5.  “Popular Names of British Plants,” 1879, p. 204.

CHAPTER XVIII.

CHILDREN’S RHYMES AND GAMES.

Children are more or less observers of nature, and frequently far more so than their elders.  This, perhaps, is in a great measure to be accounted for from the fact that childhood is naturally inquisitive, and fond of having explained whatever seems in any way mysterious.  Such especially is the case in the works of nature, and in a country ramble with children their little voices are generally busy inquiring why this bird does this, or that plant grows in such a way—­a variety of questions, indeed, which unmistakably prove that the young mind instinctively seeks after knowledge.  Hence, we find that the works of nature enter largely into children’s pastimes; a few specimens of their rhymes and games associated with plants we quote below.

In Lincolnshire, the butter-bur (Petasites vulgaris) is nicknamed bog-horns, because the children use the hollow stalks as horns or trumpets, and the young leaves and shoots of the common hawthorn (Cratoegus oxyacantha), from being commonly eaten by children in spring, are known as “bread and cheese;” while the ladies-smock (Cardamine pratensis) is termed “bread and milk,” from the custom, it has been suggested, of country people having bread and milk for breakfast about the season when the flower first comes in.  In the North of England this plant is known as cuckoo-spit, because almost every flower stem has deposited upon it a frothy patch not unlike human saliva, in which is enveloped a pale green insect.  Few north-country children will gather these flowers, believing that it is unlucky to do so, adding that the cuckoo has spit upon it when flying over. [1]

The fruits of the mallow are popularly termed by children cheeses, in allusion to which Clare writes:—­

  “The sitting down when school was o’er,
  Upon the threshold of the door,
  Picking from mallows, sport to please,
  The crumpled seed we call a cheese.”

A Buckinghamshire name with children for the deadly nightshade (Atropa belladonna) is the naughty-man’s cherry, an illustration of which we may quote from Curtis’s “Flora Londinensis":—­“On Keep Hill, near High Wycombe, where we observed it, there chanced to be a little boy.  I asked him if he knew the plant.  He answered ’Yes; it was naughty-man’s cherries.’” In the North of England the broad-dock (Rumex obtusifolius), when in seed, is known by children as curly-cows, who milk it by drawing the stalks through their fingers.  Again, in the same locality, children speaking of the dead-man’s thumb, one of the popular names of the Orchis mascula, tell one another with mysterious awe that the root was once the thumb of some unburied murderer.  In one of the “Roxburghe Ballads” the phrase is referred to:—­

“Then round the meadows did she walke,
Catching each flower by the stalke,
Suche as within the meadows grew,
As dead-man’s thumbs and harebell blue.”