OLD ENGLISH FLOWER-NAMES 137 



play waken of the sweet, naughty ladies who paced 

 here in the days of Brantome and Ronsard ? Whereas 

 one great charm of the old class of ' herbaceous stuff,' 

 as gardeners contemptuously called it but a few 

 summers ago, lies in their permanence. Many are 

 not only technically perennial, in the sense of not 

 having to be resown annually, but seem even to have 

 the property of perpetual youth. In many an old 

 English garden there are vigorous clumps of scarlet 

 lychnis or fragrant dittany coeval with mighty oaks 

 in the park outside and a girl may gather a posy 

 to-day from the selfsame tuft on which another of 

 her kin dropped tears as she thought of lover or 

 husband riding with Falkland at Newbury or Rupert 

 at Marston Moor. 



But another secret of our affection for old-fashioned 

 flowers is contained in their old-fashioned names, of 

 which some are no more than homely, but others are 

 full of tender or plaintive meaning. Some flowers 

 have titles of both qualities; that, for instance, 

 now known to everybody as forget-me-not, though 

 Gerarde and the old herbalists called it scorpion- 

 grass, because in its spike of unopened buds could be 

 traced a resemblance to a scorpion's tail. This was 

 quite enough, according to the doctrine of signa- 



