June 27, 1968
To anyone interested in wild plant study the derivation of the plant names, both common and botanical, is a source of never-ending fascination and puzzlement. Many of the plant names are so far-fetched and imaginative they seem almost ridiculous. A great many of them were dreamed up in the early days of wildplant history and reflect the grouping, wishful thinking of those bent on bringing relief to suffering humanity in those far-off days of medical awakening. Of course many of those old ideas were of real value, but even those that were later found to be deserving of little or no merit have had their misapplied names retained and preserved in the wildplant literature.
Many of the names in our wildplant books we find ending in wort. Wort (pronounced wirt) is an old word meaning plant and was often attached as a suffix to the fore part of the name, that was supposed to be descriptive of the plant in question or its supposed virtues.
Some of these were given names that alluded to a fancied physical likeness to some familiar object or substance – as, for instance, the moneywort, whose small roundish leaves were thought to resemble coins. Another example is the butterwort. The rosette of basal leaves of this little insectivorous plant are a viscid pale yellow, with a little imagination resembling butter – hence, to those early-day name givers, the butter plant, or butterwort. The plausibility of naming this plant for its beautiful violet-like flowers with some such name as cliff violet (it is often found growing on wet cliff-faces) was somehow overlooked.
Others bore names suggestive of their supposed value as curative agents: spleenwort, kidneywort, and lungwort – all these were so-named because of their real or fancied effectiveness in treating the organ referred to.
Figwort was the name given not only to a genus of plants but to a whole plant family. The name, of course, as well as most of those old labels, still persists – and serves as well, no doubt, as any other. But to turn up such a name in the first place required some real mental scratching. The sharp-eyed inventor of the name observed in the course of his studies, that protuberances on the roots of certain plants, and small nodules characteristic in some human ailments these plants were supposed to cure, resembled the fig in shape. And so what would be more logical than to name the plants figworts?
Although the original meaning of some of these names has been all but forgotten, there seems to be no earthshaking reason why we should abandon them. Even if not accurately descriptive, their quaintness and long usage give them a real value to us.
Of course we’ve come a long way since the “wort” names were first applied. We no longer think of coins as being in any way associated with the moneywort; nor of figs in connection with the figwort. Our modern interest in these plants has to do mostly with either their beauty or their physical make-up, principally the structure of their flowers.
Even some of the botanical names take us back to those days when wildplants were being given credit, rightly or wrongly, for being capable of curing all manners of humanity’s ills. Scrophularia, Latin name of the figwort genus refers to the plants’ supposed cure of scrofula, a loathsome and one-time dreaded disease that was usually characterized by those tuberous “fig-shaped” swellings. The name of this entire huge family is Scrophulariaceae.
This particular group of plants, the Figwort family, with exquisitely lovely flowers, in spite of its jaw-breaking botanical moniker, harbors some of the most interesting genera of any plant family: monkey-flowers, penstemons, Paintbrushes, snapdragons, and a score of others. With such an impressive array of genera as this one family possesses, what difference does it make what banner it sails under?
And the same might be said for any of the other numerous wildplant families – “A rose by any other name. – ”.
