Joan Silver-pin ~ 313 
Notwithstanding all this distinction and beauty, 
these fine things of the garden were dubbed Joan 
Silver-pin. I wonder who Joan Silver-pin was ! I 
have searched faithfully for her, but have not been 
able to get on the right scent. Was she of real life, 
or fiction ? I have looked through the lists of char- 
acters of contemporary plays, and read a few old jest 
books and some short tales of that desperately color- 
less sort, wherein you read page after page of the 
printed words with as little absorption of signification 
as if they were Choctaw. But never have I seen 
Joan Silver-pin's name; it was a bit of Elizabethan 
slang, I suspect, — a cant term once well known by 
every one, now existing solely through this chance 
reference of the old herbalists. 
No garden can aspire to be named An Old-fash- 
ioned Garden unless it contains that beautiful plant 
the Garden Valerian, known throughout New Eng- 
land to-day as Garden Heliotrope; as Setwall it 
grew in every old garden, as it was in every pharma- 
copoeia. It was termed “ drink-quickening Setuale ” 
by Spenser, from the universal use of its flowers to 
flavor various enticing drinks. Its lovely blossoms 
are pinkish in bud and open to pure white ; its 
curiously penetrating vanilla-like fragrance is disliked 
by many who are not cats. I find it rather pleas- 
ing of scent when growing in the garden, and not at 
all like the extremely nasty-smelling medicine which 
is made from it, and which has been used for centuries 
for “ histerrick fits," and is still constantly prescribed 
to-day for that unsympathized-with malady. Dr. 
Holmes calls it, cc Valerian, calmer of hysteric * 
