Joan Silver-pin 313 



Notwithstanding all this distinction and beauty, 

 these fine things of the garden were dubbed Joan 

 Silver-pin. I wonder who Joan Silver-pin was ! I 

 have searched faithfully for her, but have not been 

 able to get on the right scent. Was she of real life, 

 or fiction ? I have looked through the lists of char- 

 acters of contemporary plays, and read a few old jest 

 books and some short tales of that desperately color- 

 less sort, wherein you read page after page of the 

 printed words with as little absorption of signification 

 as if they were Choctaw. But never have I seen 

 Joan Silver-pin's name; it was a bit of Elizabethan 

 slang, I suspect, a cant term once well known by 

 every one, now existing solely through this chance 

 reference of the old herbalists. 



No garden can aspire to be named An Old-fash- 

 ioned Garden unless it contains that beautiful plant 

 the Garden Valerian, known throughout New Eng- 

 land to-day as Garden Heliotrope; as Setwall it 

 grew in every old garden, as it was in every pharma- 

 copeia. It was termed "drink-quickening Setuale " 

 by Spenser, from the universal use of its flowers to 

 flavor various enticing drinks. Its lovely blossoms 

 are pinkish in bud and open to pure white ; its 

 curiously penetrating vanilla-like fragrance is disliked 

 by many who are not cats. I find it rather pleas- 

 ing of scent when growing in the garden, and not at 

 all like the extremely nasty-smelling medicine which 

 is made from it, and which has been used for centuries 

 for " histerrick fits," and is still constantly prescribed 

 to-day for that unsympathized-with malady. Dr. 

 Holmes calls it, " Valerian, calmer of hysteric 



