It’s not a great photograph for sure, but the family name Galinsoga triggered the memory of a story my dad used to tell about a wartime message which began as “send reinforcements, going to advance” and having been passed by mouth from messenger to messenger finally arrived at headquarters as “Send three and fourpence, going to a dance”. The trigger, of course was the similarity, when spoken, between Galinsoga and Gallant Soldier.
As ever I turned to Geoffrey Grigson’s marvellous 1958 book “An Englishman’s Flora” which lists Latin and English folk names, county by county for hundreds of familiar flowering plants. Galinsoga is something of an outlier in the book because it lists only one name by way of explanation to describe these “thin, long legged, little flowered daisies, ray flowers white, disc flowers yellow – annual, naturalised little cockneys in a waste corner or uncultivated garden” and makes the link between the plant name and the 18th century Spanish botanist Don Mariano Martinez de Galinsoga.
Many of the plants mentioned in the book have dozens of local folk names which would (at least the Oxfordshire ones) have been familiar to my mother. Every time I open the book I get a pang to think of the loss of local dialects; it only took a few turns of the page to discover that in Gloucestershire the Spindle tree was known as Skiver – which isn’t a name I’ve ever heard. But what about “Single Gussies”, “Smear Docken” or “Son afore the father”? What about “Arse smart”? The rich and earthy poetry of plant names has all but disappeared by now. I remember an old man in Pucklechurch delightedly telling my young sister that the Dandelion she’d picked was really called “Piss the Bed”. I can see the point of the Latin binomials if a native botanist of Gloucestershire was trying to compare Pulmonaria (Jerusalem Cowslip) notes with a neighbour from Herefordshire who called it Spotted Virgin” – but there’s a wealth of folklore and pre-scientific medical wisdom hidden within the local dialect names. It’s a great book to browse and I’ve almost worn my battered paperback copy out – I’ll have to shell out for a properly stitched hardback copy one of these days.
