100 Flowers and How They Got Their Names (8 page)

By chrysanthemums we usually mean mums, the popular fall-blooming perennial or hothouse plants originating in China. Actually several flowers we call daisies, such as the ox-eye daisy, the painted daisy, and the Shasta daisy, are technically chrysanthemums (see “Daisy”).

The name “chrysanthemum” comes from the Greek
chrys
(golden) and
anthos
(flower). The Mediterranean
Chrysanthemum coronarium
, from the Latin
coronarius
(used for garlands), was a golden-yellow flower from which garlands were made to protect against demons. It was also called
Dios ophrya
(God's eyebrow). The European feverfew or featherfew (the medieval
Tanacetum
, or “tansie,” now
Chrysanthemum parthenium
) was widely used as an antipyretic.

The Chinese chrysanthemum, originally a daisy-like wild plant, had been cultivated in Chinese gardens for more than twenty-five hundred years before it came to the West. The fourth-century poet T'ao Yuan-Ming had a famous chrysanthemum garden to which he retired after refusing a high government post. He preferred to “pick chrysanthemums from the hedges,” entertain his friends, and get drunk.
Chrysanthemums symbolized a scholar in retirement, though not necessarily a recluse. Infusions of the petals and leaves made wine and medicine, and the dew collected from them was supposed to promote longevity. They were considered one of the four “noble plants” (the other three being bamboo, plum, and orchid). About
A.D
. 400, Zen Buddhist monks took chrysanthemums to Japan, where they eventually became the symbol of the Mikado, represented by an insignia that looked like the Rising Sun but was in fact a sixteen-petaled chrysanthemum.

It was also called
Dios ophrya
(God's eyebrow).

The first “garden” chrysanthemum (
C
. ×
morifolium
) was exhibited in England in 1795. In the nineteenth century, John Reeves, tea inspector for the East India Tea Company in China, sent home chrysanthemums and botanical drawings by Chinese artists. Robert Fortune sent home the Chusan daisy, which became the pompom chrysanthemum, so called because in France, where it was first grown, it looked like pompoms on sailors' hats.

Since chrysanthemums are short-day flowers, they are well adapted to greenhouse cultivation and can be hoodwinked into blooming at any time of year by decreasing the amount of light they receive. Outdoors they bloom in autumn. One ardent chrysanthemum grower is said to have sued his township because a streetlight shining on the flowers at night prevented them from blooming. They are used freely in houses in England and America, but in Italy, perhaps because of the time of year they bloom, they are associated with the dead and are unacceptable in any other context.

COMMON NAMES
: Clematis, virgin's bower, old man's beard.
BOTANICAL NAME
:
Clematis
.
FAMILY
:
Ranunculaceae
.

Clematis vines were growing all over the world, both wild and in gardens, before Linnaeus conclusively named them (from the Greek
klema
, “a twig”). The Swiss botanist Kaspar Bauhin, in a compendium of the six thousand plants then known, had listed a “clematitis,” and John Parkinson changed the spelling to “clematis,” describing its seeds as a “round feather topt ball.” The Japanese called them “wire lotus.” John Gerard called them “Travellers-Joy” and said the plants had no use but were “esteemed onely for pleasure, by reason of the goodly shadow which they make with their thicke bushing and clyming, as also for the beauty of the floures.”

The first Asian clematis to reach Britain seems to have been the
Clematis florida
, which grew in the garden of the famous Quaker, Dr. John Fothergill. Fothergill humbly described his garden as “a paradise of plants of small extent, whose master . . . has at least a burning love of botany.” But Sir Joseph Banks said that “no other garden in Europe, royal or of a subject, had nearly so many scarce and valuable plants.”

Fothergill's clematis was cultivated in Japan but was a native of China, where most of the large-flowered clematis varieties originated. The enormous-flowered Chinese
Clematis lanuginosa
(from the Latin
lanuginosus
, “woolly”) was imported by Robert Fortune (see “Bleeding Heart”) in 1850.

The most popular clematis grown is the gorgeous purple
C
. ×
jackmanii
. It was bred in the Jackman nursery in 1858 and is generally believed to be a cross between three other varieties. George Jackman published
The Clematis as a Garden Flower
, in which he suggested planting a clematis garden with the vines trained over picturesque old tree stumps. By then though, a new fashion had started of pegging down clematis vines to cover the ground and fill flower beds. William Robinson also suggested they should be allowed to grow through shrubs such as azaleas, “throwing veils over the bushes here and there.”

The new British hybrids were introduced to America in the 1890s, but the British “wild” garden style of Gertrude Jekyll and William Robinson never really became fashionable here, probably because America was wild enough as it was. Andrew Jackson Downing, the American landscape gardener, said that clematis “are capable of adding to the interest of the pleasure ground, when they are planted so as to support themselves on the branches of trees.” They do not seem to have been allowed to sprawl over the flower beds.

Clematis are most often seen nowadays growing up mailboxes, where they hang nicely in “veils.” The flowers are breathtakingly beautiful, especially when seen up close—which we have an opportunity to do whenever we collect our junk mail and bills.

COMMON NAMES
: Columbine, granny's bonnet.
BOTANICAL NAME
:
Aquilegia
.
FAMILY
:
Ranunculaceae
.

At first it seems odd that the common and favorite name of the flower of cuckoldry and the flower of the mysterious doctrine of the holy dove should be “granny's bonnet,” even though it is shaped like an old-fashioned bonnet. Columbines remind us of bonneted little old women, nodding and gossiping, huddled under walls and in corners, where these flowers love to grow. But maybe the name is not so odd after all. For old women, bobbing and trembling, have memories under those bonnets: they might well have known the excitement or agony of cuckoldry (depending on the part they played); they may have been mothers who saw the lives of their sons given to mysterious idealism (their own or someone else's); they may have buried babies, and hoped for rebirth. The columbine's bonnets, maybe, could represent it all.

Its botanical name is
Aquilegia
, either from the Latin
aquila
,
“eagle,” because the spurs were like long eagle's talons, or, possibly, from the Latin,
aquarins
(a water carrier). Ancient jars for holding liquids and oil were often pointed at the base and buried upright in the ground to keep the contents cool, and they did look a bit like the spurs of the columbine flower. Spurs, like all horns, also symbolized cuckoldry and disloyalty.

The name “columbine” comes from the Latin
columba
(dove). Held upside down the flower looks a bit like a ring of doves drinking. John Gerard said the leaves too were “the shape of little birds.” The flower, with one petal and sepals removed, also resembles a hovering dove.

In old paintings and tapestries, columbine represented the dove of peace, symbol of the Holy Spirit, and it can be seen in religious works poking up through grassy foregrounds or the interstices of terraces. Many garden flowers had symbolic religious meanings; paintings depicted them blooming and fruiting together in a perpetual spring that knew no other seasons, in a Garden of Eden that was thought to have existed somewhere in reality. Enclosed medieval gardens of Paradise were attempts to literally re-create a paradise of all the plants in the world (and until Darwin's time these were thought to have been the same since the day of Creation).

In the medieval paintings, animals lie peacefully together on grassy swards, surrounded by flowers, including columbines. Indeed the columbine was also called the “herbe wherein the Lion doth delight” because it was believed that lions, at least lions in Paradise, liked to eat it. Whether, when they tried, it fluttered out of their reach, like doves, we do not know. At any rate, for a bit they were all there in Eden together.

COMMON NAMES
: Crape
or
crêpe myrtle, China berry.
BOTANICAL NAME
:
Lagerstroemia
.
FAMILY
:
Lythraceae
.

Although crape myrtle grows all over the Amercan South, it was introduced, probably from a Chinese cargo ship, by a Frenchman, André Michaux. It was named by Linnaeus after Magnus von Lagerström, generous benefactor to Uppsala University, where Linnaeus taught. Lagerström once brought Linnaeus a rhinoceros-horn cup from China carved with fruit, flowers, and lizards. This cup was among the possessions and papers of Linnaeus bought by Sir James Smith after the botanist's death. When the Swedes realized that all of Linnaeus's effects would be taken to England, there was a great stir—one story says that the Swedish navy chased the boat carrying them to England. This is probably not true, but a nice engraving exists which shows the English ship out-sailing its Swedish pursuers. In 1970 the Linnaean Society returned the rhinoceros-horn cup (but not the papers) to Sweden in honor of the king's eighty-eighth birthday.

Michaux was a Frenchman who took up botany after his beloved
wife died. His adventures in Persia included being robbed of all his possessions twice and left without his shoes, making it hard for him, he said, to botanize on the hot sand. In 1785 he was sent by the French government to America to collect American plants, particularly trees that could help in reforestation. With his fifteen-year-old son François he set up nursery gardens in New York and Charleston to house his American collections and introductions from abroad, including the Lombardy poplar and the ginkgo. Michaux stayed ten years, exploring from Florida to Canada. A water primrose and an oak are named
michauxiana
and
michauxii
in honor of father and son. Michaux sent thousands of trees back to Versailles, though many did not survive the voyage home. He himself almost died in 1796 when he was returning to France and his ship was wrecked off the Holland coast. Michaux was washed ashore, unconscious, lashed to a spar. He survived, along with his collection of dried plants. After all his years of service, the revolutionary government refused to pay the salary he was owed, and he finally died of fever in Madagascar.