100 Flowers and How They Got Their Names by Diana Wells

used by fishermen in Campania. Pandolfo Collenuccio, in a defense of Pliny, argued that fishermen used several plants (including cyclamen) this way and there was no reason to suppose Pliny mistaken.
    Before the science of botany developed, this kind of theoretical debate preoccupied scholars, and cyclamen’s medicinal uses were tailored to fit many theories. During the Renaissance, the influential Doctrine of Signatures, popularized by Paracelsus, held that the appearance of different plants conveniently indicated the use for which they had been created. Cyclamen, because it had a leaf shaped much like an ear, was used to treat earaches.
    The English botanist William Turner warned that cyclamen wassuch a potent aid to childbirth that it was dangerous for pregnant women even to step over cyclamen roots. Poor Turner knew about childbirth. He complained that his living quarters were so crowded that “I can not go to my booke for ye crying of childer and noyse yt is made in my chamber.” He wrote the first popular English herbal, published in 1551, which called cyclamen “Sawesbread.”
    The name “sowbread” refers to the supposed use of cyclamen tubers as food for pigs, although Canon H. N. Ellacombe, in 1895, said that some pigs had got into his garden and dug up a bed of cyclamens without eating any of them. The name “cyclamen” comes from the Greek
kyklos
(circle) and probably refers to the seed stalks, or pedicels, which after flowering curl up and ripen among the leaves. The Greek name for cyclamen was
chelonion
(tortoiseshell) because the tubers look like little turtles.
    The wild European cyclamens are enchantingly diminutive versions of the gross hothouse cyclamens more often grown today. These are descendants of the Persian cyclamen, which came to Britain in the 1650s, and are an example of freak gigantism that Victorian plant breeders were able to exploit. They make handsome houseplants that the Victorian writer John Loudon claimed lived for years and were “easily raised from seed” to produce “from fifty to eighty blossoms.” They do not have the magic of the meek (but hardy) wild cyclamens that will grow in America south of climatic zone 5 and that will, if content, spread to make brilliant clumps. Most of us feel triumphant if we manage to keep the conservatory cyclamens alive at all for more than one season, let alone growing them from seed. The Victorians must have been better gardeners, or better liars, than we are.

DAFFODIL
    COMMON NAMES : Daffodil, narcissus, jonquil.
BOTANICAL NAME :
Narcissus
. FAMILY :
Amaryllidaceae
.

    The difference in meaning between the names of daffodils, narcissi, and jonquils is still unclear, but we seem to agree that all daffodils are narcissi, though not all narcissi are daffodils, and it has to do with length of trumpet and number of flowers per stem.
    The confusion over the name “daffodil” may have started early, when the British, who preferred the imported asphodel to their native daffodil, allegedly called the former “bastard ’affodil.” “Jonquil” comes from the Spanish
jonquillo
(rush), referring to the rush-like leaves. Daffodils may have been brought to Britain by the Romans, who believed their mucilaginous sap could heal wounds, although in fact it contains sharp crystals that prevent animals from eating the plant and may in fact irritate the skin. But JohnParkinson says, “Know I not any in these days, with us, that apply any of them as a remedy for any griefe, whatsoever Gerard or others have written.” Parkinson was right, for the sap of daffodils contains crystals of calcium oxalate, an irritant, which is why, in a vase of mixed flowers, daffodils will soon make the other blossoms wilt. The asphodel also has sharp crystals in its sap which protect it from being eaten, although its roots, unlike the daffodil’s, are said to be edible and were used in times of famine by