The American cowslip displays a distinctive shape: its flowers, growing in an umbel, hang downwards. Each of its petals reflex upwards from the base of the flower. Robert Thornton’s description of it as a “shuttlecock” is, as the above images attest, quite apt. This dangling pendent shape is what constitutes this plant’s, in Maria Jacson’s words, “peculiar elegance.” Darwin, moreover, calls attention to two functions of the plant’s peculiar morphology.

First, he remarks on the fact that the stigma of this plant greatly exceeds the length of its anthers. This disproportion is the reason, in fact, that the plant must “bow with wanton air,” otherwise the short anthers would not be able to pollinate the stigma, in Darwin’s interpretation. The reflexed petals offer protection for pollination by shielding it from the elements. Darwin observes that the complex and unusual morphology of this flower would have been avoided if only the anthers had grown longer, for then the flower would not have to hang downwards. He infers from this that the filaments must be the most immutable part of the plant. He continues this train of thought in a later work, Phytologia (1800), arguing that since filament length is the plant’s most immutable characteristic, it should serve as the essential trait for classification.

Second, Darwin remarks on another aspect of the plant’s physiology: once the seeds are formed, the flower-stalks that previously hung downward become upright. He considers an explanation of this phenomenon that would have seemed as far-fetched in his time as it does in ours, that the Dodecatheon meadia turns up its flower-stalks out of a desire to protect its future offspring. Storgé, along with eros, philia, and agape, are Ancient Greek words for love; in distinction from the latter words, storgé signifies a parental love or affection. Darwin’s quite deliberate use of it thus suggests that the plant’s behavior is not due to blind mechanism (instinct, biochemistry, etc.), but rather because of its affection for its future offspring. Under this interpretation, plants, just like humans, express affection for their future children, as in protecting them from environmental harms. Turning upward, then, is a form of prenatal care.

Throughout his poem, Darwin consistently challenges the longstanding estimation of the ontological status of plants. From Aristotle to Linnæus and into our present age, sensibility, locomotion, and volition were and are consistently denied to plants but accorded to animals. Darwin asserts, to the contrary, that plants have each of these capacities, if only in a diminished form. He states this position clearly in his Zoonomia, a more explicitly scientific book published after The Botanic Garden. In it, he writes, “The approach of the anthers in many flowers to the stigmas, and of the pistils of some flowers to the anthers, must be ascribed to the passion of love, and hence belongs to sensation.” Two plants, in particular, encapsulated the challenge to eighteenth-century thinking about plants: see The Sensitive Plant (Mimosa pudica) and the carnivorous plants like the Common Sundew (Drosera rotundifolia) and Venus Flytrap (Dionæa muscipula). For a recent discussion of the ontological status of plants, see the provocatively titled Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence (2015) by Stefano Mancuso and Alessandra Viola. The question of what plants are and what capabilities they have is by no means resolved.

In her poetic treatment of this class and order, Pentandria Monogynia, Frances Arabella Rowden conveys a remarkable story. She indicates in the footnote that she wrote the verse at the request of a friend, who had been able to find her only solace from a husband on the brink of death in the quiet company of her cowslip, which she watched grow in the greenhouse. Just as Darwin’s plant cared for its offspring, the cowslip here cares for this woman in her time of distress, as she cares for it and her husband. Rowden’s verse is positively chilling and rewards reading in full.

The plant, though, that Rowden writes about is the cowslip (Primula veris), which is different than the American cowslip (Dodecatheon meadia). The American plant received its name, as one might guess, because it looked similar to the former English species. The etymological origin of “cowslip” itself, though, is a bit more of a mystery. It may refer to the boggy habitat of the plant or cow dung, in which the plant also often grows. In The Gardeners Dictionary, Philip Miller says he will continue to use “American cowslip,” as the common name, but will do so only begrudgingly, for the plant, he complains, remains in want of a proper name. He would have likely preferred its common name today, “shooting star.”

The binomial name was also not without its controversy. Although Catesby had suggested “Mead” as a genus name, rather than as a species epithet, Linnæus adopted it for the latter, using “Dodecatheon” for the genus, which means twelve heathen gods, apparently in reference to the plant’s beauty. This adoption, no doubt, ruffled a few of the many pious feathers in the 1700s, but they can now rest a little easier, knowing that Austin R. Mast and James L. Reveal have recently argued (2008) that based on genetic evidence the genus Dodecatheon should be taxonomically moved into the genus Primula, thereby making the genus monophyletic. Under this new organization, then, D. meadia becomes Primula meadia, and the pantheon is no more. Although modern taxonomy may have begun with Linnæus (see Canna indica), its work is far from done.