Nature, and curiosity about Language.  Plant names are often of the highest antiquity, and more or less common to the whole stream of related nations.  Could we penetrate to the original suggestive idea that called forth the name, it would bring valuable information about the first openings of the human mind towards Nature; and the merest dream of such a discovery invests with a strange charm the words that could tell, if we could understand, so much of the forgotten infancy of the human race.”

Footnotes: 

1.  “Dictionary of English Plant Names,” by J. Britten and Robert
    Holland. 1886.

2.  “English Plant Names,” Introduction, p. xiii.

3.  See Folkard’s “Legends,” p. 309; Friend’s “Flowers and Flowerlore,”
    ii. 401-5.

4.  See “Flower-lore,” p. 74.

5.  Friend’s “Flower-lore,” ii. 425.

6. Garden, June 29, 1872.

7.  Johnston’s “Botany of Eastern Borders,” 1853, p. 177.

8.  Lady Wilkinson’s “Weeds and Wild Flowers,” p. 269.

CHAPTER XIV.

PLANT LANGUAGE.

Plant language, as expressive of the various traits of human character, can boast of a world-wide and antique history.  It is not surprising that flowers, the varied and lovely productions of nature’s dainty handiwork, should have been employed as symbolic emblems, and most aptly indicative oftentimes of what words when even most wisely chosen can ill convey; for as Tennyson remarks:—­

          “Any man that walks the mead
  In bud, or blade, or bloom, may find
  A meaning suited to his mind.”

Hence, whether we turn to the pages of the Sacred Volume, or to the early Greek writings, we find the symbolism of flowers most eloquently illustrated, while Persian poetry is rich in allusions of the same kind.  Indeed, as Mr. Ingram has remarked in his “Flora Symbolica,"[1]—­Every age and every clime has promulgated its own peculiar system of floral signs, and it has been said that the language of flowers is as old as the days of Adam; having, also, thousands of years ago, existed in the Indian, Egyptian, and Chaldean civilisations which have long since passed away.  He further adds how the Chinese, whose, “chronicles antedate the historic records of all other nations, seem to have had a simple but complete mode of communicating ideas by means of florigraphic signs;” whereas, “the monuments of the old Assyrian and Egyptian races bear upon their venerable surfaces a code of floral telegraphy whose hieroglyphical meaning is veiled or but dimly guessed at in our day.”  The subject is an extensive one, and also enters largely into the ceremonial use of flowers, many of which were purposely selected for certain rites from their long-established symbolical character.  At the same time, it must be remembered that many plants have had a meaning attached to them by poets and others, who have by a license of their own made them to represent certain sentiments and ideas for which there is no authority save their own fancy.