Then the strawberry-leaves dying, with a most excellent cordial smell. Then the flower of the vines; it is a little dust, like the dust of a bent, which grows upon the cluster in the first coming forth. Then sweet-briar. Then wall-flowers, which are very delightful to be set under a parlour or lower chamber window. Then pinks and gilliflowers,[1] specially the matted pink and clove gilliflower. Then the flowers of the lime-tree. Then the honeysuckles, so they be somewhat afar off. Of beanflowers[2] I speak not, because they are field flowers. But those which perfume the air most delightfully, not passed by as the rest, but being trodden upon
- ↑ Gilliflowers. Gillyflower is a name that has been applied to various plants whose blossoms smell like the clove (Old French, girofle, or clove), and especially to the clove-scented pink, Dianthus Caryophyllus, or Clove-gillyflower. The clove-gillyflower is the original of the carnation and other double pinks in cultivation, and it is the gillyflower of Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspere, and Bacon.
"The fair'st flowers o' the season
Are our carnations, and streak'd gillyvors."
Shakspere. The Winter's Tale. iv. 3.
In those dialects in which the name gillyflower is still current, it is commonly applied, either to the Wall-flower (Cheiranthus Cheiri), or Wall-Gillyflower, or to the White Stock (Matthiola Incana), or Stock-Gillyflower. Bacon's garden contains all three, pinks, stocks, and wall-flowers. The wall-flower is a native of southern Europe, where its deep orange-yellow flowers light up old walls and cliffs. In cultivation, the flowers range in color from pale yellow to deep red, and are clustered in short racemes. Wall-flowers are "delightful to be set" under windows because of their sweet odor.
- ↑ Bean-flower. Vicia Faba, or Faba Vulgaris, a bean which has been cultivated in England for centuries as food for cattle, just as Indian corn is grown in the United States. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, ii. 1, Shakspere refers to "a fat and bean-fed horse."
"Long let us walk,
Where the breeze blows from yon extended field
Of blossomed beans. Arabia cannot boast
A fuller gale of joy, than, liberal, thence
Breathes through the sense, and takes the ravish'd soul."
James Thomson. The Seasons. Spring.
