100 years ago in COUNTRY LIFE
AT this time of year we are all interested in flowers and Mr G. H. Browning has an interesting series on the way they came to be named. He dissipates one or two misapprehensions. For instance, it is often believed that foxglove should properly be spelled folks’- glove because its glove was that of the fairies or little folk. But there is no old spelling which gives ground to this pretty legend. It is the fox itself from which the flower is called. It is traced as far back as the thirteenth century in and occurs again in the fourteenth. The word has an analogue in Danish, ‘revbjelde’, meaning the fox-bell. The common names of garden flowers were due largely to the monks who were mediaeval gardeners. St John’s wort and the pretty Marybud are cases in point.
