I haven’t planted anything in the ground yet this spring, but the lawn is perking up with flowers, some of them of our own planting, and many of them wild, and that gave me the idea to devote our Word of the Week to the some old-fashioned names for flowers, which I like a lot better than the gray and tinny scientific names. Who doesn’t prefer, for example, sweet-william to dianthus? “That’s got to have come from somebody named William whom people liked,” you’ll guess — and was it Shakespeare? Alas, no. One guess is that the “william” part of it is an Englishing of the Old French word oeillet, “little eye,” because the flower looks sort of like a big open eye with the darker pupil inside. But there was an old ballad about two lovers who came to a sorry end, named “Fair Margaret and Sweet William,” and it apparently was pretty well known by the time of Shakespeare. Or maybe people heard “sweet oeillet” and thought, “Sweet William!”
Anyway, I like the old name, and sometimes a flower is so common, not even the botanists or the greenhouses can dislodge it. That’s the case with dandelion, which is about to spring up in our yard. Maybe I’m a rare bird, but I actually like the bold and cheerful things, as do the birds and the bees, for that matter, since everything about the dandelion is edible. Italians eat the greens, which have a sharp but not unpleasant taste, and they make wine from the flowers. I’ve never had dandelion wine — can any of our friends here tell me what it tastes like? Apparently it is one of the common flavorings in American root beer, whose main ingredient, sassafras, I grew up with, because it grew wild in open fields with poor soil. We’d yank up a young sassafras, maybe a foot high, scrape the dirt from the tap root, and suck or chew on it, for the sweet and minty flavor. The English word for it comes from the early Spanish colonists who called it sasafras, probably from a native Indian word now lost, which they mis-heard and applied to their own word saxifraga, from Latin, meaning stone-breaker.
But what about the name of the bright yellow weed? It comes from the French: dent-de-leon, that is, lion’s tooth! I think the name comes from the spiky leaves and not the flower. In Welsh, it’s dant-y-llew, also lion’s tooth, though maybe they picked up the idea from the French and applied it to their own language. So it appears also in German: Löwenzahn. By the way, in case you’re wondering: French dent, Welsh dant, German Zahn, and English tooth are all cousins.
“Now then,” you may say, “even if sweet-william didn’t come from somebody named William, rosemary sure has to come from somebody named Rosemary!” Yes and no. The word didn’t, but then English speakers heard it as rosemary because they were accustomed to the name. The flower was called in Latin rosmarinus, meaning — ready? — sea-dew! That’s what the farmer-poet Columella called it, in the 1st century A.D. Rosemary doesn’t grow in our yard, but forget-me-nots do, down in the back forty where the rainwater doesn’t drain so well. I remember the forget-me-nots when I was a boy, and we had a sort of gully in our backyard. My father planted a couple of willow trees to drink up the moisture, but the ground was still wet enough to sprout up in a big carpet of forget-me-nots every year. But if you go to a greenhouse, you’re as likely as not to find on sale, as the forget-me-not, some flower called myosotis, which sounds like a disease, doesn’t it?
“How are you doing, Joe?” says his old friend Jim, as he sits on a stump, whittling a stick of apple-wood. “Well, I don’t know,” says Joe, sitting down on a stump nearby and letting his cane drop to the ground. “My memory ain’t what she used to me. Doc says I got a bad case of myosotis.” “Dang, that’s too bad,” says Jim. “My old lady had it too. Lots of it going around.” But all fooling aside — it often happens that the “scientific” name is just an old folk name in Greek or Latin. Greek myos-otis is just mouse’s-ear, because there’s a kind of soft fuzz on the leaves that reminded them of that. And yes, Greek mys and English mouse are cousins too — with Sanskrit mus, Russian mysh’, and a whole lot more, because, as you may guess, the critters were everywhere.
Wild violets are springing up all through the shady part of our yard. They’re a light purple with a shading into a soft yellow center. They show up all over the world. They get their name from Latin viola, for the color. Roses are red and violets are blue — but who said so for the first time? I don’t know. I do know that it’s as old as the poet Spenser, who described a beautiful nymph of Diana’s, who after the sweat of the hunt, “bathed in roses red and violets blue, / And all the sweetest flowers that in the forest grew.” That was in 1590. The buttercups are also sprouting. They’re lovely little things, and nobody minds them, yet between them and the dandelion, the one we’re not supposed to like, the dandelion, is the real friend to man. These are called buttercups for their buttery yellow color and their shape, but they’re toxic, and if your sheep eat them, watch out. In Roman times the flower was called the ranunculus — the little frog, or, I guess we could say, the frogling. Why, I have no idea. In Italian it’s still ranunculo, frogling. But the Germans are of our mind: they call it Butterblume, “butter-flower.” Well — butter was always more important up north than in Italy, where the olives grow!
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