As I was writing those homely names I felt again how fit and lovely they
were, how much more fit and lovely than the scientific names of the
flowers. Mrs. Creevey will make a botanist of you if you will let her,
and I fancy a very good botanist, though I cannot speak from experience,
but she will make a poet of you in spite of yourself, as I very well
know; and she will do this simply by giving you first the familiar name
of the flowers she loves to write of. I am not saying that the Day-Lily
would not smell as sweet by her title of ‘Hemerocallis Fulva’, or that
the homely, hearty Bouncing Bet would not kiss as deliciously in her
scholar’s cap and gown of ‘Saponaria Officinalis’; but merely that their
college degrees do not lend themselves so willingly to verse, or even
melodious prose, which is what the poet is often after nowadays. So I
like best to hail the flowers by the names that the fairies gave them,
and the children know them by, especially when my longing for them makes
them grow here in the city streets. I have a fancy that they would all
vanish away if I saluted them in botanical terms. As long as I talk of
cat-tail rushes, the homeless grimalkins of the areas and the back fences
help me to a vision of the swamps thickly studded with their stiff
spears; but if I called them ‘Typha Latifolia’, or even ‘Typha
Angustifolia’, there is not the hardiest and fiercest prowler of the roof
and the fire-escape but would fly the sound of my voice and leave me
forlorn amid the withered foliage of my dream. The street sparrows,
pestiferous and persistent as they are, would forsake my sylvan pageant
if I spoke of the Bird-foot Violet as the ‘Viola Pedata’; and the
commonest cur would run howling if he beard the gentle Poison Dogwood
maligned as the ‘Rhus Venenata’. The very milk-cans would turn to their
native pumps in disgust from my attempt to invoke our simple American
Cowslip as the ‘Dodecatheon Meadia’.