JOAN SILVER-PIN
"Being of many variable colours, and of great beautie, although of
evill smell, our gentlewomen doe call them Jone Silver-pin."
--JOHN GERARDE, _Herball_, 1596.
Garden Poppies were the Joan Silver-pin of Gerarde, stigmatized also by
Parkinson as "Jone Silver-pinne, _subauditur_; faire without and foule
within." In Elizabeth's day Poppies met universal distrust and aversion,
as being the source of the dreaded opium. Spenser called the flower
"dead-sleeping" Poppy; Morris "the black heart, amorous Poppy"--which
might refer to the black spots in the flower's heart.
Clare, in his _Shepherd's Calendar_ also asperses them:--
"Corn-poppies, that in crimson dwell,
Called Head-aches from their sickly smell."
Forby adds this testimony: "Any one by smelling of it for a very short
time may convince himself of the propriety of the name." Some fancied
that the dazzle of color caused headaches--that vivid scarlet, so fine
a word as well as color that it is annoying to hear the poets change it
to crimson.
[Illustration: "Black Heart, Amorous Poppies."]
This regard of and aversion to the Poppy lingered among elderly folks
till our own day; and I well recall the horror of a visitor of antique
years in our mother's garden during our childhood, when we were found
cheerfully eating Poppy seeds. She viewed us with openly expressed
apprehension that we would fall into a stupor; and quite terrified us
and our relatives, in spite of our assertions that we "always ate them,"
which indeed we always did and do to this day; and very pleasant of
taste they are, and of absolutely no effect, and not at all of evil
smell to our present fancy, either in blossom or seed, though distinctly
medicinal in odor.
Returned missionaries were frequent and honored visitors in our town and
our house in those days; and one of these good men reassured us and
reinstated in favor our uncanny feast by telling us that in the East,
Poppy seeds were eaten everywhere, and were frequently baked with
wheaten flour into cakes. A dislike of the scent of Field Poppies is
often found among English folk. The author of _A World in a Garden_
speaks in disgust of "the pungent and sickly odor of the flaring
Poppies--they positively nauseate me"; but then he disliked their color
too.
There is something very fine about a Poppy, in the extraordinary
combination of boldness of color and great size with its slender
delicacy of stem, the grace of the set of the beautiful buds, the fine
turn of the flower as it opens, and the wonderful airiness of poise of
so heavy a flower. The silkiness of tissue of the petals, and their
semi-transparency in some colors, and the delicate fringes of some
varieties, are great charms.
"Each crumpled crepe-like leaf is soft as silk;
Long, long ago the children saw them there,
Scarlet and rose, with fringes white as milk,
And called them 'shawls for fairies' dainty wear';
They were not finer, those laid safe away
In that low attic, neath the brown, warm eaves."
And when the flowers have shed, oh, so lightly! their silken petals,
there is still another beauty, a seed vessel of such classic shape that
it wears a crown.
I have always rejoiced in the tributes paid to the Poppy by Ruskin and
Mrs. Thaxter. She deemed them the most satisfactory flower among the
annuals "for wondrous variety, certain picturesque qualities, for color
and form, and a subtle air of mystery."
There is a line of Poppy colors which is most entrancing; the gray,
smoke color, lavender, mauve, and lilac Poppies, edged often and freaked
with tints of red, are rarely beautiful things. There are fine white
Poppies, some fringed, some single, some double--the Bride is the
appropriate name of the fairest. And the pinks of Poppies, that
wonderful red-pink, and a shell-pink that is almost salmon, and the
sunset pinks of our modern Shirley Poppies, with quality like finest
silken gauze! The story of the Shirley Poppies is one of magic, that a
flower-loving clergyman who in 1882 sowed the seed of one specially
beautiful Poppy which had no black in it, and then sowed those of its
fine successors, produced thus a variety which has supplied the world
with beauty. Rev. Mr. Wilks, their raiser, gives these simply worded
rules anent his Shirley Poppies:--
"1, They are single; 2, always have a white base; 3, with yellow or
white stamens, anthers, or pollen; 4, and never have the smallest
particle of black about them."
The thought of these successful and beautiful Poppies is very
stimulating to flower raisers of moderate means, with no profound
knowledge of flowers; it shows what can be done by enthusiasm and
application and patience. It gives something of the same comfort found
in Keats's fine lines to the singing thrush:--
"Oh! fret not after knowledge.
I have none, _and yet the evening listens_."
Notwithstanding all this distinction and beauty, these fine things of
the garden were dubbed Joan Silver-pin. I wonder who Joan Silver-pin
was! I have searched faithfully for her, but have not been able to get
on the right scent. Was she of real life, or fiction? I have looked
through the lists of characters of contemporary plays, and read a few
old jest books and some short tales of that desperately colorless sort,
wherein you read page after page of the printed words with as little
absorption of signification as if they were Choctaw. But never have I
seen Joan Silver-pin's name; it was a bit of Elizabethan slang, I
suspect,--a cant term once well known by every one, now existing solely
through this chance reference of the old herbalists.
[Illustration: Valerian.]
No garden can aspire to be named An Old-fashioned Garden unless it
contains that beautiful plant the Garden Valerian, known throughout New
England to-day as Garden Heliotrope; as Setwall it grew in every old
garden, as it was in every pharmacopoeia. It was termed
"drink-quickening Setuale" by Spenser, from the universal use of its
flowers to flavor various enticing drinks. Its lovely blossoms are
pinkish in bud and open to pure white; its curiously penetrating
vanilla-like fragrance is disliked by many who are not cats. I find it
rather pleasing of scent when growing in the garden, and not at all like
the extremely nasty-smelling medicine which is made from it, and which
has been used for centuries for "histerrick fits," and is still
constantly prescribed to-day for that unsympathized-with malady. Dr.
Holmes calls it, "Valerian, calmer of hysteric squirms." It is a
stately plant when in tall flower in June; my sister had great clumps of
bloom like the ones shown above, but alas! the cats caught them before
the photographer did. The cats did not have to watch the wind and sun
and rain, to pick out plates and pack plate-holders, and gather
ray-fillers and cloth and lens, and adjust the tripod, and fix the
camera and focus, and think, and focus, and think, and then wait--till
the wind ceased blowing. So when they found it, they broke down every
slender stalk and rolled in it till the ground was tamped down as hard
as if one of our lazy road-menders had been at it. Valerian has in
England as an appropriate folk name, "Cats'-fancy." The pretty little
annual, Nemophila, makes also a favorite rolling-place for our cat;
while all who love cats have given them Catnip and seen the singular
intoxication it brings. The sight of a cat in this strange ecstasy over
a bunch of Catnip always gives me a half-sense of fear; she becomes such
a truly wild creature, such a miniature tiger.
In _The Art of Gardening_, by J. W., Gent., 1683, the author says of
Marigolds: "There are divers sorts besides the common as the African
Marigold, a Fair bigge Yellow Flower, but of a very Naughty Smell." I
cannot refrain, ere I tell more of the Marigold's naughtiness, to copy a
note written in this book by a Massachusetts bride whose new husband
owned and studied the book two hundred years ago; for it gives a little
glimpse of old-time life. In her exact little handwriting are these
words:--
"Planted in Potts, 1720: An Almond Stone, an English Wallnut,
Cittron Seeds, Pistachica nutts, Red Damsons, Leamon seeds, Oring
seeds and Daits."
Poor Anne! she died before she had time to become any one's grandmother.
I hope her successor in matrimony, our forbear, cherished her little
seedlings and rejoiced in the Lemon and Almond trees, though Anne
herself was so speedily forgotten. She is, however, avenged by Time; for
she is remembered better than the wife who took her place, through her
simple flower-loving words.
I am surprised at this aspersion on the Marigold as to its smell, for
all the traditions of this flower show it to have been a great favorite
in kitchen gardens; and I have found that elderly folk are very apt to
like its scent. My father loved the flower and the fragrance, and liked
to have a bowl of Marigolds stand beside him on his library table. It
was constantly carried to church as a "Sabbath-day posy," and its petals
used as flavoring in soups and stews. Charles Lamb said it poisoned
them. Canon Ellacombe writes that it has been banished in England to the
gardens of cottages and old farm-houses; it had a waning popularity in
America, but was never wholly despised.
How Edward Fitzgerald loved the African Marigold! "Its grand color is so
comfortable to us Spanish-like Paddies," he writes to Fanny Kemble in
letters punctuated with little references to his garden flowers: letters
so cheerful, too, with capitals; "I love the old way of Capitals for
Names," he says--and so do I; letters bearing two surprises, namely, the
infrequent references to Omar Khayyam; and the fact that Nasturtiums,
not Roses, were his favorite flower.
The question of the agreeableness of a flower scent is a matter of
public opinion as well as personal choice. Environment and education
influence us. In olden times every one liked certain scents deemed
odious to-day. Parkinson's praise of Sweet Sultans was, "They are of so
exceeding sweet a scent as it surpasses the best civet that is." Have
you ever smelt civet? You will need no words to tell you that the civet
is a little cousin of the skunk. Cowper could not talk with civet in the
room; most of us could not even breathe. The old herbalists call Privet
sweet-scented. I don't know that it is strange to find a generation who
loved civet and musk thinking Privet pleasant-scented. Nearly all our
modern botanists have copied the words of their predecessors; but I
scarcely know what to say or to think when I find so exact an observer
as John Burroughs calling Privet "faintly sweet-scented." I find it
rankly ill-scented.
The men of Elizabethan days were much more learned in perfumes and
fonder of them than are most folk to-day. Authors and poets dwelt
frankly upon them without seeming at all vulgar. Of course herbalists,
from their choice of subject, were free to write of them at length, and
they did so with evident delight. Nowadays the French realists are the
only writers who boldly reckon with the sense of smell. It isn't deemed
exactly respectable to dwell too much on smells, even pleasant ones; so
this chapter certainly must be brief.
I suppose nine-tenths of all who love flower scents would give Violets
as their favorite fragrance; yet how quickly, in the hothouse Violets,
can the scent become nauseous. I recall one formal luncheon whereat the
many tables were mightily massed with violets; and though all looked as
fresh as daybreak to the sight, some must have been gathered for a day
or more, and the stale odor throughout the room was unbearable. But it
is scarcely fair to decry a flower because of its scent in decay.
Shakespeare wrote:--
"Lilies festered smell far worse than weeds."
Many of our Compositae are vile after standing in water in vases; Ox-eye
Daisies, Rudbeckia, Zinnia, Sunflower, and even the wholesome Marigold.
Delicate as is the scent of the Pansy, the smell of a bed of ancient
Pansy plants is bad beyond words. The scent of the flowers of
fruit-bearing trees is usually delightful; but I cannot like the scent
of Pear blossoms.
I dislike much the rank smell of common yellow Daffodils and of many of
that family. I can scarcely tolerate them even when freshly picked, upon
a dinner table. Some of the Jonquils are as sickening within doors as
the Tuberose, though in both cases it is only because the scent is
confined that it is cloying. In the open air, at a slight distance, they
smell as well as many Lilies, and the Poet's Narcissus is deemed by many
delightful.
[Illustration: Old "War Office."]
I have ever found the scent of Lilacs somewhat imperfect, not well
rounded, not wholly satisfying; but one of my friends can never find in
a bunch of our spring Lilacs any odor save that of illuminating gas. I
do wish he had not told me this! Now when I stand beside my Lilac bush I
feel like looking around anxiously to see where the gas is escaping.
Linnaeus thought the perfume of Mignonette the purest ambrosia. Another
thinks that Mignonette has a doggy smell, as have several flowers; this
is not wholly to their disparagement. Our cocker spaniel is sweeter than
some flowers, but he is not a Mignonette. There be those who love most
of all the scent of Heliotrope, which is to me a close, almost musty
scent. I have even known of one or two who disliked the scent of Roses,
and the Rose itself has been abhorred. Marie de' Medici would not even
look at a painting or carving of a Rose. The Chevalier de Guise had a
loathing for Roses. Lady Heneage, one of the maids of honor to Queen
Elizabeth, was made very ill by the presence or scent of Roses. This
illness was not akin to "Rose cold," which is the baneful companion of
so many Americans, and which can conquer its victims in the most sudden
and complete manner.
Even my affection for Roses, and my intense love of their fragrance,
shown in its most ineffable sweetness in the old pink Cabbage Rose, will
not cause me to be silent as to the scent of some of the Rose sisters.
Some of the Tea Roses, so lovely of texture, so delicate of hue, are
sickening; one has a suggestion of ether which is most offensive. "A
Rose by any other name would smell as sweet," but not if its name (and
its being) was the Persian Yellow. This beautiful double Rose of rich
yellow was introduced to our gardens about 1830. It is infrequent now,
though I find it in florists' lists; and I suspect I know why. Of late
years I have not seen it, but I have a remembrance of its uprootal from
our garden. Mrs. Wright confirms my memory by calling it "a horrible
thing--the Skunk Cabbage of the garden." It smells as if foul insects
were hidden within it, a disgusting smell. I wonder whether poor Marie
de' Medici hadn't had a whiff of it. A Persian Rose! it cannot be
possible that Omar Khayyam ever smelt it, or any of the Rose singers of
Persia, else their praises would have turned to loathing as they fled
from its presence. There are two or three yellow Roses which are not
pleasing, but are not abhorrent as is the Persian Yellow.
One evening last May I walked down the garden path, then by the shadowy
fence-side toward the barn. I was not wandering in the garden for sweet
moonlight, for there was none; nor for love of flowers, nor in
admiration of any of nature's works, for it was very cold; we even spoke
of frost, as we ever do apprehensively on a chilly night in spring. The
kitten was lost. She was in the shrubbery at the garden end, for I could
hear her plaintive yowling; and I thus traced her. I gathered her up,
purring and clawing, when I heard by my side a cross rustling of leaves
and another complaining voice. It was the Crown-imperial, unmindful or
unwitting of my presence, and muttering peevishly: "Here I am, out of
fashion, and therefore out of the world! torn away from the honored
border by the front door path, and even set away from the broad garden
beds, and thrust with sunflowers and other plants of no social position
whatever down here behind the barn, where, she dares to say, we 'can all
smell to heaven together.'
"What airs, forsooth! these twentieth century children put on! Smell to
heaven, indeed! I wish her grandfather could have heard her! He didn't
make such a fuss about smells when I was young, nor did any one else; no
one's nose was so over-nice. Every spring when I came up, glorious in my
dress of scarlet and green, and hung with my jewels of pearls, they were
all glad to see me and to smell me, too; and well they might be, for
there was a rotten-appley, old-potatoey smell in the cellar which
pervaded the whole house when doors were closed. And when the frost came
up from the ground the old sink drain at the kitchen door rendered up
to the spring sunshine all the combined vapors of all the dish-water of
all the winter. The barn and hen-house and cow-house reeked in the
sunlight, but the pigpen easily conquered them all. There was an ancient
cesspool far too near the kitchen door, underground and not to be seen,
but present, nevertheless. A hogshead of rain-water stood at the cellar
door, and one at the end of the barn--to water the flowers with--they
fancied rotten rain-water made flowers grow! A foul dye-tub was ever
reeking in every kitchen chimney corner, a culminating horror in
stenches; and vessels of ancient soap grease festered in the outer shed,
the grease collected through the winter and waiting for the spring
soap-making. The vapor of sour milk, ever present, was of little
moment--when there was so much else so much worse. There wasn't a
bath-tub in the grandfather's house, nor in any other house in town, nor
any too much bathing in winter, either, I am sure, in icy well-water in
icier sleeping rooms. The windows were carefully closed all winter long,
but the open fireplaces managed to save the life of the inmates, though
the walls and rafters were hung with millions of germs which every one
knows are all the wickeder when they don't smell, because you take no
care, fancying they are not there. But the grandfather knew naught of
germs--and was happy. The trees shaded the house so that the roof was
always damp. Oh, how those germs grew and multiplied in the grateful
shade of those lovely trees, and how mould and rust rejoiced. Well might
people turn from all these sights and scents to me. The grandfather and
his wife, when they were young, as when they were in middle age, and
when they were old, walked every early spring day at set of sun, slowly
down the front path, looking at every flower, every bud; pulling a tiny
weed, gathering a choice flower, breaking a withered sprig; and they
ever lingered long and happily by my side. And he always said, 'Wife!
isn't this Crown-imperial a glorious plant? so stately, so perfect in
form, such an expression of life, and such a personification of spring!'
'Yes, father,' she would answer quickly, 'but don't pick it.' Why, I
should have resented even that word had she referred to my perfume. She
meant that the garden border could not spare me. The children never
could pick me, even the naughtiest ones did not dare to; but they could
pull all the little upstart Ladies' Delights and Violets they wished.
And yet, with all this family homage which should make me a family
totem, here I am, stuck down by the barn--I, who sprung from the blood
of a king, the great Gustavus Adolphus--and was sung by a poet two
centuries ago in the famous _Garland of Julia_. The old Jesuit poet
Rapin said of me, 'No flower aspires in pomp and state so high.'
"Read this page from that master-herbalist, John Gerarde, telling of the
rare beauties within my golden cup.
"A very intelligent and respectable old gentleman named Parkinson, who
knew far more about flowers than flighty folk do nowadays, loved me well
and wrote of me, 'The Crown-imperial, for its stately beautifulnesse
deserveth the first place in this our garden of delight to be here
entreated of before all other Lilies.' He had good sense. It was not I
who was stigmatized by him as Joan Silver-pin. He spoke very plainly and
very sensibly of my perfume; there was no nonsense in his notions, he
told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth: 'The whole
plant and every part thereof, as well as rootes as leaves and floures
doe smell somewhat strong, as it were the savour of a foxe, so that if
any doe but near it, he can but smell it, yet is not unwholesome.'
"How different all is to-day in literature, as well as in flower
culture. Now there are low, coarse attempts at wit that fairly wilt a
sensitive nature like mine. There is one miserable Man who comes to this
garden, and who _thinks_ he is a Poet; I will not repeat his wretched
rhymes. But only yesterday, when he stood looking superciliously down
upon us, he said sneeringly, 'Yes, spring is here, balmy spring; we know
her presence without seeing her face or hearing her voice; for the Skunk
Cabbage is unfurled in the swamps, and the Crown-imperial is blooming in
the garden.' Think of his presuming to set me alongside that low Skunk
Cabbage--me with my 'stately beautifulness.'
[Illustration: Crown Imperial. A Page from Gerarde's _Herball_.]
"Little do people nowadays know about scents anyway, when their
botanists and naturalists write that the Privet bloom is 'pleasingly
fragrant,' and one dame set last summer a dish of Privet on her dining
table before many guests. Privet! with its ancient and fishlike smell!
And another tells of the fragrant delight of flowering Buckwheat--may
the breezes blow such fragrance far from me! But why dwell on perfumes;
flowers were made to look at, not to smell; sprays of Sweet Balm or
Basil leaves outsweeten every flower, and make no pretence or thought of
beauty; render to each its own virtues, and try not to engross the charm
of another.
"I was indeed the queen of the garden, and here I am exiled behind the
barn. Life is not worth living. I won't come up again. She will walk
through the garden next May and say, 'How dull and shabby the garden
looks this year! the spring is backward, everything has run to leaves,
nothing is in bloom, we must buy more fertilizer, we must get a new
gardener, we must get more plants and slips and seeds and bulbs, it is
fearfully discouraging, I never saw anything so gone off!' then perhaps
she will remember, and regret the friend of her grandparents, the
Crown-imperial--whom she thrust from her Garden of Delight."