Free 100 Flowers and How They Got Their Names by Diana Wells Page B

propagation and hardiness caused it to be planted in gardens everywhere. Then, like a lot of wildly popular plants, it fell into disrepute, and so-called discriminating gardeners talked of it as “vulgar.”
    Forsyth too fell into disrepute. In 1770 he became the director of the Chelsea Physic Garden. He was able and enthusiastic, reorganizing and replanting the Chelsea garden, exchanging seeds and plants with gardens abroad, making the first British rock garden with forty tonsof old stone from the Tower of London and lava brought back from Iceland by Sir Joseph Banks, and helping to found the Royal Horticultural Society. However, in spite of all this laudable horticultural activity, he seems to have been a bit of a rascally entrepreneur. He invented, or claimed to invent, “Forsyth’s Plaister.” By 1799 overuse of forests had left few great trees suitable for wartime shipbuilding, and those that remained were often diseased. In his gardens, Forsyth had used his plaster to seal wounds in fruit trees after he had removed diseased limbs, and he offered to sell the recipe to the British navy. The navy fell for it and the treasury paid him fifteen hundred pounds—an immense sum in those days. The secret recipe turned out to consist of cow dung, lime, wood ashes, and sand mixed to a malleable paste with soapsuds and urine. Its efficacy was challenged by Thomas Knight, an expert on the cultivation of fruit trees, who refused to concede that “man, with the aid of a little lime, cowdung and wood ashes, is capable of rendering that immortal, which the great God of nature evidently intended to die.” A Quaker doctor, John Lettsom, supported Forsyth, but when challenged by Knight with a wager of a hundred guineas that he could not “produce a single foot of timber restored after being once injured to the state asserted by Mr. Forsyth,” repliedprimly that his religion did not allow him to make wagers. Forsyth, however, died in 1804 before the controversy could be resolved.
    The secret recipe for “Forsyth’s Plaister” turned out to consist of cow dung, lime, wood ashes, and sand mixed to a malleable paste with soapsuds and urine.
    Of course Forsyth may have believed that his plaster was truly effective—or it may even have worked. His instructions included cutting away the diseased parts of the tree before applying the cure and, as we are discovering increasingly, plants as well as people have selfhealing powers we do not fully understand. The trees, with the canker removed, may simply have recovered as they would have without the plaster.
    The forsythia asserts itself every spring with brilliant blasts of yellow, even sometimes where the house it adorns has fallen into ruins. Occasionally this bold showiness is devastated by an extra early frost, but mostly forsythia gets away with it, and cheers us all up with its very audacity.

FOXGLOVE
    COMMON NAMES : Foxglove, fairy-bells, ladies’-thimble.
BOTANICAL NAME :
Digitalis
.
FAMILY :
Scrophulariaceae
.

    Foxgloves, native to Britain and Europe, have always been considered fairy flowers. There are dozens of fairy names for them, as well as some more sinister ones like the Gaelic
ciochan nan cailleachan marblia
, or “dead old women’s paps.” In 1542, Leonhard Fuchs named the foxglove
Digitalis
from the Latin
digitus
(finger).
    The name “foxglove” comes from the Old English
foxes glofa
, and the flowers do look like the fingers of a glove. Foxgloves tend to grow on woody slopes where foxes’ burrows are often found. Foxes are wily creatures who may have needed magical gloves when they slunk out of the shadows and spirited away chickens. English foxes were brought to America in the eighteenth century by hunting club purists in Philadelphia, but soon those foxes interbred with native foxes. Foxglove plants were imported to America in the eighteenth century too, after their medicinal properties had been