My Garden in Spring 



Kunkuma, in Indian languages as Kurkum, and in Hebrew 

 as Karkom. In these Eastern languages the consonants 

 are more important than the vowels, and are written first, 

 the vowels being mere dots and dashes placed above or 

 below the line. So K.R.K.M. would represent this word, 

 the name of the drug so highly prized in the ancient world 

 as a sweet scent, a golden dye, and a medicine. It is easy 

 to imagine how merchants would carry it about the world 

 for sale, and how nations speaking different languages 

 would alter the name a little ; Crocum is a form found 

 in the writings of some Romans, and doubtless the result 

 of their not quite catching the pronunciation of the name 

 by which the Phoenician merchants called the precious 

 drug. We have plentiful instances in our own land of 

 the way a vowel gets tranferred from before to after an r 

 as one tracks the word northward. 



I shall not speak here of autumnal Crocuses, though 

 I know it is not quite consistent with my plan and the 

 way I treated Iris unguicularis and the Snowdrops, but I 

 like a change, and hope you do. The Spring and Autumn 

 bloomers are not varieties of the same species, unless 

 graveolens be, as botanists declare, a form of vitdlinus. 

 Nor, except in the case of three widely differing species, 

 do any flower continuously from Autumn to Spring. Of 

 these last, two (C. caspius and laevigatus) flower mainly in 

 the autumn, with just a few poor remnants of flowers for 

 the New Year, so are best classed as autumnal. The 

 third species, C. Cambessedesii, is the only one with 

 sufficient originality of mind to baffle all attempts at 

 classification by time of flowering. 

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