100 Flowers and How They Got Their Names by Diana Wells Page A

the Greeks.
    Narcissus, who was exquisitely beautiful, saw his own image in a pool, leaned over to possess it, and drowned, becoming the flower.
    They were associated with death. In Greek myth, pale asphodels grew in the meadows of the Underworld, kingdom of the dead. Hades abducted Persephone after she had wandered away from her companions to pick the flowers. The stupefying quality of their sweet perfume was once thought to be as dangerous as any narcotic, and many people find the scent overpowering. The Victorians suspected narcissi of having harmful “effluvia.”
    The name “narcissus” is most often associated with the Greek youth Narcissus, with whom the nymph Echo fell in love. He spurned her, and she hid in a cavern where she died of a broken heart, leaving only her voice. Meanwhile Narcissus, who was exquisitely beautiful, saw his own image in a pool, leaned over to possess it, and drowned, becoming the flower. People do love themselves when they think they love another, but they don’tchange into flowers—which was often a handy solution to a problem in Greek mythology.
    The daffodil, for many, is spring itself. Describing the daffodils she and her brother William saw on a walk, Dorothy Wordsworth said, “Some rested their heads on these stones as on a pillow.” This is good to remember when looking at daffodils after a storm: they are simply resting their heads. Dorothy noted that the daffodils “tossed and reeled and danced, and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind, they looked so gay and glancing.” One can’t help wondering if William read her diary before writing his famous poem and wandering lonely as a cloud.
    The Romans believed the daffodil’s sap could heal wounds.
    The daffodil has filled the time of as many poets as botanists, and almost everywhere people have traveled they have taken daffodils. Oscar Wilde said, “They are like Greek things of the best period,” which is a way of saying that nothing really surpasses them and if possible they should be taken wherever we go—even to the Underworld.

DAHLIA
    BOTANICAL NAME :
Dahlia
. FAMILY :
Asteraceae
.

    Dahlias are called after Dr. Anders Dahl, a Swedish botanist. Until recently they were also called “georginas,” after the botanist Johann Georgi of Petersburg. The name is still used in Eastern Europe.
    The history of their introduction is confused as well. They originated in Mexico and were grown by the Aztecs, who called them
“cocoxochitl.”
Spanish invaders sent them home to the Old World, but dahlias did not, like some floral imports, take European gardeners by storm.
    One story recounts that dahlia tubers were stolen from the royal gardens in Madrid and taken to the Jardin du Roi in Paris. Another nice story says that they were imported directly to France by a Thierry de Menonville, who had been sent to Mexico by the French government to smuggle out cochineal insects (a precious source of red dye, protected by the Spanish). Menonville reputedly sent the tubers home to Paris as food for the insects on the journey. The cochineal insectsdied, but the tubers were then sent on to the Jardin du Roi, whose curator, André Thouin, saw the dahlia as a possible edible substitute for the potato. Although it is not the proper food for the cochineal insect, the dahlia is said to be edible and the Aztecs had indeed used it for food. One Victorian described dahlias as having a “repulsive, nauseous peppery taste [which] inspires equal disgust to man and beast.”
    After Thouin’s brief interest in the dahlia as a food source, the plant seems to have disappeared until several decades later. There had been no place for them either in the French formal gardens or the great English landscaped estates of the eighteenth century. But in the early nineteenth century seeds were sent to Berlin, where they were named for the botanist Johann Georgi; they were also sent by