SOME NAMES OF PLANTS 223 



weeds ; yet wlienever one asked how she was 

 getting on, and of what kinds of weeds she found 

 the greater number, her broad brown face woukl 

 beam her appreciation of the interest shown in her 

 work, and her stout figure would make a sudden 

 subsidence in the good old country bob-curtsey, as 

 she gave the invariable answer " Docks, m'm," 



Sometimes the country folk will make a name 

 of their own. I think this must have been 

 the case in a village in the south of Sussex in 

 whose neighbourhood I was often on a visit to a 

 dear friend, now, alas, no longer living. There 

 was a grand growth of Bignonia radicans along the 

 front of some cottages, whose occupiers called 

 it by the capitally descriptive name of Flowering 

 Ash. And from the same friend I learnt the 

 most remarkable country plant-name I ever heard ; 

 for she told me that one day, asking the mistress 

 of a cottage home what she called the well-known 

 Stonecrop with spreading heads of bright-yellow 

 flowers on six-inch-high stalks that grew on the low 

 old wall in front of the cottage garden, the 

 woman said : " Well, m'm, we call it Welcome- 

 home-husband-be-he-ever-so-drunk " ! 



