certain to what flower Shakespeare
refers in "Love's Labour's Lost" (v. 2):

"When daisies pied and violets blue,
And lady-smocks all silver-white,
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue
Do paint the meadows with delight."

Mr. Miller, in his "Gardener's Dictionary," says that the flower here
alluded to is the _Ranunculus bulbosus_; but Mr. Beisly, in his
"Shakespeare's Garden," considers it to be the _Ranunculus ficaria_
(lesser celandine), or pile-wort, as this flower appears earlier in
spring, and is in bloom at the same time as the other flowers named in
the song. Mr. Swinfen Jervis, however, in his "Dictionary of the
Language of Shakespeare" (1868), decides in favor of cowslips:[485] and
Dr. Prior suggests the buds of the crowfoot. At the present day the
nickname cuckoo-bud is assigned to the meadow cress (_Cardamine
pratensis_).

[485] See Nares's "Glossary," vol. i. p. 212.

_Cuckoo-flowers._ By this flower, Mr. Beisly[486] says, the ragged robin
is meant, a well-known meadow and marsh plant, with rose-colored flowers
and deeply-cut, narrow segments. It blossoms at the time the cuckoo
comes, hence one of its names. In "King Lear" (iv. 4) Cordelia narrates
how

"he was met even now
As mad as the vex'd sea; singing aloud;
Crown'd with rank fumiter, and furrow weeds,
With burdocks, hemlock, nettles, cuckoo-flowers,
Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow
In our sustaining corn."

[486] "Shakespeare's Garden," p. 143.

_Cypress._ From the earliest times the cypress has had a mournful
history, being associated with funerals and churchyards, and as such is
styled by Spenser "cypress funereal."

In Quarles's "Argalus and Parthenia" (1726, bk. iii.) a knight is
introduced, whose

"horse was black as jet,
His furniture was round about beset
With branches slipt from the sad cypress tree."

Formerly coffins were frequently made of cypress wood, a practice to
which Shakespeare probably alludes in "Twelfth Night" (ii. 4), where the
Clown says: "In sad cypress let me be laid." Some, however, prefer[487]
understanding cypress to mean "a shroud of cyprus or cypress"--a fine,
transparent stuff, similar to crape, either white or black, but more
commonly the latter.[488] Douce[489] thinks that the expression "laid"
seems more applicable to a coffin than to a shroud, and also adds that
the shroud is afterwards express