The Folk-lore of Plants

The withering of plants has long been regarded ominous, and, according to a Welsh superstition, if there are faded leaves in a room where a baby is christened it will soon die. Of the many omens afforded by the oak, we are told that the change of its leaves from their usual colour gave more than once "fatal premonition" of coming misfortunes during the great civil wars; and Bacon mentions a tradition that "if the oak-apple, broken, be full of worms, it is a sign of a pestilent year." In olden times the decay of the bay-tree was considered an omen of disaster, and it is stated that, previous to the death of Nero, though the winter was very mild, all these trees withered to the roots, and that a great pestilence in Padua was preceded by the same phenomenon. [2] Shakespeare speaks of this superstition:-- "'Tis thought the king is dead; we will not stay, The bay-trees in our county are all withered." Lupton, in his "Notable Things," tells us that, "If a fir-tree be touched, withered, or burned with lightning, it signifies that the master or mistress thereof shall shortly die." It is difficult, as we have already noted in a previous chapter, to discover why some of our sweetest and fairest spring-flowers should be associated with ill-luck. In the western counties, for instance, one should never take less than a handful of primroses or violets into a farmer's house, as neglect of this rule is said to affect the success of the ducklings and chickens. A correspondent of Notes and Queries (I. Ser. vii. 201) writes:--"My gravity was sorely tried by being called on to settle a quarrel between two old women, arising from one of them having given one primrose to her neighbour's child, for the purpose of making her hens hatch but one egg out of each set of eggs, and it was seriously maintained that the charm had been successful." In the same way it is held unlucky to introduce the first snowdrop of the year into a house, for, as a Sussex woman once remarked, "It looks for all the world like a corpse in its shroud." We may repeat, too, again the familiar adage:--