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PEEFACE. »^'^" 



The compilation of this Dictionary was undertaken at the request of 

 Mr. W. Robinson, of The Garden newspaper, at whose expense the work 

 is pubhshed, he having advocated in his journal a more general use 

 of English names for the plants, trees, and shrubs which are commonly 

 grown in our gardens and pleasure-grounds, and who wished the 

 horticultural public to have at command a list of all such names now 

 appUed to these as well as to all other cultivated and useful plants in- 

 cluding our native flora and the native plants and trees of America and 

 the colonies. 



It is an undeniable fact that the vast majority of people of all 

 classes who take an interest in horticultural pursuits consists of those 

 who, never having received any classical or botanical training, find it 

 difficult to learn and remember, and impossible to understand, the Latin 

 or scientific names by which plants are spoken of and described by 

 botanists. These names, however useful and even necessary they may be 

 as technical terms to the systematic botanist, become a senseless jargon in 

 the vain attempt to fix them amongst our " household words," and most 

 of us are keenly alive to the inconsistency of employing words from a 

 foreign and even dead language to name such familiar everyday objects 

 as the flowers and shrubs which are grown in our gardens and woods. 

 ' Notwithstanding the copious use of Latin, it would be a grievous mistake 

 to suppose that Enghsh names do not exist for most of our cultivated 

 plants, the fact being that such names do exist, and abundantly, many of 

 them dating back to the days of Spenser, Shakespeare, Gerard, and 

 Parkinson — nearly 800 years ago — although they have now fallen into 

 disuse, and are only to be met with in books, in consequence of what the 

 Rev. John Earle, in his excellent little volume on "English Plant Names," 

 terms " the gratuitous rejection of good native names in favour of some 

 Latin name, through mere contempt for homely things and affectation of 

 novelty." No farther back, mdeed, than the commencement of the present 

 century, it would appear that, even amongst gardeners, it was the ordinary 



