IO 
PLANT-LORE OF SHAKESPEARE 
Greeke” (“Nat. Hist.,” xxi. n, Holland’s translation). This, 
however, is not the character of the Anemone as grown in 
English gardens; and so it is probable that the name has been 
transferred to a different plant than the classical one, and I 
think no suggestion more probable than Dr. Prior’s, that the 
classical Anemone was the Cistus, a shrub that is very abund¬ 
ant in the South of Europe ; that certainly opens its flowers 
at other times than when the wind blows, and so will not well 
answer to Pliny’s description, but of which the flowers are 
bright-coloured and most fugacious, and so will answer to 
Ovid’s description. This fugacious character of the Anemone 
is perpetuated in Sir William Jones’lines (“Poet. Works,” i. 254, 
ed. 1810)— 
“Youth, like a thin Anemone, displays 
His silken leaf, and in a morn decays ; ” 
but the lines, though classical, are not true of the Anemone, 
though they would well apply to the Cistus. 1 
Our English Anemones belong to a large family inhabiting 
cold and temperate regions, and numbering seventy species, 
of which three are British. 2 3 These are A. nemorosa , the 
common wood Anemone, the brightest spring ornament of 
our woods ; A. Apennina , abundant in the South of Europe, 
and a doubtful British plant; and A. pulsatillap the Passe, or 
Pasque flower, /. e. the flower of Easter, one of the most 
beautiful of our British flowers, but only to be found on the 
chalk formation. 
1 Mr. Leo Grindon also identifies the classical Anemone with the Cistus. 
See a good account of it in “Gardener’s Chronicle,” June 3, 1876. 
2 The small yellow A. ranuncttloides has been sometimes included 
among the British Anemones, but is now excluded. It is a rare plant, and 
an alien. 
3 Called Fulsatilla, “ ob pulsatione floris vento.” 
Linn/eus, Philos. Bot ., 234, 
