Cineraria

The cineraria of the florist is Pericallis hybrida, a garden hybrid of the daisy family raised from wild Pericallis species of the Canary Islands and Madeira, where they grow in the laurel forest and on rocky slopes. The plant has moved genus more than once in the botanical literature, having been placed at various times in Cineraria and Senecio before settling in Pericallis, which is why the common name no longer matches any accepted botanical name.

Selection in European nurseries from the later eighteenth century onward produced the dense, dome-shaped pot plant now sold in late winter: a mound of broad soft leaves under a solid sheet of daisy flowers in blues, violets, magentas and reds, each floret ringed about a paler eye. It is grown as an annual, flowers once and is discarded, and its whole horticultural point is a short and intense display of colour in the coldest and dullest part of the year.

Cineraria is a useful example of a plant with no traditional symbolism at all, and it is more honest to say so than to invent one. It did not exist as a garden plant before the modern period, it is a nursery hybrid rather than a wild species, it has no medicinal use in the western herbal tradition, and it appears in none of the classical or medieval correspondence systems, so it has no planetary ruler, no humoral character and no place in the older magical herbals. What meaning it carries is the gardener's: a bringer of cheer, an emblem of bright and uncomplicated delight, given for the plain reason that a mass of jewel-coloured flowers in February is a welcome thing. Several of the wild Canary species are of genuine conservation interest in their island habitats, which is a more substantial fact about the plant than any assigned emblem.

The common name adds its own confusion: the silvery-leaved bedding plant called dusty miller, valued for its felted grey foliage rather than its flowers, is a related but distinct plant, Jacobaea maritima, formerly classified as Senecio cineraria, and is often sold or described under the cineraria name though it is not the same florist's plant discussed here, one more case of a shared common name spanning two different genera. Both plants share the same fine white down on their leaves and stems, the literal source of the Latin cinerarius, of ashes, for their ash-grey colouring, which is the one thing tying the two unrelated plants' common names together.