Stray Leaves from a Border Garden 
some miles from here. I fancy it must be the same with 
the Italian tulips described, but not pictured, in my old 
Queen Anne Herbal. In both France and England it is 
evidently the wild form of tulip. Our Garden Tulips are 
said to have come originally from Turkey and Dalmatia, 
and their name Tulip is from Tulipan, Thoulyban, 
Turban or Turkscap, whence they were formerly known 
as Turkscaps or Dalmatians. Old Thomas Fuller calls 
“ the Toolip a well complexioned stink, an illfavour wrapt 
up in pleasant colours,” wherein I think he is sometimes 
hard upon the “ Painted Lady ” of the parterre, since it 
cannot be expected all flowers should be blessed with a 
sweet scent any more than all women with beauty. An 
odd old name for the tulip was Satyrion. 
May 7. — I spent the afternoon howking at the Bishop- 
weed in the Rose-garden borders. Verily one would need 
the cast-iron back with hinges, of which discourseth 
pleasantly good Master Warner in his book, “ A Summer in 
a Garden,” to do real good work against this inveterate 
nuisance. It does seem very difficult to know of what 
good are weeds. Wordsworth calls them “ flowers out of 
place.” Malerba , or bad root, the Italians call them so 
graphically. Certainly they seem gifted with a most 
marvellous power of reproduction, and to have more lives 
than the proverbial cat. It has been said in America of 
that most troublesome “ plan ten ” ( Plantago Major), or 
wabret, that it always springs up wherever the white man 
penetrates. The Indians call it White Man’s Foot, and in 
Hiawatha, Longfellow sings : 
Wheresoe’er they tread beneath them 
Springs a flower unknown among us, 
Springs the “ Whiteman’s foot in blossom.” 
The worst of grubbing up the wabret is that it leaves such 
pits in the grass, and I have not sufficient faith that it will 
not resurrect, to follow the old receipt, and bury it upside- 
down in the hole. Boy brings great energy to weeding, 
camps solemnly in the Rose-garden on his housemaid’s 
mat, provides himself with a grype, better known, perhaps, 
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