100 Flowers and How They Got Their Names (15 page)

The mallow is of the same edible family as the hibiscus, cotton,
okra, and rose of Sharon. Marsh mallow root was used to make the confection called marshmallow, but, while people nowadays might worry about the edibility of the original plant, they do not seem to worry about the edibility of its sticky namesake.

Albertus Magnus, the medieval botanist and theologian who traveled over Europe compiling an encyclopedia, recommended that hollyhocks should be rubbed on the hands to protect from burns during “ordeal by fire,” which was a popular method of trying criminals at the time. Nicholas Culpeper, who wrote
The English Physician
in 1652, said that hollyhocks were good for “Belly, Stone, Reins, Kidneys, Bladder, Coughs, Shortness of Breath, Wheesing, Excoriation of the Guts, Ruptures, Cramp, Convulsions, the King's Evil, Kernels, Chin-cough [whooping cough], Wounds, Bruises, Falls, Blows, Muscles, Morphew [a skin eruption], Sun-burning.” In addition to all this their fibrous stems can be used to make cloth, and they yield a very good blue dye.

The wild marsh mallow was used medicinally; the root contains a mucilaginous juice said to be very soothing and that could be chewed by teething babies.

No wonder that hollyhocks were one of the earliest imports to America. Colonists brought both the
Alcea rosea
, the old single red hollyhock, and the
Althaea officinalis
, the marsh mallow, and gave their seeds to the Cherokee Indians soon after they arrived.

In the eighteenth century new strains with bigger, double flowers were brought from China; hollyhock became one of the most popular garden flowers, the standby of cottage gardens until the nineteenth century, when hollyhock rust came to Britain. At that time the recommended cure was to remove infected leaves, but now it can be controlled with modern sprays. It's rather sad though, if the whole point of hollyhocks was their curative powers. They are pretty flowers in the border, but not quite the same if they have to be sprayed with poisons.

BOTANICAL NAME
:
Lonicera
.
FAMILY
:
Caprifoliaceae
.

Adam Lonicer, or Lonitzer, was a German physician who practiced in Frankfurt and, in 1555, published a book on natural history. A later botanist said, “His herbals though used widely and reprinted many times, had little or no influence on Linnaean and post-Linnaean taxonomy,” but, in 1753, Linnaeus named the honeysuckle
“Lonicera”
after him. The bush honeysuckle,
Diervilla
, is of the same family (see “Weigela”).

Wild British honeysuckle was known from earliest times as “woodbind,” although other climbing plants bore the same name. Possibly Shakespeare's “woodbine” is convolvulus (see “Morning Glory”). Generations of children have “sucked honey” from the beautiful flowers, which John Gerard compared to the “nose of an Elephant.” They are pollinated hawk moths, and a Viennese botanist, Kerner, once placed a hawk moth three hundred yards away from the nearest honeysuckle
early in the day and marked it. When dusk fell, he watched the moth gently wave its feelers and then head straight for the honeysuckle.

Sometimes honeysuckle is trained around young straight branches, which are later cut to make walking sticks with a spiral imprint on them. But it always had to be controlled in gardens. John Parkinson said he knew the wild honeysuckle “yet doe I not bring it into my garden, but let it rest in his owne place, to serve the senses that travell by it, or have no garden.” The “Northern” honeysuckle, he said, was “entertained into their gardens onely [by those] that are curious.”

We should have been less curious when we entertained the Japanese, or Hall's, honeysuckle. It was introduced to America in 1862 by Dr. George Hall, an American doctor who opened the Hospital for Seamen in Shanghai. It was carefully sent home in a Wardian case and cosseted in a Long Island nursery, one of the treasures that the Parson's Nursery officials unpacked as carefully as “an original of Raphael or Murillo,” but it soon spread to cover much of the eastern seaboard and has become a terrible pest.

When cursing Hall's honeysuckle we have to remember that he also introduced the beautiful little star magnolia. Meddling with plant distribution is, as we know now, tricky. As in love affairs, it is hard to get the right balance. We introduce plants, rejoice, and coddle them, but when they prosper we call them invasive. We should have left them alone—but then we would have missed much that is beautiful as well. Japanese honeysuckle is a menace, but on the banks of busy highways its scent even overwhelms the stench of exhaust.

COMMON NAMES
: Hosta, funkia, plantain lily.
BOTANICAL NAME
:
Hosta
.
FAMILY
:
Liliaceae
.

Hostas became popular in this century when gardeners were looking for easier ways to care for their gardens. They grow splendidly in almost complete shade and will form a mass of diverse and extraordinary leaves, some of them as big as large wet buttock prints. Their colors range from almost true blue to yellow, and they are wrinkled and striped, puckered, pointed, and blunt according to the dozens of kinds now available. Once they are planted, you don't have to do anything to them, except admire them.

The garden hostas originated in China and Japan. Engelbert Kaempfer (see “Deutzia”) described them in 1712 and Latinized their Japanese name as
Joksan vulgo giboosi
. Carl Thunberg (see “Japonica”) later called them
Aletris japonica
and
Hemerocallis japonica
. Hostas were
named “funkias” by Christian Sprengel (see “Forget-me-not”) as a tribute to Heinrich Christian Funck, a German botanist and specialist on mosses. The hosta, especially in Britain, is still sometimes called “funkia,” or “funckia.” Hostas are also called “plantain lilies,” from the Latin
planta
, “sole of the foot,” which the large leaves resemble.

Hostas grow splendidly in almost complete shade and will form a mass of diverse and extraordinary leaves, some of them as big as large wet buttock prints.

No one seemed able to agree about what to call the plant. (Botanists do agree that the name by which a plant is first described, unless it is found to be incorrect, should be retained.) Many have yearned to have their names first stamped on a plant because once there, it is there forever, even if it is their only claim to eternity. The hosta fell short of their ideal. By 1812 its names included
Giboosi, Hemerocallis
, and plantain lily. That year, Sir Edward Salisbury divided hostas botanically and proposed the names
Niobe
and
Bryocles
for them, but he never published his description or validated the names. The same year Leopold Trattinick proposed the name
Hosta
, after the physician Nicolaus Thomas Host, an expert on grasses who seemed an acceptable recipient for the name of a lily. At first the new name appeared to be invalid, as a verbena (now known as
Cornutia
) already bore the name
Hosta
. But it turned out that the cornutia had been classified a verbena by Linnaeus, so finally, in 1905, the
International Botanical Congress voted that the name
Hosta
could be used.

The German eye surgeon Philipp von Siebold sent the first living hosta plants from Japan to Leyden Botanical Garden. The Japanese allowed only Dutchmen from the East India Trading Company on Deshima Island (see “Japonica”), and although Siebold spoke Dutch, he had a thick German accent that didn't deceive the Japanese. So he pretended his accent was that of a remote mountain town in Holland and was allowed to stay!

Even the Dutch were not allowed to leave Deshima for the mainland, but Siebold was a skilled surgeon and was permitted to leave Deshima to perform the first cataract operations in Japan. As payment for his services, he accepted botanical specimens, which he illicitly exported. He fell in love with a Japanese woman who registered as a prostitute in order to live with him on Deshima. They had a daughter. In 1829, he was caught shipping out a map of Japan and was arrested and expelled. Siebold pined for Japan and wore Japanese dress even in Ghent, where he died.

BOTANICAL NAME
:
Hyacinthus
.
FAMILY
:
Liliaceae
.

Hyacinth was a beautiful boy whom the god Apollo loved. While they were playing the ancient game of quoits together, Hyacinth ran forward to catch the discus, but it struck him on the head and killed him. (A chilling elaboration of this story tells that Zephyr, the wind, was jealous of the friendship and blew the quoit against a rock to rebound and kill the boy.) As Hyacinth died, a flower sprang from his bleeding head, which hung over the shoulder of Apollo, who was desperately cradling him in his arms and begging him to live. Wild hyacinths always bend toward the ground, and the letter-like markings on their petals were supposed to read
AI, AI
in Greek, the sound of a mournful wail. Wild gladioli and some wild orchids in Greece have the same symbol, and they were all used in wreaths for the dead. According to John Parkinson, hyacinths “hinder young persons from growing ripe too soone,” which would be useful to those who love unchanging youth.