This has long been a puzzle to the Hull antiquaries. I have often inquired
of old persons likely to know the origin of such names of places at that
sea-port as "The Land of Green Ginger," "Pig Alley," "Mucky-south-end," and
"Rotten Herring Staith;" and I have come to the conclusion, that "The Land
of Green Ginger" was a very dirty place where horses were kept: a mews, in
short, which none of the Muses, not even with Homer as an exponent, could
exalt ([Greek: Epea pteroenta en athanatoisi theoisi]) into the regions of
poesy.
Ginger has been cultivated in this country as a _stove_ exotic for about
two hundred and fifty years. In one of the histories of Hull, ginger is
supposed to have grown in this street, where, to a recent period, the
stables of the George Inn, and those of a person named Foster opposite,
occupied the principal portion of the short lane called "Land of Green
Ginger." It is hardly possible that the true zingiber can have grown here,
even in the manure heaps; but a plant of the same order (_Zingiberaceæ_)
may have been mistaken for it. Some of the old women or marine school-boys
of the Trinity House, in the adjoining lane named from that guild, or some
druggist, may have dropped, either accidentally or experimentally, a root,
if not of the ginger, yet of some kindred plant. The magnificent _Fuchsia_
was first noticed in the possession of a seaman's wife by Fuchs in 1501, a
century prior to the introduction of the ginger plant into England.