100 Flowers and How They Got Their Names (23 page)

COMMON NAMES
: Myrtle, periwinkle.
BOTANICAL NAME
:
Vinca
.
FAMILY
:
Apocynaceae
.

What Americans call myrtle is really vinca or periwinkle. The name is used because the leaves are similar to the aromatic Mediterranean bush myrtle, or
Myrtus
.

Mediterranean myrtle was the symbol of both love and immortality, perhaps the two most important human preoccupations. It was used extensively and was considered an essential plant. Some stories said that Adam was allowed to take only three plants—wheat, dates, and myrtle—from Paradise. The myrtle nymphs taught the Greeks, via Apollo's son Aristaeus, the useful arts of making cheese, building beehives, and cultivating olives; they used myrtle to tan leather (which retained the aromatic fragrance) and as a black hair dye. The aromatic leaves are perforated
(which later made it an important “Christ plant”) supposedly because Phaedra, desperately in love with her stepson, Hippolytus, sat nervously pricking them while she watched him exercising. Unlike some Greek heroes, he behaved very properly and rejected her love, which turned to despair. It all ended in tragedy when she hanged herself (on a myrtle tree), and his chariot reins caught on some myrtle branches and he was dragged to his death.

The vinca, with its tough, shiny leaves similar to myrtle's (but not aromatic), probably came to Britain with the Romans. “Vinca” comes from the Latin
vincire
(to bind), and the long, tough stalks were used by the Romans to make ceremonial wreaths often associated with sacrifices. In the Middle Ages vinca wreaths garlanded criminals on their way to execution. “Vinca pervinca,” or “creeping vinca,” became “periwinkle.”

The plant retained its associations with love. Albertus Magnus, a thirteenth-century Dominican botanist, scientist, and theologian who was canonized by the Catholic Church in 1931, said that “beate unto pouder with wormes of ye earth wrapped aboute it . . . [it] induceth love between man and wyfe if it bee used in their meals.” Lovers prepared to go to those lengths might, one would think, be on the way to love anyway. Magnus added that if “said confection be put in the fyre,” it turns blue—and maybe that is where the said confection often ended, while the man and wyfe managed without it. While not insuring, as far as we know, immortality, the Madagascar periwinkle is used to make vinblastine, which successfully treats Hodgkin's disease and childhood leukemia, thereby at least prolonging life.

BOTANICAL NAME
:
Tropaeolum
.
FAMILY
:
Tropaeolaceae
.

Monet's famous garden at Giverny relied heavily on nasturtiums. They fitted the impressionist style of shimmering blurred colors, and they spilled over pathways like exuberant brush strokes. Monet was a contemporary of Gertrude Jekyll, and his garden, like hers, was revolutionary—a freely painted garden in an era of formal bedding. But as well as being informal and beautiful, nasturtiums are invaluable in the garden for filling in space with a minimum
of effort and expense. As early as 1592 John Gerard observed that “one plant doth occupie a great circuit of ground.”

Nasturtiums originated exclusively in South America, and were first described by the Spanish physician and plant collector Nicolas Monardes in
Joyfull Newes out of the Newe Founde Worlde
(1569). In the middle of every nasturtium petal, he noted, was a spot like “a droppe of bloode, so redde and so firmely kindled in couller, that it cannot bee more.” But when most plants then were grown for usefulness rather than beauty, he said of the nasturtium, “I sowed a seede which thei brought me from Peru, more to see his fairnesse than for any Medicinall vertues that it hath.” One can picture him at his desk with a nasturtium in front of him, gazing into the flower, careful not to miss the tiniest beautiful detail for his readers.

A child can throw seeds in the ground and they will come up and cover the least fertile spaces with gorgeous shields and helmets.

The name comes from the Latin
nasus
, “nose,” and
tortus
, “twisted,” because their pungent smell makes the nose wrinkle or twist. The botanical name is from the Greek
tropaion
, “a trophy,” referring to the shield-like shape of the leaves. In ancient Greece, the shields and helmets of defeated enemies were fixed onto tree trunks. Linnaeus saw the plant twining up a post and thought the leaves looked like hanging shields and the flowers like bloodstained helmets. Monardes's nasturtiums were
Tropaeolum minus
, smaller than the
Tropaeolum majus
, which came to Europe later, in 1648, and was the ancestor of our garden nasturtiums. Other nasturtiums include the Canary creeper, which is quite often grown in modern gardens as a summer vine, and a tuberous variety in Peru, used for food. Our garden nasturtiums are eaten too, and sometimes the seeds are pickled.

Thomas Jefferson planted nasturtiums every year. A letter from him to Bernard Peyton, not long before he died, said, “I missed raising Nasturtium seed the last year and it is not to be had in this neighborhood. Can your seedsmen furnish it?” He wanted enough seeds for a bed of nasturtiums ten by nineteen
yards
!

In the world exhibition in Paris in 1878, there were thirty varieties of nasturtium. They are so easy to grow that these days professional horticulturalists rather tend to ignore them. Of course there is not much point in their promoting them: a child can throw seeds in the ground and they will come up and cover the least fertile spaces with gorgeous shields and helmets. But their “fairnesse” is still irresistible, and no summer garden should ever be without them.

COMMON NAME
: Orchid.
BOTANICAL NAME
:
Orchis
.
FAMILY
:
Orchidaceae
.

The history of orchids is of lust, greed, and wealth. The most famous orchid, the vanilla orchid, was thought to promote strength in the Aztecs, who drank vanilla mixed in chocolate. The name “vanilla” is derived from the Spanish
vainilla
, for the shape of the seed pod, or vanilla bean, and has the same root as “vagina.” At first Westerners did not appreciate it: “our Privateers . . . have often thrown [vanilla] away when they took any, wondering why the Spaniards should lay up Tobacco stems,” wrote the pirate and botanist William Dampier, who was the darling of London society when not capturing ships and killing their crews. But by 1753, Linnaeus recommended vanilla as an aphrodisiac in
Materia Medica
, which listed sixty-nine species of orchid.

The name orchid comes from the Greek
orchis
(testicle). The tubers of Mediterranean orchids resemble paired testicles of different sizes, the smaller storing the previous year's food. The popular cattleya
orchid was named in 1818 for William Cattley, who received it as packing around other plants. But after it flowered, it died, and wasn't found again for years. At a ball in Paris an orchid enthusiast noticed one in the cleavage of a South American ambassadoress. Immediately he inquired where it came from, and it was traced to Brazil. The cattleya lives up to the orchid's lascivious reputation in Marcel Proust's
Swann's Way
, when Swann offers to fasten one “a little more securely” in “the cleft of [Odette's] low-necked bodice.” He then suggests he should “brush off” the pollen fallen from it, and the rest follows.

The cattleya lives up to the orchid's lascivious reputation in Marcel Proust's
Swann's Way
.

Other orchids are called “ladies' fingers” or “ladies' tresses,” “long purples,” or, as Ophelia says, “a grosser name.” The paphiopedilum orchids are named for Paphos, the site of a temple on Cyprus where Aphrodite was worshipped and prostitutes were available, and for
pedilon
(a slipper). All in all orchids are, even in their names, closely connected with the power that “geveth lust unto the workes of generacyon and multiplycacyon of sperma” (Hieronymous Braunschweig,
Book of Distillation
).

The sexual behavior of orchids has baffled botanists since they first began to be studied. To germinate, their seeds need to be penetrated by fungus threads. Orchids go to extremes to propagate themselves, just as those who sought to acquire them went to extremes to show off their wealth and power.

In the nineteenth century orchids were collected by the ton. Once, four thousand trees were cut down for the orchids growing on them. One collector alone was said to have sent one hundred thousand orchids to England, many of which died. Wilhelm Micholitz sent home an orchid growing in a human skull, which was auctioned for a huge sum complete with container.

The vanilla orchid was thought to promote strength in the Aztecs.