They are plucked from where nature bade them grow in the wild places, or their own wayward wills led them astray.  A singularly fascinating chapter is that called “Escaped from Gardens,” in which some of these pretty runagates are catalogued.  I supposed in my liberal ignorance that the Bouncing Bet was the only one of these, but I have learned that the Pansy and the Sweet Violet love to gad, and that the Caraway, the Snapdragon, the Prince’s Feather, the Summer Savory, the Star of Bethlehem, the Day-Lily, and the Tiger-Lily, and even the sluggish Stone Crop are of the vagrant, fragrant company.  One is not surprised to meet the Tiger-Lily in it; that must always have had the jungle in its heart; but that the Baby’s Breath should be found wandering by the road-sides from Massachusetts and Virginia to Ohio, gives one a tender pang as for a lost child.  Perhaps the poor human tramps, who sleep in barns and feed at back doors along those dusty ways, are mindful of the Baby’s Breath, and keep a kindly eye out for the little truant.

III.

As I was writing those homely names I felt again how fit and lovely they were, how much more fit and lovely than the scientific names of the flowers.  Mrs. Creevey will make a botanist of you if you will let her, and I fancy a very good botanist, though I cannot speak from experience, but she will make a poet of you in spite of yourself, as I very well know; and she will do this simply by giving you first the familiar name of the flowers she loves to write of.  I am not saying that the Day-Lily would not smell as sweet by her title of ‘Hemerocallis Fulva’, or that the homely, hearty Bouncing Bet would not kiss as deliciously in her scholar’s cap and gown of ‘Saponaria Officinalis’; but merely that their college degrees do not lend themselves so willingly to verse, or even melodious prose, which is what the poet is often after nowadays.  So I like best to hail the flowers by the names that the fairies gave them, and the children know them by, especially when my longing for them makes them grow here in the city streets.  I have a fancy that they would all vanish away if I saluted them in botanical terms.  As long as I talk of cat-tail rushes, the homeless grimalkins of the areas and the back fences help me to a vision of the swamps thickly studded with their stiff spears; but if I called them ‘Typha Latifolia’, or even ’Typha Angustifolia’, there is not the hardiest and fiercest prowler of the roof and the fire-escape but would fly the sound of my voice and leave me forlorn amid the withered foliage of my dream.  The street sparrows, pestiferous and persistent as they are, would forsake my sylvan pageant if I spoke of the Bird-foot Violet as the ‘Viola Pedata’; and the commonest cur would run howling if he beard the gentle Poison Dogwood maligned as the ‘Rhus Venenata’.  The very milk-cans would turn to their native pumps in disgust from my attempt to invoke our simple American Cowslip as the ‘Dodecatheon Meadia’.