WHO NAMED THE FLOWERS?

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXIX, Issue 20104, 10 May 1935, Page 12

WHO NAMED THE FLOWERS?

LINK WITH THE PAST No longer are there any flowers to name, for those that are found in far places, such as Tibet, are but new varieties of floi’al families long known tp us. Mr Perkins, of Suburbia, meditates upon this, and with something of regret as he turns the polychromatic pages of the new seed catalogue (states the “Christian Science Monitor”). They are so charmingly, dearly, and sometimes whimsically christened, many of the garden flowers that bear the old, old English names. Here is the most delicate yet enduring of contacts with an unrecorded past—the names of the familiar flowers. It is as though we talked with neighbours across the backyard lawn, so friendly, so engagingly usual, are the names of flowers.. Yet this communication is across the centuries. Who could have been the one that was not to be forgotten, in a countryside of long ago and far away, when the forget-me-not was named. And the William whose name was given to Sweet William, in a time comparably remote, was he a sailor boy on a ship bound for the western ocean? It may have been that Black-eyed Susan stood on an English wharf looking to seaward, while the sail was small and shining in the sunset.

Who named the familiar flowers so aptly and so fondly? Not those that ride with the “periwigged charioteers,” this much is certain, for they have little time to spend on such seeming triviality—though the names of the flowers shall endure when the kings have departed. The flowei's were named by three sorts of people—grandmothers, children, poets. They were named in laughter and lightness, they were named in sighing, and time is singularly powerless to alter the names of them.