Plant Names 
289 
view is limited and he learns to know garden flowers 
and birds and insects thoroughly, when the vast and 
bewildering variety of field and forest would have 
remained unappreciated by him. 
It is a distressing condition of the education of 
farmers, that they know so little about the country. 
The man knows about his crops, and his wife about 
the flowers, herbs, and vegetables of her garden ; 
but no countrymen know the names of wild flowers 
— and few countrywomen, save of medicinal herbs. 
I asked one farmer the name of a brilliant autumnal 
flower whose intense purple was then unfamiliar to 
me — the Devil's-bit. He answered, “ Them’s Woi- 
lets.” Violet is the only word in which the initial V 
is ever changed to W by native New Englanders. 
Every pink or crimson flower is a Pink. Spring 
blossoms are “ Mayflowers.” A frequent answer is, 
u Those ain't flowers, they're weeds.” They are more 
knowing as to trees, though shaky about the ever- 
green trees, having little idea of varieties and inclined 
to call many Spruce. They know little about the 
reasons for names of localities, or of any histor- 
ical traditions save those of the Revolution. One 
exclaims in despair, cc No one in the country knows 
anything about the country.” 
This is no recent indifference and ignorance; Susan 
Cooper wrote in her Rural Hours in 1848 : — 
u When we first made acquaintance with the flowers of 
the neighborhood we asked grown persons — learned per- 
haps in many matters — the common names of plants they 
must have seen all their lives, and we found they were no 
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