Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers by John Ruskin
page 75 of 120 (62%)
page 75 of 120 (62%)
![]() | ![]() |
|
17. Nobody tells me why either this last or No. 5 have been called bitter;
and Gerarde's five kinds are distinguished only by colour--blue, red, white, purple, and "the dark, of an overworn ill-favoured colour, which maketh it to differ from all others of his kind." I find no account of this ill-favoured one elsewhere. The white is my Soror Reginæ; the red must be the Austriaca; but the purple and overworn ones are perhaps now overworn indeed. All of them must have been more common in Gerarde's time than now, for he goes on to say "Milk-woort is called _Ambarualis flos_. so called because it doth specially flourish in the Crosse or Gang-weeke, or Rogation-weeke, of which flowers, the maidens which use in the countries to walk the procession do make themselves garlands and nosegaies, in English we may call it Crosse flower, Gang flower, Rogation flower, and Milk-woort." 18. Above, at page 197, vol. i., in first arranging the Cytherides, I too hastily concluded that the ascription to this plant of helpfulness to nursing mothers was 'more than ordinarily false'; thinking that its rarity could never have allowed it to be fairly tried. If indeed true, or in any degree true, the flower has the best right of all to be classed with the Cytherides, and we might have as much of it for beauty and for service as we choose, if we only took half the pains to garnish our summer gardens with living and life-giving blossom, that we do to garnish our winter gluttonies with dying and useless ones. 19. I have said nothing of root, or fruit, or seed, having never had the hardness of heart to pull up a milkwort cluster--nor the chance of watching one in seed:--The pretty thing vanishes as it comes, like the blue sky of April, and leaves no sign of itself--that _I_ ever found. The botanists tell me that its fruit "dehisces loculicidally," which I suppose is botanic for "splits like boxes," (but boxes shouldn't split, and didn't, as we used |
|