The Folk-lore of Plants Part 29

"Cou' it by the auld wa's, Cou' it where the sun ne'er fa'

Stoo it when the day daws, Cou' the nettle early."

The juice of fumitory is said to clear the sight, and the kennel-wort was once a popular specific for the king's-evil. As disinfectants, wormwood and rue were much in demand; and hence Tusser says:--

"What savour is better, if physicke be true, For places infected, than wormwood and rue?"

For depression, thyme was recommended, and a Manx preservative against all kinds of infectious diseases is ragwort. The ill.u.s.trations we have given above show in how many ways plants have been in demand as popular curatives. And although an immense amount of superst.i.tion has been interwoven with folk-medicine, there is a certain amount of truth in the many remedies which for centuries have been, with more or less success, employed by the peasantry, both at home and abroad.

Footnotes:

1. See Tylor's "Primitive Culture," ii.

2. See Folkard's "Plant-lore Legends and Lyrics," p. 164.

3. "Mystic Trees and Shrubs," p. 717.

4. Folkard's "Plant-lore," p. 379.

5. Hunt's "Popular Romances of the West of England," 1871, p. 415

6. Folkard's "Plant-lore Legends and Lyrics," p. 216.

7. See Black's "Folk-medicine," 1883, p.195.

8. _Quarterly Review_, cxiv. 245.

9. "Sacred Trees and Flowers," _Quarterly Review_, cxiv. 244.

10. Folkard's "Plant Legends," 364.

11. _Fraser's Magazine_, 1870, p. 591.

12. "Mystic Trees and Plants;" _Fraser's Magazine_, 1870, p. 708.

13. "Reliquiae Antiquse," Wright and Halliwell, i. 195; _Quarterly Review_, 1863, cxiv. 241.

14. Coles, "The Art of Simpling," 1656.

15. Anne Pratt's "Flowering Plants of Great Britain," iv. 9.

16. Black's "Folk-medicine," p. 201.

17. Folkard's "Plant-Lore Legends and Lyrics," p. 248.

18. _Fraser's Magazine_, 1870, p. 591.

19. "Plant-Lore Legends and Lyrics," p. 349.

20. Black's "Folk-medicine," p. 185.

21. See Hunt's "Popular Romances of the West of England."

22. Black's "Folk-medicine," p. 193.

23. "Rabies or Hydrophobia," T. M. Dolan, 1879, p. 238.

24. Black's "Folk-medicine," p. 193.

CHAPTER XXII.

PLANTS AND THEIR LEGENDARY HISTORY.

Many of the legends of the plant-world have been incidentally alluded to in the preceding pages. Whether we review their mythological history as embodied in the traditionary stories of primitive times, or turn to the existing legends of our own and other countries in modern times, it is clear that the imagination has at all times bestowed some of its richest and most beautiful fancies on trees and flowers. Even, too, the rude and ignorant savage has clothed with graceful conceptions many of the plants which, either for their grandeur or utility, have attracted his notice.

The old idea, again, of metamorphosis, by which persons under certain peculiar cases were changed into plants, finds a place in many of the modern plant-legends. Thus there is the well-known story of the wayside plantain, commonly termed "way-bread," which, on account of its so persistently haunting the track of man, has given rise to the German story that it was formerly a maiden who, whilst watching by the wayside for her lover, was transformed into this plant. But once in seven years it becomes a bird, either the cuckoo, or the cuckoo's servant, the "dinnick," as it is popularly called in Devonshire, the German "wiedhopf" which is said to follow its master everywhere.

This story of the plantain is almost identical with one told in Germany of the endive or succory. A patient girl, after waiting day by day for her betrothed for many a month, at last, worn out with watching, sank exhausted by the wayside and expired. But before many days had pa.s.sed, a little flower with star-like blossoms sprang up on the spot where the broken-hearted maiden had breathed her final sigh, which was henceforth known as the "Wegewarte," the watcher of the road. Mr. Folkard quotes an ancient ballad of Austrian Silesia which recounts how a young girl mourned for seven years the loss of her lover, who had fallen in war.

But when her friends tried to console her, and to procure for her another lover, she replied, "I shall cease to weep only when I become a wild-flower by the wayside." By the North American Indians, the plantain or "way-bread" is "the white man's foot," to which Longfellow, in speaking of the English settlers, alludes in his "Hiawatha":--

"Wheresoe'er they move, before them Swarms the stinging fly, the Ahmo, Swarms the bee, the honey-maker; Wheresoe'er they tread, beneath them Springs a flower unknown among us, Springs the white man's foot in blossom."

Between certain birds and plants there exists many curious traditions, as in the case of the nightingale and the rose. According to a piece of Persian folklore, whenever the rose is plucked, the nightingale utters a plaintive cry, because it cannot endure to see the object of its love injured. In a legend told by the Persian poet Attar, we are told how all the birds appeared before Solomon, and complained that they were unable to sleep from the nightly wailings of the nightingale. The bird, when questioned as to the truth of this statement, replied that his love for the rose was the cause of his grief. Hence this supposed love of the nightingale for the rose has been frequently the subject of poetical allusion. Lord Byron speaks of it in the "Giaour":--

"The rose o'er crag or vale, Sultana of the nightingale, The maid for whom his melody, His thousand songs are heard on high, Blooms blushing to her lover's tale, His queen, the garden queen, his rose, Unbent by winds, unchilled by snows."

Thackeray, too, has given a pleasing rendering of this favourite legend:--

"Under the boughs I sat and listened still, I could not have my fill.

'How comes,' I said, 'such music to his bill?

Tell me for whom he sings so beautiful a trill.'

'Once I was dumb,' then did the bird disclose, 'But looked upon the rose, And in the garden where the loved one grows, I straightway did begin sweet music to compose.'"

Mrs. Browning, in her "Lay of the Early Rose," alludes to this legend, and Moore in his "Lalla Rookh" asks:--

"Though rich the spot With every flower this earth has got, What is it to the nightingale, If there his darling rose is not?"

But the rose is not the only plant for which the nightingale is said to have a predilection, there being an old notion that its song is never heard except where cowslips are to be found in profusion. Experience, however, only too often proves the inaccuracy of this a.s.sertion. We may also quote the following note from Yarrell's "British Birds" (4th ed., i. 316):--"Walcott, in his 'Synopsis of British Birds' (vol. ii. 228), says that the nightingale has been observed to be met with only where the _cowslip_ grows kindly, and the a.s.sertion receives a partial approval from Montagu; but whether the statement be true or false, its converse certainly cannot be maintained, for Mr. Watson gives the cowslip (_Primula veris_) as found in all the 'provinces' into which he divides Great Britain, as far north as Caithness and Shetland, where we know that the nightingale does not occur." A correspondent of _Notes and Queries_ (5th Ser. ix. 492) says that in East Suss.e.x, on the borders of Kent, "the cowslip is quite unknown, but nightingales are as common as blackberries there."

A similar idea exists in connection with hops; and, according to a tradition current in Yorkshire, the nightingale made its first appearance in the neighbourhood of Doncaster when hops were planted. But this, of course, is purely imaginary, and in Hargrove's "History of Knaresborough" (1832) we read: "In the opposite wood, called Birkans Wood (opposite to the Abbey House), during the summer evenings, the nightingale:--

'Sings darkling, and, in shadiest covert hid, Tunes her nocturnal lay.'"