NASTURTIUM

　　The pungent smell of these flowers caused them to be nicknamed “nose-twisters ” by the ancients. You see, the word nasturtium was made up of the Latin words nasus, “nose,” and torqueo, “twist.” It was the Roman naturalist Pliny who said, in the 1st century, that this flower “received its name from tormenting the nose.” And if you chew one of the seeds the bitter taste will make the meaning of the name more obvious.

　　ORCHID

　　The lovely and expensive orchid holds in its name the Greek word for “testicle,” orchis. Even Pliny the Elder, Roman author and naturalist, said,these 2,000 years ago, that the orchid was remarkable in that, with its double roots, it resembles the testicles. These are his Latin words:” Mirabilis est orchis herba, sive serapias, gemina radice testiculis simili.” The word orchis now survives in English only as a botanical and medical term. The meaning proper has disappeared along with the study of Greek from the general ken.

　　PANSY

　　Some poetic mind fancied that this dainty flower had a thoughtful face, and so named it pensee, French for “thoughtful,” which turned easily into our word pansy.

　　PASSION FLOWER

　　So named because its parts resemble the instruments of Christ’s passion. The corona is the crown of thorns; the flower, the nails or wounds. The five sepals and five petals are the ten apostles. Peter and Judas were not counted.

　　PEONY

　　These striking, heavy-headed plants so characteristic of early summer wereonce widely used in medicine so they were named after Paion, a personage of Greek mythology who was the physician of the gods.

　　PETUNIA

　　The botanists saw a resemblance between this small tropical plant with its white and violet flowers and the tobacco plant so they took the American Indian word petun, “tobacco,” and put a Latin sounding ”ia” on the end.

　　PHILODENDRON

　　A tropical Amirican plant that likes to climb trees, among other things, and so takes its name from the Greek philodendros, from philos, “l(fā)oving,” and dendron, ”tree,” that is, a “tree-loving plant.”

　　PHLOX

　　The solid and variegated colors of the phlox glow like flames. Why shouldn’t they, since phlox, in Greek, means “flame”?

　　POINSETTIA

　　The Honorable Joel Roberts Poinsett of Charleston, South Carolina, was adistinguished diplomat, Secretary of War in President Martin Van Buren’s cabinet, author, congressman, authority on military science, Union leader in the Civil War, but for all that he would probably gave been forgotten had he not been appointed as a special minister to Mexico. It was while there that he became attracted to the large, flaming flowers that we now know so well. He brought some of the plants back to the States and his name Poinsett gave us poinsettia.