100 Flowers and How They Got Their Names (2 page)

And that, after all, is perhaps why I continued to write about flowers. Not only had their beauty not evolved for me but I suddenly realized what I had really always known. It would not make the slightest difference to them, even while I gasped at their loveliness, if I or the entire human race should die the next day. But if all the flowers died, the world we know would be no more. No flowers, no seeds, no vegetation. If they all died, we would very shortly follow. Flowers are more essential to us than we are even to one another, and if we lost them, we would lose all. Even human grief, our cries into the darkness, is nothing compared to the flowers.

If we fail to remember the history of our flowers, we know them less, and to trace their link with us is to make them part of our lives.
If we forget they are part of our lives, we may be too casual about them. The naming of flowers is no botanical game. It is the story of a relationship, a relationship of the essential to the incidental. We can call flowers what we like, we can tread on them, we can pick them. But it is always we, not they, who are incidental.

100 FLOWERS

And How They Got Their Names

BOTANICAL NAME
:
Abelia
.
FAMILY
:
Caprifoliaceae
.

Someone should do a scholarly survey and find out if plants whose names come at the beginning of the alphabet are more often found in gardens than those that are listed farther along in the catalogs. Abelia, with its fine glossy leaves and delicate flowers, is found in most gardens. Abeliophyllum, or white forsythia, is truly a beginning plant, for it bears fragrant flowers in early spring before its own leaves, or any other, appear. Either is a good start to a garden, but although they are not related (white forsythia is a member of the olive family) both are named after Dr. Clarke Abel, who accompanied Lord Amherst on a disastrous expedition to China in 1817.

Politics, stupidity, and natural disasters were always hazards that challenged plant collectors, and Dr. Abel was hampered by them all. British access to Chinese botanical treasures was still limited to the Portuguese island of Macao and whatever plants the Chinese deigned to offer them. The British wanted to explore the interior and take
back what they could find, but the Chinese understandably resented British arrogance and involvement in the opium trade. Lord Amherst was sent to negotiate an agreement with the emperor. He was, Abel said, “urged to enter the imperial presence and to prostrate” (at 6:00
A.M
.), but he “declared his intention not to perform the ceremony” and the embassy was dismissed. The British asserted that they were merely refusing to “kowtow” to what Abel called “every piece of yellow rag that they might choose to consider as emblematical of his Chinese majesty,” but as a result the interior of China remained closed to them until gunboat diplomacy dictated the 1842 Treaty of Nanking.

Dr. Abel collected what he could along the homeward route, but the ship,
Alceste
, was wrecked; a box of seeds and plants that had been saved was then thrown into the sea to make room for the linen of an embassy “Gentleman.” What remained was captured and burned by Malaysian pirates. Abel had, however, left a few plants at Canton, and eventually the
Abelia chinensis
reached England.

Abeliophyllum, so called because its leaf (Greek,
phyllon
) is like the abelia's, has white or faintly pink flowers. The abelia has red or pink flowers from midsummer through autumn. Neither comes in any shade of yellow—perhaps luckily for the memory of a man who would not bow to that color.

COMMON NAMES
: African violet, Usambara violet.
BOTANICAL NAME
:
Saintpaulia
.
FAMILY
:
Gesneriaceae
.

There are probably more African violets in American bathrooms than in Africa. From a plant's point of view, in spite of chrome and toothpaste, warm steamy bathrooms are quite a good imitation of a tropical rain forest, and African violets flourish in them. They come from the humid forests of the Usambara Mountains in northern Tanzania. African violets grow naturally in rock crevices where small amounts of soil have been deposited and water drains away rapidly. Though they thrive on 80 percent humidity, they must not be over-watered. They get much of their water from the atmosphere through the fine hairs which cover the surface of their leaves. These hairs take in moisture from the air, like miniature roots, and also trap raindrops, separating them so the leaves don't suffocate. The roots themselves remain relatively dry.

African violets were sent to Europe in 1892, by Baron Adalbert Emil Walter Redcliffe le Tanneux von Saint Paul-Illaire, district governor
of Usambara, in what was the German colony of Tanganyika. When the young governor, some say in the company of his future wife, Margarethe, was exploring his territory, he found these new plants. He collected plants or, more probably, seeds to send back to his father, Baron Ulrich von Saint Paul, a keen horticulturalist who took them to Hermann Wendland, director of the Royal Botanic Garden at Herrenhausen (Hanover). Wendland described the new plant as “of enhancing beauty . . . one of the daintiest hot house plants” and he named it
Saintpaulia
, after the two barons, father and son. He added
ionantha
because of the purple, violet-like flowers (see “Violet”). Another African violet introduced at the same time was later called
Saintpaulia confusa
because it was confused with another species!

Sadly though, there is a shortage of them in their native Tanzania.

When the British took over the colony (later known as Tanzania) after World War I, more African violets were discovered. The flowers were soon available in purples, pinks, nearreds, whites, and bicolors, with single or double flowers. There are no yellows or oranges, and the leaves vary. They can be propagated by rooting a single leaf, although some people are better at this than others. But there is no shortage of the plants in American nurseries, supermarkets, and even dime stores. Sadly though, there is a shortage of them in their native Tanzania. They can only grow in the shady rain forest, and these days forests are being felled everywhere for agricultural needs and for modern houses—with modern plumbing.

BOTANICAL NAME
:
Anemone
.
FAMILY
:
Ranunculaceae
.

Anemones used to be called “windflowers,” possibly because they grew on windy sites (
anemos
is Greek for “wind”). The herbalist Nicholas Culpeper said that “the flowers never open but when the wind bloweth; Pliny is my author; if it be not so, blame him.”

A more compelling derivation is from “Naamen,” which is the Persian for “Adonis.” Anemones were associated with Adonis, with whom Aphrodite (Venus) fell passionately in love when he was born. She tried to protect him from harm by hiding him in the underworld, but was forced by Zeus to share him with the underworld goddess, Persephone. Aphrodite was afraid he might be hurt while hunting, but of course he would not listen to her, so she could only follow him in her swan-drawn chariot. One day Adonis tracked down a huge boar and wounded it. It turned on him and gored him. Aphrodite arrived in time to hold him in her arms and weep over him as he died. Some versions of the legend say the anemone grew up from her tears and some that it sprang from his blood as it soaked into the ground, but it
became the symbol of protective love that could not protect and of adventurous youth and beauty that challenged life, and lost.

Anemones were also sacred flowers, possibly the “lilies of the field” mentioned in the New Testament. Some legends say that the red petals of these wild anemones came from the blood dripping down on them from Christ's cross, and that they sprang up miraculously in Pisa's Campo Santo cemetery after a Crusader ship had brought some earth for the graves back from the Holy Land.

There were various theories about breeding them. A Dutch herbalist, Van Oosten, said that if the wind was in a southerly direction when the seeds were sown, the flowers would come out double. The “French” anemones, one story says, were stolen by a parliamentary official from the Parisian breeder who had refused to share them. The official arranged to be shown round the garden just when the anemones were going to seed. His fur-lined cloak “accidentally” slipped off his arm as he was passing the anemone bed, and his servant (previously instructed) picked it up, rolling into it some of the precious seeds.

The “Japanese” anemones were sent back to England in 1844 by Robert Fortune, who saw them growing on tombs in China and called them a “most appropriate ornament for the last resting places of the dead.” These get their color from their bracts, not their petals, and they bloom in autumn, not spring. But autumn-blooming flowers are a symbol of hope and resurrection too, for gardeners believe spring is rebirth and they prepare for spring by planting bulbs in autumn. Like Aphrodite, they are consigning their hopes to the underworld, and like Aphrodite, they will hover over the fragile blossoms when they emerge. They will not always be able to protect them, but still they hope and still they believe.

COMMON NAMES
: Aster, Michaelmas daisy, Chinese aster.
BOTANICAL NAMES
:
Aster, Callistephus (Chinese aster)
.
FAMILY
:
Asteraceae
.