Adiantum capillus-veneris (maidenhair fern)I am reading this book: 100 Flowers and How They Got their Names by Diana Wells. After all, "Weren't names designed to enhance the matter in which they referred? (Bernard Cooper, Maps to Anywhere, 1990, 4) I wish this were true - I am finding that most botanical and family names of flowers are Greek origin with mythological stories to match; which is interesting. Whereas the common names are often named after botanists and not relating to the flower's characteristics or habitat or cultural context; this is not so interesting.
However, the Foxglove's common name, it's meaning and history are not only interesting, but quaint. Wells (1997) writes:
Foxgloves, native to Britain and Europe, have always been considered fairy flowers. There are dozens of fairy names for them, as well as some more sinister ones like the Gaelic ciochan nan cailleachan marblia, or "dead old woman's paps". The name "foxglove" comes from the Old English foxes glofa, and the flowers do look like the fingers of a glove. Foxgloves tend to grow on woody slopes where foxes' burrows are often found. Foxes are wily creatures who may have needed magical gloves when they slunk out of the shadows and spirited away chickens... William Curtis, whose illustration of a foxglove was the frontispiece to Withering's book, compared the flowers to spotted wings of butterflies, which "smile at every attempt of the Painter to do them justice"... (77-78)
