In My Vicarage Garden 



Baron von Mueller, the energetic Government 

 botanist for Victoria, in his account of tropical 

 plants useful in manufactures, etc., has given good 

 reasons against this. In writing the book he says 

 that — 



" Vernaculars have been but sparingly used, being so often 

 of duplicity or even multiplicity in their application, and so 

 frequently also misleading. We should strive to simplify 

 nomenclature, and should reduce popular names to such 

 solitary and logical expressions as most readily can be under- 

 stood in each instance. Thus it is as easy to say Casuarinas 

 as the very objectionable appellations Sheoak and Heoak." 



I know that there are some, but not many, I 

 should think, who profess to love flowers, but 

 who say they care nothing for the names, whether 

 English, Latin, or Greek. They will quote from 

 Shakespeare that " a rose by any other name 

 would smell as sweet," or Tennyson's description 

 of the baronet's garden, in which — 



" Flowers of all hue and lovelier than their names 

 Grew side by side.'' 



With such I have no sympathy ; it is a real 

 pleasure to me, and I know it is to many others 

 who are not only botanists, but good garden 

 masters, to hunt up the history of a plant name ; 

 to trace it from Theophrastus, Dioscorides, and 

 Pliny till I get the helping hand of Gaspar 

 Banhin, who in the seventeenth century sum- 

 marised for me in his great Pinex Theatri Botanici 

 all the names that had gone before ; and then 

 Miller, in his Gardener' s Dictionary, will do much 

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