94 BARBAROUS PLANT NAMES 



butterfly-like blotch on tlie falls/ and what think you 

 the learned folk have invented for it? It has been 

 christened Iris Robinsoni I These homely English 

 patronymics offer a serious obstacle to those who love 

 to commemorate their affection for the departed by 

 flowers which return year by year. It must be seldom 

 that a modern Bion shall find a Moschus to marshal 

 sweet mourners at his bier 



' Ye flowers, sigh forth your odours with red buds ; 

 Flush deep ye roses and anemones ; 

 And more than ever now, hyacinth, show 

 Your written sorrows the sweet singer 's dead.' 



To find one of the congeners of Robinson we need 

 only turn to the list of lilies ; and who the deuce was 

 Brown ? we murmur pettishly, that he should make a 

 godchild of the noble Lilium Browni, with its purple 

 trumpets, lined with white satin. Lilies on the whole 

 have fared better than other plants when names were 

 served out; for here are tigrinum and pardalinum, 

 the tiger and leopard lilies, in gorgeous livery of orange 

 and sable. Yet a recent importation from Mexico, 

 described as ' one of the most beautiful of all/ has to 

 carry a barbarous barrow-load of polysyllables Lilium 

 Bloomerianum magnificum. 



Daffodils (let alone the florist's varieties) come fairly 

 well out of it. Narcissus bicolor, odorus, jonquilla, 

 were so called of old, hi the good days of Gerarde and 

 Parkinson, and their names mingle prettily with memo- 

 ries of March winds and suns. Poeticus, too, the 

 exquisite pheasant-eye narcissus, latest to flower, brings 



