d indeed, for
this unrestrainable, unconquerable insolence of uselessness, what name can
be enough dishonourable?

6. I pass to vegetation of nobler rank.

You remember, I was obliged in the last chapter to leave my poppy, for the
present, without an English specific name, because I don't like Gerarde's
'Corn-rose,' and can't yet think of another. Nevertheless, I would have
used Gerarde's name, if the corn-rose were as much a rose as the corn-flag
is a flag. But it isn't. The rose and lily have quite different relations
to the corn. The lily is grass in loveliness, as the corn is grass in use;
and both grow together in peace--gladiolus in the wheat, and narcissus in
the pasture. But the rose is of another and higher order than the corn, and
you never saw a cornfield overrun with sweetbriar or apple-blossom.

They have no mind, they, to get into the wrong place.

What is it, then, this temper in some plants--malicious as it
seems--intrusive, at all events, or erring,--which brings them out of their
places--thrusts them where they thwart us and offend?

7. Primarily, it is mere hardihood and coarseness of make. A plant that can
live anywhere, will often live where it is not wanted. But the delicate and
tender ones {110} keep at home. You have no trouble in 'keeping down' the
spring gentian. It rejoices in its own Alpine home, and makes the earth as
like heaven as it can, but yields as softly as the air, if you want it to
give place. Here in England, it will only grow on the loneliest moors,
above the high force of Tees; its Latin name, for _us_ (I may as well tell
you at once) is to be 'Lucia verna;' and its English one, Lucy of Teesdale.

8. But a plant may be hardy, and coarse of make, and able to live anywhere,
and yet be no weed. The coltsfoot, so far as I know, is the first of
large-leaved plants to grow afresh on ground that has been disturbed: fall
of Alpine debris, ruin of railroad embankment, waste of drifted slime by
flood, it seeks to heal and redeem; but it does not offend us in our
gardens, nor impoverish us in our fields.

Nevertheless, mere coarseness of structure, indiscriminate hardihood, is at
least a point of some unworthiness in a plant. That it should have no
choice of home, no love of native land, is ungentle; much more if such
discrimination as it has, be immodest, and incline it, seemingly, to open
and much-traversed places, where it may be continually seen of strangers.
The tormentilla gleam