116 OUR ROCK-GARDEN 



so that we are thrown upon another track : the 

 plant botanically is the Asperula odorata, and its 

 early colloquial name may signify the odorous 

 woodland plant, the wood-sweet. On the other 

 hand, the plants of the genus have a certain 

 roughness to the touch, hence asperula ; and the 

 Anglo-Saxon for rough is ruh, thence another 

 theory is that the plant is the wood-rough. Others, 

 again, remind us that the radiating leaves are 

 strongly suggestive of the ruff that has from time 

 to time appeared as an article of dress, but we 

 may take it that such a derivation is of too modern 

 a date ; while yet others take the French roue, 

 a wheel, as a base, and find justification for the 

 idea in the spoke-like rings of leaves. The diminu- 

 tive form is rouelle, a little wheel or rowel, and we 

 are invited to see in the leaf arrangement a sug- 

 gestion of the radiate star-like spurs of the olden 

 days. Turner, for instance, writing in 1548, calls 

 our plant the woodrowel, and says that its leaves 

 " represent certaine rowelles of spurres." 



The woodruff is found in woods and copses in 



to it. This latter in olden days was the heriffe, from the 

 Anglo-Saxon words haga, a hedge, and reafe, a taxgatherer 

 a name given to it from its grasping powers, hooking into 

 anything by which it could sustain itself and rambling far 

 and wide over the hedges and undergrowth. It may well be 

 that in those less observant days the aggressive demeanour 

 of the one plant caused the other that resembled it to be 

 credited with an ambition quite foreign to its nature. 



