GARDENING PEDANTRY CRABBE. 31 



As names run at present, the ordinary amateur is 

 obliged to give up the whole matter in despair, and 

 rest satisfied with the awful false quantities which 

 his gardener is pleased to inflict upon him, who, for 

 his own part, wastes hours and hours over names 

 that convey to him no information, but only serve 

 to puff him up with a false notion of his acquire- 

 ment, when he finds himself the sole possessor of 

 this useless stock of " Aristophanic compounds and 

 insufferable misnomers." Crabbe, whom nothing was 

 too minute to escape, has admirably ridiculed this 

 botanical pedantry : 



" High-sounding words our worthy gardener gets, 

 And at his club to wondering swains repeats ; 

 He there of Rhus and Rhododendron speaks, 

 And Allium calls his onions and his leeks. 

 Nor weeds are now ; from whence arose the weed, 

 Scarce plants, fair herbs, and curious flowers proceed ; 

 Where cuckoo-pints and dandelions sprung 

 (Gross names had they our plainer sires among), 

 There Arums, there Leontodons we view, 

 And Artemisia grows where wormwood grew." 



To make confusion worse confounded, our bota- 

 nists are not satisfied with their far-fetched names ; 

 they must ever be changing them too. Thus it is a 

 mark of ignorance in the world of flowers to call our 

 old friend geranium otherwise than Pelargonium ; 

 the Glycine (6r. sinensis) the well-known specimen 

 of which at the Chiswick Gardens produced more 

 than 9000 of its beautiful, lilac, laburnum-like 

 racemes from a single stem is now to be called 

 Wistaria : the new Californian annual ^Enothera is 

 already Godetia ; while the pretty little red Hemi- 



