100 Flowers and How They Got Their Names

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

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Authors: Diana Wells
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Lady Bute, wife of the British ambassador in Spain, to England, where they were named after Dahl, a physician and a pupil of Linnaeus. When they returned to the New World, they were known as “Mexican georginas.”
    The Empress Josephine uprooted her precious dahlia cultivars after some were stolen from Malmaison by a lady-in-waiting; we are not told what happened to the lady-in-waiting. Soon dahlias became immensely popular. In 1826 a prize of one thousand pounds was offered for a blue dahlia, and one dahlia tuber was reputedly exchanged for a diamond. Victorians enjoyed a showy lack of discretion in their material surroundings, and the contemporary style of gardening now fitted dahlias admirably. They now could connect the fashionable new shrubberies with the formal beds of flowers raised in hothouses and “bedded out.” Perhaps this flamboyance was a way of compensating for discretion in so many other spheres of Victorian life.

DAISY
    COMMON NAMES : Daisy, marguerite, ox-eye daisy. BOTANICAL NAMES :
Bellis perennis, Chrysanthemum
.
FAMILY :
Asteraceae
.

    Chaucer, writing about the English daisy, said that there was no “English rhyme or prose / Suffisant this floure to praise aright.” Its botanical name comes from the Latin
bellus
, “beautiful.” The English name comes from the Old English
daeges-eaye
or “day’s eye,” referring to the way the flowers open and close with the sun.
    Flowers that open or close at certain times of the day were perhaps more noticed by our ancestors than by us, with our surfeit of timepieces. Andrew Marvell observed that the garden “computes its time as well as we,” and Linnaeus actually made a floral clock whose flowers could accurately show the time throughout the day, according to when they opened. English daisies would not have been good in this respect, as they do not open on cloudy days.
    Ox-eye “daisies,” or marguerites (which are really chrysanthemums), may have got their name from their pearly color, from the Greek
margaretes
(pearl), or, some say, from the name Margaret.Margaret of Anjou is the most likely candidate for this honor, and she had daisies embroidered on her personal banner. She was the wife of Henry VI who, in 1422, succeeded to the thrones of both England and France. Henry was supposed to have been saintly and ineffectual, but Margaret was ruthless and extremely ambitious to obtain the throne for her son. In the end both Henry and their son died and Margaret was exiled to France.
    We associate daisies with simplicity, but the composite blooms are tube-shaped floral groups surrounded by petals, not one simple flower. An insect attracted to a composite pollinates dozens of flowers at once. The ox-eye daisies, which came with the colonists to America, were loved by poets and hated by farmers because their roots give off toxic substances that damage crops even as they fill great expanses with their beauty. Luther Burbank crossed them with a Japanese “daisy” to obtain, in 1890, the famous Shasta daisy. Apart from the Burbank potato it was his most successful hybrid and substantiated his belief that “man can modify, change, improve, add, or take away from any plant he chooses.” He called the new daisy after the magnificent Mount Shasta near his home. It has remained a garden favorite ever since.
    The daisy continued its tradition of modesty, and in Victorian times it was a popular name for sweet young girls. But although beautiful, like Margaret of Anjou, marguerites, which are the “daisies” grown in American gardens (the climate is not right for English daisies), have another side, just as she did. In a vase they will make the other flowers wilt. But a field of them looks like a sky studded with millions of stars—stars whose beauty for once is not inaccessible and that we can reach for and hold in our hands.

DATURA
    COMMON NAMES : Angel’s trumpet, thorn apple.
FAMILY

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