There are many flowers that seem ugly to an indifferent eye.  Even the red valerian, that sprouts so boldly in bushes of coral from the top of the wall, is regarded by some people as a weed and an impudent intruder.  For myself, I love the spectacle of stone walls breaking out into flower with red valerian and ivy-leaved toad-flax.  The country people have greeted these flowers with comic and friendly names.  Valerian they call “drunken sailor,” and the ivy-leaved toad-flax that blossoms in a thousand tiny blue butterflies from the stones has (so prolific it is) been given the nickname of “mother of thousands.”  I doubt, however, whether the country people have as many fanciful names for the flowers as they are represented as having in the books.  When Mr W.H.  Hudson first came on winter heliotrope in Cornwall, and was attracted by its meadow-sweet smell at a season when there were few other flowers, he was told by a countryman that it was called simply “weed.”  Countrymen, if they are asked the name of a flower, will often say that they do not know, but that they call it so-and-so.  A small boy who was gathering green-stuffs for his rabbits came up and walked beside me the other day, and, on being shown some goose-grass, and asked what name he knew it by, said:  “I don’t know its name; we calls it ‘cleavers.’” In my childhood, I never heard it called by any other name than “robin-run-the-hedge,” and under that name alone am I attracted by it.  “Cleavers” is too reminiscent of a butcher’s yard or of some dull tool.  “Goose-grass” at least fills the imagination with the picture of a bird.  But “robin-run-the-hedge” is better, for it is an image of wild adventure.  It will be a pity if the tradition of picturesque names for flowers is allowed to die.  The kidney-vetch, a long yellow claw of a flower that looks withered even at birth, may not deserve a prettier name, but at least it is possible to give it an ugly name with more interesting associations.  “Staunch” is an older name that reminds us that the flower was, a few generations ago, used to staunch wounds.  The other name, it is suggested, had its origin in the supposed excellence of the plant in curing diseases of the kidney.

But there seem to be no grounds for believing this.  There are, unfortunately, some beautiful flowers for which no beautiful or even expressive name has ever been invented.  Who is there who, coming on the blue scabious on a hill near the sea, is not conscious of the gross failure of the human race in never having found anything but this name out of a dustbin for one of the most charming of flowers?  Matthew Arnold, appalled by some of the names of human beings that still flourished in the days of Victoria, and may for all I know be flourishing to-day, once hoped to turn us into Hellenists by declaring that there was “no Wragg on the Ilissus.”  Was there no “scabious” on the Ilissus either, I wonder?  Were I a flower of the field, I should prefer to be called “nose-bleed” or “sow-thistle.”