100 Flowers and How They Got Their Names (5 page)

It is possible that Michel Bégon was familiar with the flowers that bore his name, but it is not probable. Bégon was an official of Louis XIV's government in Santo Domingo and later governor of Canada, and he recommended the Minimus monk Charles Plumier to the King. Plumier named the begonia after Bégon, just as he named the lobelia, the magnolia, and the fuchsia after botanists whom he admired. He died in 1704 while waiting for a boat to take him to Peru to investigate the quinine tree's potential as a cure for malaria, the disease that killed so many of his contemporaries.

Begonias did not become important garden flowers until the nineteenth century, when South America became a rich source of new plants. Many begonias were discovered there and introduced by Richard Pearce around 1865:
Begonia pearcei
engendered today's tuberous begonias. Pearce sometimes climbed over twelve thousand feet, with no sort of equipment, to get botanical specimens.

The kind of hardships that early botanists had to undergo seem
unimaginable now. They had no equipment, as we know it today, and they had to carry everything with them—this included large quantities of paper for pressing plants, and ink to make notes. They were constantly in danger and suffered from the unremitting attacks of insects. Again and again we read of explorers being plagued with mosquitoes, gnats, or fleas. Why they did not carry protective gauze or netting, which had been available since classical times, is hard to understand. Indeed the Greek historian Herodotus tells of Egyptian fishermen wrapping themselves in their nets as a protection from mosquitoes, and Cleopatra is described as stretching her mosquito net on the Tarpeian Rock before getting down to the business of seduction.

Pearce sometimes climbed over twelve thousand feet, with no sort of equipment, to get botanical specimens.

Pearce died of mosquito-borne yellow fever in Panama at the age of thirty. Soon after Plumier's time quinine was used to cure malaria, but many botanists died anyway because the connection between mosquitoes and disease was not deduced until the beginning of the present century.

COMMON NAMES
: Bleeding heart, lady in the bath.
BOTANICAL NAME
:
Dicentra spectabilis
.
FAMILY
:
Fumariaceae
.

Bleeding heart does look like a dripping heart. But if you turn the flower upside down and pull it slightly open, it also looks exactly like a “lady in the bath,” which it is sometimes called. Its botanical name is from the Greek
di
(two) and
kentron
(spur).
“Spectabilis”
is saying, in Latin, that it is spectacular, which it is.

Robert Fortune introduced bleeding heart once the Treaty of Nanking, in 1842, gave plant collectors some access to China. Fortune set out to explore an unknown world, equipped with a Chinese dictionary, a stick loaded with lead that he called a “life preserver,” and three of the new “Wardian” glass cases, which had recently been invented by Nathaniel Ward. He succeeded in sending back many of our greatest garden treasures.

The carrying cases were invented accidentally when Ward buried a chrysalis in a closed bottle containing earth. He had intended only to watch the moth develop, but he noticed that a small fern grew and prospered
in the bottle, and he hit upon the idea of using similar airtight containers to protect plants from salt spray, lack of water, and changes in temperature on the long sea voyages home. It completely revolutionized the transportation of live plants from abroad.

Fortune went into the still-forbidden interior of China to smuggle out plants, dressed in Chinese clothing complete with false pigtail.

Fortune went into the still-forbidden interior of China to smuggle out plants, dressed in Chinese clothing complete with false pigtail. His adventures included being set upon by angry crowds and robbed, falling into a wild boar trap, and being attacked by pirates, whom he held at bay while the crew of the junk hid below. When trespassing into the interior, he did not dare eat at inns because his lack of skill with chopsticks would have betrayed him. But although he collected many treasures, he was not flattering about the Chinese. They were, he said, filled with “the most conceited notions of their own importance and power; and fancy that no people, however civilised, and no country, however powerful, are for one moment to be compared with them.” This did not prevent him from collecting some of their loveliest garden treasures, most of which were the result of centuries of Chinese breeding and cultivation. He did not, like later explorers, go deep into the interior to collect truly wild plants, but we have to thank him for the many flowers he brought from what he called the “central flowery land.”

COMMON NAMES
: Virginia bluebell, English bluebell, Spanish hyacinth.
BOTANICAL NAMES
:
Mertensia virginica, Endymion non-scripta, Hyacinthoides non-scripta
.
FAMILIES
:
Boraginaceae, Liliaceae
.

Several flowers, including Canterbury bells and harebells, are sometimes called “bluebells,” but the two that concern us here are the American bluebell and the English bluebell. Both, in their respective countries, turn spring woodlands into shimmering sheets of blue, as if the sky itself were reflected back onto the earth. They are not related, except in their capacity to perform this miracle.

The American bluebell is called
Mertensia virginica
after Franz Karl Mertens, a German botanist and director of a business school in Bremen. The name is sometimes wrongly attributed to his son, Karl Heinrich, for he too was a botanist, though neither has much to do with the damp Virginia woodlands where the mertensia flourishes.

The Virginia bluebell was first sent back to Europe by John Banister, a young clergyman sent to Virginia by Bishop Henry Compton to
be in charge of the spiritual health of the American colonies. Although he specialized in freshwater snails, Banister was also a botanist who wrote about a world of plants so strange that he feared others might think them “chameras” of his own mind. He died while botanizing, apparently shot by a soldier who mistook him for a wild animal.

William Turner called the native English bluebell “commune Hyacinthus” or “crowtoes” and said that its roots made very good glue. John Gerard called it “Hyacinthus Anglicus” and recommended the roots as starch for stiffening ruffs. It does not have the “inscription”
AI AI
on the petals (see “Hyacinth”) so it was called
non-scripta
. Another of its names was “scilla,” from the Greek for “sea squill.” The Spanish scilla, which has flowers all round the stem, is sometimes confused with the English bluebell, which has flowers only along the lower side of its drooping stalk, because both are found wild and sometimes hybridized in English woods.

William Turner called the native English bluebell “commune Hyacinthus” or “crowtoes” and said that its roots made very good glue.

The name
Endymion
comes from the Greek youth Endymion, with whom Selene, the moon, fell in love. He was a shepherd, and she looked down on him in the fields and was smitten by his extraordinary beauty. She managed (by her own or Zeus's exertions) to make him sleep forever, so she could always flicker over his body and kiss him where he lay. Actually, bluebells, massed in a wood, bring the whole noontime sky flickering down on them, not just the moon, and, like Endymion, they will do it forever if they are left alone.

BOTANICAL NAME
:
Bougainvillea
.
FAMILY
:
Nyctaginaceae
.

Bougainvillea was named for Louis Antoine de Bougainville, who was commissioned by Louis XV to circumnavigate the world and obtain any unclaimed territory to compensate for French losses to the British in North America. But it was the botanist Philibert Commerson who actually discovered and named the bougainvillea. Commerson accepted Bougainville's invitation to accompany him around the world to divert himself from his despair when his wife died in childbirth.

The spectacular new vine that Commerson called after his friend and captain originates in South America, but Commerson saw it in Tahiti ornamenting houses. The two men were captivated by Tahiti and the inhabitants' spontaneous and public love-making. Commerson noted that their “chief god” was love, but that their religion included an occasional human sacrifice. The Tahitians found the Europeans intriguing too, particularly Commerson's cat, for which they offered
to exchange their loveliest maiden. Commerson, some would think to his credit and others foolishly, refused.