus, who was a heavy smoker, recommended smoking as a protection against infection. Infused tobacco leaves were used until well into this century as an effective insecticide, and pure nicotine is one of the most powerful plant poisons in existence.

We are still arguing, as they did in the sixteenth century, about how or if tobacco should be used, but no one argues about the beauty of the garden tobacco plant. Victorian gardeners recommended that it should be planted along paths, so at dusk they could walk outside and enjoy its heavy fragrance. The moth, fluttering toward the fragrant white flower funnels, glowing out of the dark border, is about to fulfill its own and the plant's destiny, which has nothing to do with us. We can go on arguing—enjoy or abstain; the moth will continue to flutter, and the flower to bloom, regardless.

BOTANICAL NAME
:
Campsis
(formerly
Bignonia
).
FAMILY
:
Bignoniaceae
.

Doubtless few of us give much thought to Louis XIV; we are more apt to be preoccupied with love and war, taxes, politics, or even gardening. If, however, we find ourselves occasionally pondering the era of the Sun King, we probably think of his
affaires de coeur
, his military campaigns, his unpopular means of raising money, and the intrigues of his stupendous court. Gardeners might also think of Versailles, a “garden” that was really a symbol of power and prestige and unlimited control over nature. What we are not apt to think of is plants, or of the age of Louis XIV as a time of botanical discovery—either theoretical or actual.

In fact, the Jardin des Plantes (or King's Garden) and the University at Montpellier were expanded dramatically under Louis. Exotic
new plants were raised in greenhouses, systems of classification were explored, and botanists, adventurers, and priests were sent worldwide to bring back discoveries. Plants represented new knowledge, and new knowledge represented power, power being what Louis wanted. The king's missionary priests, tactful about strictness of conversion, were accepted in China, and a wealth of new plants was sent home, including asters, delphiniums, jasmine, tea, soybeans, ailanthus, hibiscus, mulberry, peonies, and thuja.

Exotic new plants were raised in greenhouses, systems of classification were explored, and botanists, adventurers, and priests were sent worldwide to bring back discoveries.

The Abbé Jean Paul Bignon, for whom the trumpet vine was first named, was Louis XIV's librarian. Joseph de Tournefort (see “Bear's Breeches”) named the bignonia to express his “Esteem and Veneration” for Bignon, who had successfully nominated him to the Royal Academy of Science.

The American trumpet vine,
Bignonia radicans
, was probably introduced by the elder John Tradescant (see “Aster”). It was not grown much until after the Chinese trumpet vine had been introduced (in the eighteenth century) and crossed with it by the brothers Tagliabue, nurserymen from Laniate near Milan. In about 1889 the red-flowered ‘Madame Galen' appeared. It is still our most popular garden trumpet vine.

The bignonia family was later divided by botanists, and the trumpet vine was no longer
called after Abbé Bignon, but given its own classification as a campsis. This comes from the Greek
kampe
(bending) and refers to climbing tendrils, which had been described by Tournefort as “curls or tufts.” Today's bignonia vine is the “crossvine,” also a climber, with peach-apricot flowers. Its wood when cut transversely is marked with a cross. Other bignonias are greenhouse climbers, and there still seems to be some confusion about the name. The family though, includes the common catalpa tree, named
Bignonia catalpa
by Linnaeus to include the Indian name of
“catalpa.”
In 1788, the
Flora Caroliniana
of Thomas Walter called the American species
Catalpa bignonioides
, which means “bignonia-like,” and so it remained.

There isn't, to the common eye, much similarity between the trumpet vine and the catalpa—except that both are beautiful, both are American, and both should be in our gardens. Botanists live in their own world, however, and it's a useful one. Who are we to argue with them? After all, we have plenty to think about, like love and war, taxes, politics, and gardening.

BOTANICAL NAME
:
Tulipa
.
FAMILY
:
Liliaceae
.

Tulips were probably introduced to Europe in the sixteenth century by Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, who was ambassador of the Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand I, to the court of Suleiman the Magnificent, sultan of Turkey. The name “tulip” is generally thought to be the Latinized name of the arabic
dul-band
(turban). It seems that Busbecq mistook the name of the flower for that of the turbans into which tulips were commonly tucked.

Once introduced, tulips rapidly became very popular. In 1593 Charles de l'Ecluse, or Clusius, grew tulips in Leyden. Clusius was director of the emperor's garden in Vienna and author of
Rariorum Plantarum Historia
. Clusius apparently asked such a high price for his bulbs that no one could buy them, and instead they were stolen from his garden. They soon spread throughout the seventeen provinces. Clusius visited England and saw Drake and Raleigh; maybe he even took bulbs with him because, by 1629, John Parkinson called tulips “the delights of leasure.” He added, chauvinistically, that although to cultivate them women “are herin predominant,
yet cannot they be barred from your beloved, who I doubt not, will share with you in the delights as much as is fit.”

By the eighteenth century, the names of tulips included ‘Semper Augustus,' ‘Alexander the Great,' ‘Artaxerxes,' ‘Black Prince,' ‘Duke of Vendôme,' ‘Emperor of Germany,' and ‘Duke of Marlborough.' In Joseph Addison's famous satire in
The Tatler
in 1710, he pretends he has overheard a conversation about these men, who turn out to be tulips, “to which the gardeners, according to their usual custom, had given such high titles and appellations of honour.” The crowning point of the satire, however, is that he could show his friends “a chimney-sweeper and a painted lady in the same bed, which he was sure would very much please them.”

One account tells of a breeder who gave his blanket to a tulip bed and died of cold.