100 Flowers and How They Got Their Names (20 page)

Lobelia erinus
comes in white and pink too. But like most good blues it really defeats its purpose to have it in other colors. Its wonderful blue fairly shimmers, and pots of it look like dished-up summer sky, or bowls of glinting Mediterranean sea that, even on dreary days on noisy town terraces, we can keep right there beside us.

He wrote a history of cereals, a description of roses, and instructions for brewing beer.

COMMON NAMES
: Yellow loosestrife, purple loosestrife.
BOTANICAL NAMES
:
Lysimachia, Lythrum
.
FAMILIES
:
Primulaceae, Lythraceae
.

The original name of yellow loosestrife, or
Lysimachia vulgaris
, comes from King Lysimachus who was the companion and successor of Alexander the Great. Lysimachus's name came from the Greek
lysi- mache
, “causing strife to cease,” and loosestrife was used to prevent yoked animals from fighting (a sprig was put between them) and to staunch the wounds of war.

Purple loosestrife, called “lythrum,” from the Greek
lythron
, “gore” (referring to the flower's color), grows in streams and boggy places. It was once thought to be the “long purples” near which Ophelia drowned, but scholars decided that those were really orchids. However, the famous pre-Raphaelite painting by John Millais of the drowned Ophelia shows her lying in a stream with loosestrife on its banks. Evidently Millais and his friend, Holman Hunt, looked a long
time for an appropriate place for the tragedy and found it on the River Wey in Surrey. Millais painted the streambed with its banks of loosestrife, leaving a gap for Ophelia, who was later inserted. The long-suffering model, Elizabeth Siddal, was painted lying in a cold bath in Gower Street. Siddal, like Ophelia, seems to have been unlucky in love. In 1860 she married Dante Gabriel Rossetti, another pre-Raphaelite artist for whom she modeled, but in 1862 she took an overdose of laudanum and died. Rossetti apparently felt he had neglected her and remorsefully buried his only complete book of poems with her. Seven years later, however, he had her body exhumed so he could publish the poems. As for Millais, he married John Ruskin's wife.

Purple loosestrife is important botanically because it is trimorphic. These kinds of plants bear flowers with three different lengths of stamens and pistils, so a bee can only cross-fertilize by matching together different configurations of each flower, and has to go to another plant to do so. Thus self-fertilization is unlikely. This sophisticated system is one of the wonders of the botanical world and made Charles Darwin, who studied it, write to Asa Gray, “I am almost stark, staring mad over Lythrum.”

Purple loosestrife blooms at the end of summer during the angry heat of August, but when the hope of coolness is near, they make sheets of brilliant color across steamy lowlands. It spreads in streambeds and marshes, and in the United States it is regarded as a pestilential weed, although Mrs. William Starr Dana, in
How to Know the Wild Flowers
, says, “One who has seen the inland marsh in August aglow with this beautiful plant, is almost ready to forgive the Old Country some of the many pests she has shipped to our shores in view of this radiant acquisition.”

BOTANICAL NAME
:
Nigella damascena
.
FAMILY
:
Ranunculaceae
.

The botanical name comes from the Latin
niger
, “black,” because the seeds are black. In the Middle East Nigella seeds were put in cakes and bread. According to the Bible scholar Harold Moldenke, “Egyptian ladies eat them to produce stoutness, which is considered an attribute to beauty in these lands.”
Nigella damascena
is called after and is believed to have come from Damascus.

Its common name is associated with beauty too, but of a particular kind. “Love-in-a-mist” refers to the fine, hair-like bracts that surround the flowers. Evidently these fine hairs around the blossoms were suggestive. The French, less coyly, call them
chevaux de Vénus
.

The Western literary association of women with flowery images goes back to the Song of Solomon and has not always been ethereal,
even if disguised in fragrant petals. In more primitive times close living quarters made refinement difficult, and dozens of flowers had openly sexual associations. Navelwort (or lady's navel) was used by the Romans with the hope that the juices of its leaves
cum vino circumlitus
(mixed with wine)
in pudendis constrictionem laxat
. As living conditions improved, there was more room for delicacy in life, but flowers remained a useful way of referring to what gradually became less mentionable. By the eighteenth century ladies were openly and admiringly compared to flowers. Oddly, at the same time, Linnaeus was explaining the sexuality of the flowers themselves. He described the andromeda as “flesh-coloured” and added that “her beauty is preserved only so long as she remains a virgin (as often happens with women also)—i.e. until she is fertilized.” No wonder his new system was dismissed by some as “lewd.” Linnaeus himself said that the sexual attributes “of plants we regard with delight, of animals with abomination, of ourselves with strange thoughts” (see “Rudbeckia”).

Linnaeus himself said that the sexual attributes “of plants we regard with delight, of animals with abomination, of ourselves with strange thoughts.”

For the Victorians, names such as Rose, Violet, and Daisy were immensely popular as emblems of innocence and freshness. The irony was not lost on writers. Young ladies wandering through heavily perfumed conservatories as innocently as flowers, like George Eliot's Maggie Tulliver in
The Mill on the Floss
, sometimes got more than they bargained for. Maggie is in
the conservatory during an interval at a ball, when Stephen, who is with her and watching her reach for “a large, half-opened rose,” is seized with a “mad impulse” and showers kisses onto her wrist. He is confronted by a furious Maggie, who asks how he dares “insult” her. Maybe it was easier to walk the line between delicacy and sexuality when ladies were safely sequestered, even though the flowers in the garden might be named for the thighs of an aroused nymph (
‘Cuisse de Nymphe Emue'
—see “Rose”), a maiden's hair, or even a priest's pilly. Ellen Willmott, who never married but who owned Warley Place and had about a hundred gardeners at her beck and call, knew what she was saying when she pointed to a pink rose and said, “That is Cupid: I knew him not.”

COMMON NAMES
: Lupine, lupin, bluebonnet.
BOTANICAL NAME
:
Lupinus
.
FAMILY
:
Fabaceae
.

Like wolves, lupines, from the Latin
lupus
, were supposed to ravage the land and destroy it. Actually they are good for the land as, like all legumes, they fix nitrogen in the soil. They were also called
Pisum lupinum
, because their peas were said to be fit only for wolves. These peas or seeds are very bitter or toxic until boiled several times, but then quite nourishing. The Stoic Zeno compared himself to lupine seeds because when well soaked (with wine) he was less bitter. Those seeking to communicate with the dead at the Oracle of Epiros were fed a diet of lupine seeds, which induce a state of intoxication, perhaps making such communication more accessible.

The Mediterranean lupine is an annual. Perennial lupines are from North America and were introduced to Europe in the seventeenth century. In 1748 Peter Kalm, traveling round North America (see “Mountain Laurel”), noticed that livestock ate “almost all other plants save the lupin,” although the leaves were green and “extremely
soft to the touch.” Charles Darwin studied lupine leaves and found they “sleep in three different manners” when they close at night. In the daytime they are in constant motion, sometimes rotating ninety degrees to follow the sun.

There is a legend that bluebonnets, the Texas wild lupines, were brought to the New World by the Spaniards, whose Crusaders had originally taken them from the Holy Land. There is no biblical record of lupines, but bluebonnets are a distinct limited species that seem celestial when in flower. Henry David Thoreau, describing a hillside of bluebonnets, said, “The earth is blued.”

Like wolves, lupines, from the Latin
lupinus
, were supposed to ravage the land and destroy it.