True Dirt

Miss Willmott's ghost

It was actually Miss Willmott's peas that first got my attention, on a seed packet rack at the local garden and hardware store. Very pink and, as the lovely packet cover informs, an "heirloom" variety from 1901. After planting the sweet peas and impaling the seed packet to the accompanying wire trellis, and then whimsically photographing the packet (see last entry), an errant memory floated to the surface of my distracted brain. I went into the house and rifled through the flotsom on my desk to find the stack of seed packets left there since returning from London last fall. There was Eryngium 'Miss Wilmott's Ghost'. Apart from the alternate spelling of the name, I guessed this was one and the same Miss. (Her peas are the correct spelling).

Names are important to the gardener. Whether Latin, Linnean or common the gardener lives by plant names, and those names all tell a story. My poppy may not be Flander's poppy but we have a beginning. Latin may not be your cup of chai but if you want a "tulip tree" you had better learn the difference between Liriodendron tulipifera and Magnolia soulangiana. Both are commonly called "tulip tree" but one is a huge, small-flowered, poplar-like native of the eastern United States and the other is a small, slow-growing, spectacular flowering tree native to China. Both are in the magnolia plant family. ( If learning Latin is right up there on your to-do list with changing the car's oil filter, try "Gardener's Latin," a lexicon by Bill Neal; you will learn that edulis means "edible" - as in the mushroom Boletus edulis.)

Then there are the honorifics, ubiquitous in the world of rose growing; "the madames" I call them. Named for grand dames of the Second Empire, European queens, and movie stars these flowers aim to flatter or to sell, and all are carefully selected and developed by professional hybridizers.

Another category of names are the ones that have become attached to a plant, often a hybrid but sometimes not, through legend and history; Jimson weed, that infamous member of the potato (Solanaceae) family known for poisoning cattle and causing hallucinations (and possibly death) in humans, is also Jamestown weed, named for the ill-fated Virginia colony where the Powhatan chief's daughter Pocahontus fell in love with the English sea captain John Smith. The plant, which the native people added in small quantities to their smoking tobacco, became notorious seventy years after the founding of Jamestown when colonists added it to the salads of British soldiers come to put down the uprising known as Bacon's Rebellion, with apparently comic result:

In this frantic condition they were confined, lest they should, in their folly, destroy themselves- though it was observed that all their actions were full of innocence and good nature. Indeed, they were not very cleanly; for they would have wallowed in their own excrements, if they had not been prevented. A thousand such simple tricks they played, and after 11 days returned themselves again, not remembering anything that had passed. The History and Present State of Virginia, 1705, Robert Beverly

I have not forgotten Miss Willmott. An English woman of independent means, a friend of Gertrude Jekyll and a fanatic gardener herself, she also underwrote plant hunting expeditions, and wrote an exhaustive history of the rose, The Genus Rosa. It is also said that she had a habit of carrying seeds of her favorite garden flower in her pockets and, when visiting friends, would secretly scatter them about. What eventually sprouted in the unsuspecting gardener's borders were the silvery-blue, perniciously spiked flowers of Eryngium giganteum--Miss Willmott's ghosts.

Posted by briggs at March 21, 2006 9:24 AM