Part 5

One would fear that this wealth of diverse hues might even become embarrassing, were it not that the heart of the flower-lover is insatiable.

LIKENESSES THAT BAFFLE

Stay, stand apart; I know not which is which.

The Comedy of Errors.

ONE of the first difficulties by which those who would learn their native flora are beset is the likeness which in some cases exists between one plant and another--not the close resemblance of kindred species, such as that found, for instance, among the brambles or the hawkweeds, which is necessarily a matter for expert discrimination, but the superficial yet often puzzling similarity in what botanists call the "habit" of wildflowers. Thus the horse-shoe vetch may easily be mistaken, by a beginner, for the bird's-foot trefoil, or the field mouse-ear chickweed for the greater stitchwort; and the differences between the dove's-foot crane's-bill and the less common geranium pusillum are not at first sight very apparent. Distinguishing features instantly recognized by an expert, who has taken, so to speak, finger-tip impressions of the plants, do not readily present themselves to the layman, whose only guide is the general testimony of structure, colour, and height.

It is, moreover, unfortunate that some of the popular flower-books, owing to the slovenly way in which their descriptions are worded, are of little help; they not only fail to give the needed particulars where there is a real likeness, but often, where there is none, create confusion in the reader's mind by depicting quite dissimilar plants in almost identical terms. In Johns's Flowers of the Field (edition of 1908), for example, the description of hedge-woundwort hardly differs verbally from that of black horehound, and might certainly mislead a novice who was studying hedgerow flowers. The same writer had an exasperating habit of repeatedly stating that various plants are "well distinguished" by certain features, when in fact it is very difficult, from the accounts given by him, to distinguish them at all!

An earlier and better writer, Anne Pratt, did make an effort in her Haunts of the Wild Flowers to indicate the chief characteristics, as between the sea-plantain and the sea-arrowgrass, the hemp-agrimony and the valerian; but even she, when some of the labiate flowers were in question, dismissed them, not very helpfully, as "all growing in abundance, but so much alike that it needs a knowledge of botany to distinguish them from each other"! I have known a case where, owing to a picturesque but inaccurate account, in the same book, the Welsh stonecrop (sedum Forsterianum) was confused with the marsh St. John's-wort, which has leaves that bear a curious resemblance to those of the sedum tribe.

Even writers of botanical handbooks seem not to realize with what difficulties the uninitiated are faced, in regard to certain groups of plants where the several species, though quite distinct, bear a strong family likeness. The chamomiles, for instance, might well receive some special treatment in books; for it is no simple matter to assign their proper names to some four or five of the clan--the true chamomile, the wild chamomile, the corn chamomile, the stinking chamomile, and the "scentless" mayweed, which is not scentless. Many of the umbellifers also are notoriously difficult to identify; and among leguminous plants there is a bewildering similarity between black medick, or "nonsuch," and the lesser clover (trifolium minus), which in turn is liable to be confused with the popular hop-clover or with the slender and fairy-like trifolium filiforme. "Small examples of t. minus," said a well-known botanist, Mr. H. C. Watson, "are so frequently misnamed t. filiforme, that I trust only my own eyes for it." "As like as two peas" is a saying which finds fulfilment in these and other examples.

The clovers are indeed a perplexing family; and it is not surprising that the identification of the "shamrock" has given cause for dispute. Two of the smaller trefoils, for example, trifolium scabrum and striatum, so closely resemble each other that a novice fails to appreciate the assurance given in the Flora of Kent that they "can very easily be separated." It is doubtless easy to separate one twin from another twin, Dromio of Ephesus from Dromio of Syracuse, when once you know how to do so; but until you have acquired that knowledge there is material for a "comedy of errors." The majority of folk are much more apt to confuse plants than to distinguish them: witness such names as "fool's-parsley" and "fool's-watercress." Fools there are; yet anyone who has spent time in studying wildflowers, with no better aid than that of the popular books on the subject, will hesitate to pass judgment on such folly; for as so good an observer as Richard Jefferies said: "If you really wish to identify with certainty, and have no botanist friend and no magnum opus of Sowerby to refer to, it is very difficult indeed to be quite sure." We have to be thankful for small mercies in this matter; and it may be recognized that in some cases--generally where the similarity is not great, as that between the strawberry-leaved cinquefoil and the wild strawberry, or between the feverfew and the scentless mayweed--the books occasionally give a word of advice to "the young botanist." Nine times out of ten, however, that young fellow, or perchance old fellow (for one may be young as a botanist, while by no means young in years), must shift for himself; and doing so, he will gradually learn by experience what a number of likenesses there are among plants, and how many mistakes may be made before a sure acquaintance is arrived at.

The name of "mockers" is sometimes given by gardeners to weeds that are so like certain valued plants as to be easily mistaken for them; and in the same way, in the search for wildflowers, one's attention is often distracted, as, for instance, if one is looking for the spineless meadow-thistle, the eye may be baffled by innumerable knapweed blossoms of the same hue; the clustered bell-flower will feign to be the autumnal gentian, its neighbour on the chalk downs; or the blossoms and leaves of the purple saxifrage on the high mountains are aped by the ubiquitous wild thyme.

Of all these likenesses the most perilous is that between the malodorous ramsons, which have a very abiding smell of garlic, and the highly esteemed lily of the valley. Hence a story which I once heard from the affable keeper who presides over a wooded hill in Westmorland where the lily of the valley abounds, and where visitors are permitted to pick as many flowers as they like after payment of a shilling. Seeing a gentleman busily engaged in gathering a large bunch of ramsons, the keeper, suspecting error, asked him what he supposed himself to be picking. "Why, lilies of the valley, of course," was the reply. When the truth was explained, the visitor thanked the keeper cordially, and added: "I was picking the flowers for my wife: but if I had brought her a present of garlic she would have had something to say to me. I myself have lost the sense of smell."

Likeness or unlikeness--it is all a matter of observation. To a stranger, every sheep in the flock has a face like that of her fellows: to the shepherd there are no two sheep alike.

BOTANESQUE

What is it? a learned man Could give it a clumsy name. Let him name it who can, The beauty would be the same.

TENNYSON.

AMONG the difficulties that waylay the beginner must be reckoned the botanical phraseology. We have heard of "the language of flowers," and of its romantic associations; but the language of botany is another matter, and though less picturesque is equally cryptic and not to be mastered without study.

When, for example, we read of a certain umbelliferous plant that its "cremocarp consists of two semicircular-ovoid mericarps, constricted at the commissure"--or when, with our lives in our hands, so to speak, we experiment in fungus-eating, and learn that a particular mushroom has its stem "fistulose, subsquamulose, its pileus membranaceous, rarely subcarnose, when young ovato-conic, then campanulate, at length torn and revolute, deliquescent, and clothed with the flocculose fragments of the veil"--we probably feel that some further information would be welcome.

A friend who had been reading a series of articles on botany once remarked to me that "they could scarcely be said to be written in any known language, but were in a new tongue which might perhaps be called Botanesque."

But it is of the botanesque nomenclature that I now wish to speak. The faculty of bestowing appropriate names is at all times a gift, an inspiration, most happy when least laboured, and often eluding the efforts of learned and scientific men. By schoolboys it is sometimes exhibited in perfection; as in a case that I remember at a public school, where three brothers of the name of Berry were severally known, for personal reasons, as Bilberry, Blackberry, and Gooseberry, the fitness of which botanical titles was never for a moment impugned.

But botanists rarely invent names so well. The nomenclature of plants, like that of those celestial flowers, the stars, is a queer jumble of ancient and modern, classical learning and mediaeval folk-lore, in which the really characteristic features are often overlooked. In this respect the Latin names are worse offenders than the English; and one is sometimes tempted, in disgust at their pedantic irrelevance, to ignore them altogether, and to exclaim with the poet:

What's in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet.

But this would be an error; for a name does greatly enhance the interest of an object, be it boy, or bird, or flower; and the Greek and Latin plant-names, cumbrous and far-fetched though many of them are--as when the saintfoin is absurdly labelled onobrychis, on the supposition that its scent provokes an ass to bray--form, nevertheless, a useful link between botanists of different nations and a safeguard against the confusion that arises from a variety of local terms.

Among the English names also there are some clumsy appellations, and in a few cases the Latin ones are much pleasanter: stellaria, for example, as I have already said, is more elegant than "stitchwort." "What have I done?" asks the small cousin of the woodruff, in Edward Carpenter's poem, when it justly protests against its hideous christening by man:

What have I done? Man came, Evolutional upstart one, With the gift of giving a name To everything under the sun. What have I done? Man came (They say nothing sticks like dirt), Looked at me with eyes of blame, And called me "Squinancy-wort."

But on the whole the English names of flowers are simpler and more suggestive than the Latin; certainly "monk's-hood" is preferable to aconitum, "rest-harrow" to ononis, "flowering rush" to butomus; and so on, through a long list: and it therefore seems rather strange that the native titles should sometimes be ousted by the foreign. I have met botanists who had quite forgotten the English, and were obliged to ask me for the scientific term before they could sufficiently recall the plant of which we were speaking.

The prefix "common" is often very misleading in the English nomenclature. Anyone, for example, who should go confidently searching for the "common hare's-ear" would soon find that he had got his work cut out. There are, in fact, not many plants that are everywhere common; most of those that are so described should properly be classed as local, because, while plentiful in some districts, they are infrequent in others.

Botanical names fall mainly into three classes, the medicinal, the commemorative, the descriptive. The old uses of plants by the herbalists mark the prosaic origin of many of the names; some of which, such as "goutweed," at once explain themselves, as indicating supposed remedies for ills that flesh is heir to. Others, if less obvious, are still not far to seek; the "scabious," for example, derived from the Latin scabies, was reputed to be a cure for leprosy: a few, like "eye-bright" (euphrasia, gladness), have a more cheerful significance. When we turn to such titles as centaurea, for the knapweed and cornflower, some explanation is needed, to wit, that Chiron, the fabulous centaur, was said to have employed these herbs in the exercise of his healing art.

The commemorative names are mostly given in honour of accomplished botanists, it being a habit of mankind, presumably prompted by the acquisitive instincts of the race, to name any object, great or small--from a mountain to a mouse--as belonging to the person who discovered or brought it to notice. In the case of wildflowers this is not always a very felicitous system of distinguishing them, though perhaps better than the utilitarian jargon of the pharmacopoeia. Sometimes, indeed, it is beyond cavil; as in the fit association of the little linnaea borealis with the great botanist who loved it; but when a number of the less important professors of the science are immortalized in this way, there seems to be something rather irrelevant, if not absurd, in such nomenclature. Why, for example, should two of the more charming crucifers be named respectively Hutchinsia and Teesdalia, after a Miss Hutchins and a Mr. Teesdale? Why should the water-primrose be called Hottonia, after a Professor Hotton; or the sea-heath Frankenia, after a Swedish botanist named Franken; and so on, in a score of other cases that might be cited? The climax is reached when the rubi and the salices are divided into a host of more or less dubious sub-species, so that a Bloxam may have his bramble, and a Hoffmann his willow, as a possession for all time!