The Folk-lore of Plants

'Once I was dumb,' then did the bird disclose, 'But looked upon the rose, And in the garden where the loved one grows, I straightway did begin sweet music to compose.'" Mrs. Browning, in her "Lay of the Early Rose," alludes to this legend, and Moore in his "Lalla Rookh" asks:-- "Though rich the spot With every flower this earth has got, What is it to the nightingale, If there his darling rose is not?" But the rose is not the only plant for which the nightingale is said to have a predilection, there being an old notion that its song is never heard except where cowslips are to be found in profusion. Experience, however, only too often proves the inaccuracy of this assertion. We may also quote the following note from Yarrell's "British Birds" (4th ed., i. 316):--"Walcott, in his 'Synopsis of British Birds' (vol. ii. 228), says that the nightingale has been observed to be met with only where the cowslip grows kindly, and the assertion receives a partial approval from Montagu; but whether the statement be true or false, its converse certainly cannot be maintained, for Mr. Watson gives the cowslip (Primula veris) as found in all the 'provinces' into which he divides Great Britain, as far north as Caithness and Shetland, where we know that the nightingale does not occur." A correspondent of Notes and Queries (5th Ser. ix. 492) says that in East Sussex, on the borders of Kent, "the cowslip is quite unknown, but nightingales are as common as blackberries there."