100 Flowers and How They Got Their Names (33 page)

Water lilies are not used as food now, or probably as antiaphrodisiacs either—the latter being a medicine we don't seem to require much in our present society. But the miracle of the pristine flowers, growing from murky waters in muddy ponds, is as powerful as it ever was.

COMMON NAMES
: Weigela, weigelia.
CHINESE NAME
:
Noak chok wha
.
BOTANICAL NAME
:
Weigela
(formerly
Diervilla
).
FAMILY
:
Caprifoliaceae
.

Our Oriental weigelas had a name change. They were once thought to be related to the
Diervilla lonicera
, or bush honeysuckle. This plant interests botanists because after the yellow flowers have been fertilized they change color to a deeper yellow, “to let the bees know the larder is empty,” Neltje Blanchan wrote. The original “diervilla” was brought from Canada to France by a French surgeon, M. Dierville, who sent plant specimens home from French Acadia (Nova Scotia). Joseph de Tournefort (see “Bear's Breeches”) named the bush honeysuckle in his honor. In 1708 Dierville published an account of his voyage in verse. The diervilla is not grown much as a garden plant but is widespread in northern America.

Robert Fortune found what was first known as the
Diervilla florida
in China in 1845, and he wrote a vivid description of his discovery. It was on the island of Chusan, in a mandarin's garden that he called “an excellent specimen of the peculiar style so much admired by the Chinese in the north . . . and generally called the Grotto, on account of the pretty rockwork with which it was ornamented.” The new shrub grew only in the north of China and was not found wild—in fact it probably came from Japan to China originally. Fortune saw the plant covered in “fine rose-colored flowers, which hung in graceful bunches from the axils of the leaves and the ends of the branches,” and he “marked it as one of the finest plants of Northern China.” He said, “Every one saw and admired” it, and it was “a great favourite with the old gentleman to whom the place belonged.” It is rather nice to think of the old Chinese gentleman enjoying his bush, all those years ago.

It is rather nice to think of the old Chinese gentleman enjoying his bush, all those years ago.

Fortune immediately sent specimens of it, together with a drawing, to the Royal Horticultural Society. It was soon established in British gardens and was said to be one of Queen Victoria's favorite plants. Other diervillas followed from Japan and Korea, and were hybridized with enthusiasm.

The Asiatic diervillas were thought to be a new species and were renamed
Weigela
after Christian Ehrenfried von Weigel. Weigel was a professor at Greifswald in northern Germany and the author of a floral tome called
Flora Pomerano-Rugica
. Botanists never really settled
on the correct name of the weigela but only a few pedantic (and probably English) nurseries still call it “diervilla.” Both it and the bush honeysuckle, which
is
undisputedly diervilla, are members of the caprifolia family, charmingly so named from the Latin
caper
(goat) and
folium
(leaf)—because the leaves caper all over the place, like little goats.

Immortalization is often unpredictable. Dierville and his descriptive verse have mostly been forgotten. Weigel's life's work must hardly be read, but everyone knows the weigela, and it is in most gardens. One wonders if Weigel would have been pleased by this, or have preferred us to have read his book. The choice, as usually happens, was not his.

BOTANICAL NAME
:
Wisteria
.
FAMILY
:
Fabaceae
.

The wisteria is named for Doctor Caspar Wistar, who was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, president of the Philosophical Society, and a distinguished botanist. He was a friend of President Jefferson, and, in 1795, had helped him identify some fossil remains of the giant sloth. In 1795, Jefferson had been sent bones of an enormous clawed animal, and he assumed that it was a kind of lion that might still be found somewhere in America. He called it a “megalonyx.” Jefferson, and other Americans, were particularly defensive about large American animals because some Europeans, led by the French naturalist Georges Leclerc, comte de Buffon, maintained (partly to discourage immigration to America) that everything in America, including animals and people, was smaller and “degenerate” compared with Europe. Buffon had written
Histoire naturelle
, including thousands of facts and theories and comprising forty-four volumes, but he had no experience of America, where he said the air was so thin that the sun's influence could not be felt, causing everything there to shrink. Clearly
it was nonsense, but even so, Jefferson hoped that finding the megalonyx would help to dispel this sort of calumny, and the animal would turn out to be as big as lions and tigers found outside America (Buffon had pointed out the small size of American lions and wild cats). But a similar fossil to Jefferson's was found in Paraguay and determined to be not a large cat but a giant sloth, now called a megathere. The struggle to gain European respect for American thought and civilization continued.

Georges Leclerc, comte de Buffon, maintained that everything in America, including animals and people, was smaller and “degenerate” compared with Europe.

The wisteria we grow in our gardens is either from China
(Wisteria sinensis)
or Japan
(Wisteria floribunda)
, but there is a native American wisteria which was sent by Mark Catesby to England in 1724 as the “Carolina Kidney Bean.” It was first given the botanical name of
Glycine frutescens
(the glycine family includes the soybean) and was grown in England, but not widely.

In 1818 John Reeves, who was a tea inspector for the East India Tea Company, sent a Chinese wisteria back to London. The famous Victorian garden writer John Loudon had tried to get the plant named
Consequa
because Reeves had obtained it from a Cantonese merchant of that name, who apparently died in poverty, unrecognized by the West. It is reassuring to know that he had been a successful swindler of English merchants in Canton. In 1818, the
wisteria was named (misspelled) after Wistar by Thomas Nuttall, who came from England to Philadelphia and called America a country “full of hope and enthusiasm.”

The Chinese wisteria was first thought to be tender and was planted in a hot greenhouse, where it nearly died. But by 1838, a plant growing outdoors in London had reached eleven feet in height and ninety by seventy feet in either direction. Ever since, wisterias have flourished both in America and Europe where stone walls and fences beg for their beauty. The American wisteria isn't nearly as large or fine as the Asian varieties—but, after all, what else can you expect from a degenerate American plant?

COMMON NAMES
: Yarrow, milfoil.
BOTANICAL NAME
:
Achillea
.
FAMILY
:
Asteraceae
.

It's hard for us nowadays to understand what it must have been like to be ill in the past. We think of illness as having a physical cause and, mostly, a physical cure. If there is no cure we demand more medical research into it, confident that eventually one will be found. Not so in the past.

In the old days illness was thought to come from the stars, the mind, the humors, and sometimes the Devil. A plant that could heal was not only a medicine, it had mystical power as well. Yarrow was mainly used to stanch bleeding, and other names for it included “bloodwort,” “stanchgrass,” “sanguinary,” and “woundewort.” According to Dioscorides, the name “achillea” came from the fact that Achilles used it to heal his wounded soldiers, the Myrmidons, and he had been taught its secrets by Chiron the centaur, his tutor. Centaurs had the wisdom and hearts of men without their sexuality or slowness, combined with the swift power and other qualities of a horse. Achillea was
thought to be particularly good for healing wounds made with iron, and so it was important to battlefield surgeons as late as the American Civil War, when the crushed plant was applied to bullet and shrapnel wounds.

But its power of healing was not only physical. The name “yarrow” comes from the Anglo-Saxon
gearwe
, the origin of which is uncertain, but some etymologists believe is from
gierwan
, “to prepare” or “to be ready.” For yarrow was a defense against other ills. In France and Ireland it was one of the herbs of St. John that were picked (while they were still wet with dew) and burned on the eve of St. John's Day, to protect against evil. Often the fires were lit on the windward side of fields, so the protective smoke would blow over them, and burning brush would be carried around the stables. The French phrase
avoir toutes les herbes de Saint Jean
means “to be ready for anything.” Nicholas Culpeper described “an ancient charm” where by a leaf of yarrow was to be pulled off with the left hand as the sick man's name was pronounced.