File:Cassell's popular gardening (1884) (20540641765).jpg

Title: Cassell's popular gardening
Identifier: cassellspopularg00fish_2 (find matches)
Year: 1884 (1880s)
Authors: Fish, David Taylor, 1824-1901; Fish, D. T. (David Taylor), 1824-1901
Subjects: Gardening
Publisher: London ; New York : Cassell
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: The Library of Congress

View Book Page: Book Viewer
About This Book: Catalog Entry
View All Images: All Images From Book
Click here to view book online to see this illustration in context in a browseable online version of this book.

Text Appearing Top of Page:
104 CASSELL's POPULAR GARDENING. Text Appearing Around Image:
from P. Rhoeas. Some of the double varieties are very fine indeed. P. unbrosum is a beautiful introduction of medium, growth, and flowering very freely. It has rich vermilion flowers, each petal having a large black blotch.
There are some beautiful perennial Poppies, quite hardy, and well deserving a place in the garden. P. bracteatum has large crimson salver-shaped flowers, six to eight inches in width, and it is very showy indeed. P. orientale resembles it, but the flowers are scarlet rather than crimson. P. nudicaule is a much smaller-flowering species, forming tufts of bright yellow flowers on slender stalks about one foot in height. There is a white-flowered variety of this, and a deep orange form also. These should be planted out in well-manured ground, and suffered to become established, and then they flower very finely indeed.
The generic name Fapaver is said to be derived from papa, infant's food, because the juice of the plant was mixed with that to prevent a child being wakeful. If so, we may conclude that the Anglo-Saxon name for the plant, Papig, and our English "Poppy" had a similar origin. Theocritus tells us that the Greeks had the custom of taking a petal of the Corn Poppy, and laying it on the thumb and forefinger of one hand and slapping it with the other. If it gave a crack, it was a sign their lovers loved them; but if it failed, they lamented their disappointment. The Drapery Bee (Apis papaveris) forms the linings of its cells from the petals of the Poppy, cutting and adapting them to her purpose most dexterously. The Poppy is one of the plants the seeds of which, if buried deeply in the soil, will retain their power of vegetating many years. Tull relates an instance of their doing so after being buried twenty-four years. This explains why no lengthened fallowing gets rid of this gay weed, and that scarcely a ripening harvest-field is found in which we do not see "merry Poppies, all amid the waving corn."
The Potentilla.—The common name of the Potentilla is Cinquefoil, so named both according to the French cinq and feuilles, and Latin cinque foliola, so called from its five leaflets. The generic name Fotentilla is from potens, powerful, from its supposed medicinal quality; but with the exception of Fotentilla reptans, or Creeping Cinquefoil, a very common British plant, none of the species are remarkable for their products or properties. The root of this plant has a bitterish, styptic, slightly sweetish taste, and was formerly used in diarrhoea, and other complaints for which astringents are usually prescribed.
There are a large number of introduced species of Potentillas, but the many fine hybrids now found in our gardens have, no doubt, been derived from the Bloody Cinquefoil, P. atrosanguinea, introduced from Nepaul in l822. There is a British species named P. Fragariastrum, the strawberry-leaved Cinquefoil; the leaves greatly resemble those of this fruit, and it is sometimes termed the Barren Strawberry. But this has only three leaflets instead of five, and it is considered as the connecting link between the two genera, Fragaria (Strawberry) and Fotentilla. Nearly all the fine varieties of the present day have Strawberry-like foliage, and the flowers are of many rich shades of colour, excepting blue and purple. Some fine introduced species besides P. atrosanguinea have no doubt proved useful as parents, but excepting in old botanical gardens such species are now seldom to be met with. For a long time
Caption Appearing After Image:
Papaver nudicaule.
Note About Images