FLOWER NAMES

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXI, Issue 21906, 15 September 1934, Page 1 (Supplement)

FLOWER NAMES

BY M.A.R

.BEAUTY IN SIMPLICITY

It is a happy chance that has made " the kowhai's gold " a sign of our spring, wliero our forbears in the Homeland looked too for a golden flower — The daffodil That comes before tho swallow daree and takes The winds of March with beauty. To most of us a spring show of native flowers is a revelation of an ignorance even more profound than we had feared. We gaze abashed at that rich garnering, as we realise that every spring this garment of beauty is spread over the bush, while we gaze at the "spring flowers" in our prim little gardens. For I do suggest that our gardens, our ordinary little suburban gardens, tended by their owners, are growing almost too tidy. They have a certain sameness. One wonders what would happen to a flower that had the temerity to grow out of place. There are rows and rows of these gardens, very trim, very pretty, gay with flowers, but seemingly all constructed on one pattern. They have a curiously ready- | made look, for all their beauty, like a room new furnished with a suite (horrible word) chosen out of a catalogue.

Looking back to childhood, one realises that people were not always so trim about their gardens. '.The sinner is rare in a suburban street who will venture to leave his lawn unmown or his hedge undipped. Formerly the standard was not nearly so high; there were many more homes with untidy grounds; bi;t when there was a good garden that it had —or so it seems to me —more individuality, that it reflected more clearly the personality of the gardener. Perhaps that was because aids to gardening uere less common then than now. We have a wealth of gardening guides and seedsmen's annuals and seedling plants of every kind readily obtainable. Formerly the gardener, however humble, had to study more and rely on his own taste and judgment. The Fragrance of Years There are so many dwarf plants nowadays too. I even bought some dwarf tomato plants the other day—a foolish act, for half the pleasure of growing tomatoes lies in watching those aspiring stems with leaves and bunches of fruit alternating on their upward journey. In the garden of my dreams there will be many tall • flowers, such as hollyhocks, and little winding paths, so that I may walk among them in the early dusk of a rainy day and feel the freshness of the flowers near my face. And there will be every fragrant and sweetscented flower, whose names are fragrant too. For it is flower names that have put me in quarrelsome mood. With all the eagerness of ignorance I have been planning some flower-beds. No one could accuse my poor garden of being trim —it has been non-exist-ent. 1 ask the seedsman about some snapdragon plants, and he corrected me—antirrhinum, certainly. Now, why should we say antirrhinum ? Snapdragon suggests a gay and gaudy flower; it suggests sunny days and stems overladen with blossom, and a cottage garden with little sun-bon-neted children playing among the flowers. Antirrhinum suggests nothing but a catalogue. And thus I find in my cataloguo the pretentious aquilegia masking the columbine, the old sweet William is Dianthus barbatus, and love-in-a-mist is nigella. Of course there are exceptions to every golden rule: I believe, if 1 were a plant, I would rather be called even mesembryanthemum than pig-face.' But, where a flower has an old-fashioned name made fragrant by the years, let us use it. Poems and Posies Modern flowers with modern names must just, I suppose, grin and bear it, but who could write a sonnet to a clarkia or weave a poem round an eschscholtzia ? For flower names are of the very stuff of poetry. Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies. The tufted crow-toe and pale jessamine. The white pink and the panay freaked with jet. The glowing voilet, The musk-rose and the well-attired woodbine, With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head, And every flower that sad embroidery wears Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed. And daffodillies fill their cups with tears. Here every flower name is like a note of music, or like a flower itself in a well-chosen posy. We are a little timid, also, about the flowers with which we adorn our rooms. They too must be arranged to pattern. I knew an old lady once (alas! she gardens now no more) to whom ,a walk round her garden with a friend was a processional gathering of gifts. She picked the flowers as she went, a little here, a little there, a bit of this, a bit of that, arranging them in her hands as she went, and as she bade you farewell at the gate she handed you the whole rich bunch, a gift that spoke unmistakably of the donor. It would have been vandalism to have separated that bunch of flowers into its component parts, although the grouping might be very unconventional. One always put

it in a bowl, just as it was, qjjd anyone who knew her, on seeing it, would say at once, " Ah! I know where you have been visiting." Monkey-Musk

In that same seedsman's shop whero I sought the snapdragon I was offered some mimulus plants. I did not know them, and was not particularly attracted. But a woman spoke to me urgently in a low voice. She adjured mo to buy a few, if it were only two or three. " Mimulus I" There was a world of scorn in her voice. " It is the old-fashioned monlcoy-musk. You buy a few. You will never regret it. They are a lovely thing." And sho looked anxiously at me and tenderly at that box of plants, as if she were personally concerned that each one of them should find a good home as soon as possible. It was then that I realised that my attitude was all wrong. I had wanted to spruce up the garden and brighten it with colour, much as one cleans and tidies a room. But a true gardener loves the living plant. Perhaps that explains the charm of some of the old cottage gardens. There was a variety of flowers in the beds, and each plant, standing out from its foreign neighbours, claimed its sliaro of attention. Now we make so many beds, massed with the one variety, that the individual plant is lost in the crowd. It is the difference betweeu the home child and the one in an institution. But I am worried about that monkey-musk. I feel that I have not done my duty by it. I have planted it in far too dry a situation, and on the first suitable day I must trans* plant it to a shady spot. For I feel that 1 am only its guardian, and that if I am not kind to it dear knows what may happen!