Lincoln and flowers

[David Lockmiller]

(07-14-2020 01:54 PM)Steve Wrote:  I don't know if this is going to be of any help but one of Herndon's informants, Elizabeth Crawford, gave him a list of wildflowers that grew in Spencer Co:


https://books.google.com/books?id=s2gilc...22&f=false

At the last, just before making the following post, I found out that the hyperlink could be expanded to include what I retyped below from another source, Herndon's Informants.

The flower listing is somewhat incomplete as shown on the hyperlink. Elizabeth Crawford added the following “cultivated” flowers to the list of flowers:

Now I will give you the names of some of the garden flowers that was cultivated in this country by the first settlers, or nearly so, say in 1824 – 26, and on for several years, some of them till this time [May 3, 1866, date of the letter]. The sweet pink, the poppy, the marigold, the larkspur, the forget-me-not (she actually wrote “techmenot,” as in touch-me-not, I believe), the “pritty by night,” the lady in the green, the sword lily - the flower been the hollyhock, the bachelor’s buttens – those buttens the girls use to string and hang them up in their houses for an ornament; thay ware verry* pritty, as thay war white . . . .

* Note: For a long time, Lincoln misspelled the word “verry” this same way.