The summer flowers are blowing, and I was reminded yesterday of a slightly outlandish-sounding line in the summery poem Pearl which speaks of the plants ‘gilofre, gyngure & gromylyoun’. I am still not sure what gromylyoun is. I know it’s gromwell, but I haven’t got any in the garden, and my husband has never had occasion to use it, despite its medicinal reputation in the Middle Ages.
I thought I knew what gillyflower was, though — the wallflower, with its candy popcorn scent. But Michael Quinion has disabused me. He is the author of an excellent new book called Port Out, Starboard Home and Other Myths (Penguin, £12.99), which explodes erroneous etymologies. Posh we dealt with here, and I thought I liked this new book because I agreed with everything it said. But on the gillyflower, like Bunbury I am exploded.
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