A tulip bulb once cost more than a house
In the 1630s the Dutch went briefly and spectacularly mad about the TULIP. The flower was new to Europe, the rarest kinds had dramatic feathered stripes, and bulbs began changing hands for larger and larger sums — one reportedly for a quantity of grain, oxen, pigs, wine, butter, cheese, a bed and a silver cup, all together valued above a canal house in Amsterdam.
Then in February 1637 an auction in Haarlem found no buyers, and within weeks the bulbs fetched almost nothing. Economists have argued about the details ever since, but the phrase stuck: tulip mania is still the standard comparison for any market where people stop asking what a thing is actually for. The stripes, incidentally, were a virus.
A sunflower stops following the sun
Young SUNFLOWER plants really do track the sun, swinging west across the day and then rotating back east overnight so they are facing the right way at dawn. The stem grows slightly faster on one side and then the other, so the plant is not turning so much as leaning by growing.
Once the flower opens, it stops. The mature head locks in place facing east and stays there. Researchers who turned some plants around found the difference: east-facing heads warm up quickly in the morning sun, and warm flowers received around five times as many pollinator visits as cold west-facing ones. A field of sunflowers all looking the same way is not obedience — it is the end of the trick.
A country doctor and a foxglove
In 1775 an English doctor, William Withering, heard about an old Shropshire woman whose family recipe was curing patients with dropsy — the dreadful swelling that comes with a failing heart — after the physicians had given up. He got hold of the recipe, found twenty or so herbs in it, and worked out that the active one was the FOXGLOVE.
He then spent ten years testing doses on patients and published the results, including the failures and the poisonings, which was rare and admirable practice at the time. The drug he isolated is still used today. It remains a seriously dangerous plant, and an unusually good example of a folk remedy that turned out to be right for reasons nobody involved understood.
Some of these are not one flower at all
A DAISY looks like a white-petalled flower with a yellow middle. Pull one apart and it is hundreds of separate flowers packed onto a disc — each tiny yellow dot in the centre is a complete flower with its own petals, and each white 'petal' around the edge is another one. The SUNFLOWER and the MARIGOLD are built the same way, and that is how a single sunflower head leaves you with a thousand seeds.
The name is a small piece of Old English: day's eye, because the flower shuts at dusk and opens again in the morning. The rest of the grid is more straightforward — the ROSE, LILY, ORCHID, DAHLIA, PEONY, PANSY, PETUNIA and CARNATION from the border, LAVENDER and JASMINE for the scent, the CROCUS, SNOWDROP and DAFFODIL first out of the cold ground, and the POPPY, VIOLET, IRIS, BLUEBELL, BUTTERCUP and LOTUS growing wherever they please.