[see BELL sb.1 4.] The popular name of two widely different flowers.
1. A species of Campanula (C. rotundifolia) which grows on open downs, hills, and dry places, and flowers in summer and autumn, with a loose panicle of delicate blue bell-shaped flowers on slender peduncles. This is the ‘blue bell of Scotland,’ and of the north of England, and of the Elizabethan herbalists.
1578. Lyte, Dodoens, II. xxiii. 174. Blew Belles [with a figure of Campanula] whan their plante beginneth first to spring up … haue small rounde leaues.
1783. Ainsworth, Lat. Dict. (Morell), I. Blue bells, or bell flowers, Campanula flore cæruleo.
1795. Burns, Their Groves o’ sweet Myrtle, ii. Where the blue-bell and gowan lurk.
1837. Lockhart, Scott (1839), VII. 178. He had scrambled to gather blue bells and heath flowers.
a. 1872. W. Miller, The Blue Bell, in Poets & Poetry of Scotl., 1877, II. 340. For glaumorie is round the sweet blue bell.
2. In the south of Eng. generally and in many modern Eng. poets: a bulbous-rooted plant, Scilla nutans (Hyacinthus non-scriptus Linn.), growing in moist woods and among grass, and flowering in spring, with a nodding raceme of drooping narrow bell-like flowers.
(Those who call this ‘blue-bell’ or ‘bluebell,’ generally call the other ‘hair-bell’ or ‘hare-bell.’)
1794. Martyn, Rousseau’s Bot., xviii. 250. The Wild Hyacinth or Blue-Bells of the European woods.
1802. Southey, Thalaba, IV. xxiii. Amid the growing grass The blue-bell bends, the golden king-cup shines, And the sweet cowslip scents the genial air.
1846. Keble, Lyra Innoc., IV. vii. 121. Forest bluebells in a row Stoop to the first May wind.
1851. Mary Howitt, Sk. Nat. Hist., 83. The nodding Bluebell’s graceful flowers, The Hyacinth of this land of ours.
