Proserpina, Volume 1: Studies of Wayside Flowers, While the Air was Yet Pure Among the Alps and in the Scotland and England Which My Father KnewRuskin, John
Science
Proserpina, Volume 1: Studies of Wayside Flowers, While the Air was Yet Pure Among the Alps and in the Scotland and England Which My Father Knew
Ruskin, John
Flowers; Plants
X. DELPHIDES.--Sacred to Apollo. Granata, changed from Punica, in honor to
Granada and the Moors.
XI. HESPERIDES.--Already a name given to the order. {198} Aegle, prettier
and more classic than Limonia, includes the idea of brightness in the
blossom.
XII. ATHENAIDES.--I take Fraxinus into this group, because the mountain
ash, in its hawthorn-scented flower, scarletest of berries, and exquisitely
formed and finished leafage, belongs wholly to the floral decoration of our
native rocks, and is associated with their human interests, though lightly,
not less spiritually, than the olive with the mind of Greece.
28. The remaining groups are in great part natural; but I separate for
subsequent study five orders of supreme domestic utility, the Mallows,
Currants, Pease,[58] Cresses, and Cranesbills, from those which, either in
fruit or blossom, are for finer pleasure or higher beauty. I think it will
be generally interesting for children to learn those five names as an easy
lesson, and gradually discover, wondering, the world that they include. I
will give their terminology at length, separately.
29. One cannot, in all groups, have all the divisions of equal importance;
the Mallows are only placed with the other four for their great value in
decoration of cottage gardens in autumn: and their softly healing {199}
qualities as a tribe. They will mentally connect the whole useful group
with the three great AEsculapiadae, Cinchona, Coffea, and Camellia.
30. Taking next the water-plants, crowned in the DROSIDAE, which include the
five great families, Juncus, Jacinthus, Amaryllis, Iris, and Lilium, and
are masculine in their Greek name because their two first groups, Juncus
and Jacinthus, are masculine, I gather together the three orders of
TRITONIDES, which are notably trefoil; the NAIADES, notably quatrefoil, but
for which I keep their present pretty name; and the BATRACHIDES,[59]
notably cinqfoil, for which I keep their present ugly one, only changing it
from Latin into Greek.
31. I am not sure of being forgiven so readily for putting the Grasses,
Sedges, Mosses, and Lichens together, under the great general head of
Demetridae. But it seems to me the mosses and lichens belong no less
definitely to Demeter, in being the first gatherers of earth on rock, and
the first coverers of its sterile surface, than the grass which at last
prepares it to the foot and to the food of man. And with the mosses I shall
take all the especially moss-plants which otherwise are homeless or
companionless, Drosera, and the like, and as a connecting link with the
flowers belonging to the Dark {200} Kora, the two strange orders of the
Ophryds and Agarics.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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