rose-water.

A trade in flower and vegetable seeds formed a lucrative and popular
means by which women could earn a livelihood in colonial days. I have
seen in one of the dingy little newspaper sheets of those days, in the
large total of nine advertisements, contained therein, the
announcements, by five Boston seedswomen, of lists of their wares.

The earliest list of names of flower-seeds which I have chanced to note
was in the _Boston Evening Post_ of March, 1760, and is of much interest
as showing to us with exactness the flowers beloved and sought for at
that time. They were "holly-hook, purple Stock, white Lewpins, Africans,
blew Lewpins, candy-tuff, cyanus, pink, wall-flower, double larkin-spur,
venus navelwort, brompton flock, princess feather, balsam, sweet-scented
pease, carnation, sweet williams, annual stock, sweet feabus, yellow
lewpins, sunflower, convolus minor, catch-fly, ten week stock, globe
thistle, globe amaranthus, nigella, love-lies-bleeding, casent hamen,
polianthus, canterbury bells, carnation poppy, india pink, convolus
major, Queen Margrets." This is certainly a very pretty list of flowers,
nearly all of which are still loved, though sometimes under other
names--thus the Queen Margrets are our asters. And the homely old
English names seem to bring the flowers to our very sight, for we do not
seem to be on very friendly intimacy, on very sociable terms with
flowers, unless they have what Miss Mitford calls "decent, well-wearing
English names"; we can have no flower memories, no affections that
cling to botanical nomenclature. Yet nothing is more fatal to an exact
flower knowledge, to an acquaintance that shall ever be more than local,
than a too confident dependence on the folk-names of flowers. Our
bachelor's-buttons are ragged sailors in a neighboring state; they are
corn-pinks in Plymouth, ragged ladies in another town, blue bottles in
England, but cyanus everywhere. Ragged robin is, in the garden of one
friend, a pink, in another it flaunts as London-pride, while the true
glowing London-pride has half a dozen pseudonyms in as many different
localities, and only really recognizes itself in the botany. An American
cowslip is not an English cowslip, an American primrose is no English
primrose, and the English daisy is no country friend of ours in America.

What cheerful and appropriate furnishings the old-time gardens had;
benches full of straw beeskepes and wooden beehives, those homelike and