Popular Plant Names. 405 



simply the buttercup with us, and not the crowfoot by the 

 people at large, has elsewhere the names of King's cup, gold cup, 

 gold knobs, leopard's foot, and cuckoo bud. With us yellow 

 flowers of similar character, such even as the lesser celandine, 

 immortalised by Wordsworth's well known lines, generally bear 

 the name of buttercup, and I have even heard it applied to the 

 marsh marigold, caltha palustris. We have thus nothing so 

 poetical as the Italian " Spouse of the Sun," applied to our marsh 

 marigold, which, however, is said to have been the flower alluded 

 to by Shakespeare in the words, " And winking Mary-buds begin 

 to ope their golden eyes." We all know the daisy as the gowan, 

 but I have also heard it called the curly doddie, but this was 

 given by a man who had spent some years in Cornwall, where, I 

 believe, from a curious poem in the vernacular of that county 

 which once came under my observation, it is used for another 

 flower, apparently of the buttercup or crowfoot family. The dog 

 ■daisy is chrysanthemum leucanthemum, while, as we all know, 

 another of the same genus is not, as we might expect, the corn 

 •daisy, but the corn marigold. Then the lucken gowan is a mem- 

 "ber of still another natural order, as it is the trollius, also called 

 the globe flower, and said to bear in some parts of Scotland the 

 name of witches' gowan. It was also known as the troll flower, 

 a term probably, like the preceding one, derived from its acrid 

 juices being used by the malignant beings, the Trolls and witches. 

 Globe crowfoot and globe ranunculus are also names of this 

 pretty native plant. 



We are all familiar with crawtae as our Scottish appellation 

 ■of the wild scilla or wood hyacinth, which is also the blue-bell 

 •of England, although it has been called there by the old 

 herbalists the hare bell or hare's bell, and some think that it was 

 -the "azure harebell " of Shakespeare. It is the culver keys of 

 Izaak Watson. 



Few of our wild plants have had so many popular names as 

 verbascum thapsus, our wild mullein, and a conspicuous object 

 near Arbigland on the beach of the Solway. I have never heard 

 it called locally anything but "a mullin," but with some other 

 plants I believe it is also called Aaron's rod. Shepherd's gourd 

 is another name I have heard given to it, but that was used by 

 a person of more northern origin. Torches, hedge taper, high 

 iaper, and hig taper are all names it has borne, originating from 



