[WATERING vbl. sb.]
1. A portable vessel for watering plants; now usually of tinned iron, and furnished with a long tubular spout, often ending with a rose for scattering the water.
1580. Hollyband, Treas. Fr. Tong, Vne Chantepleure, a garden pot, a watering pot, the toppe of a Cesterne.
1620. I. C., Two Merry Milk-maids, I. ii. B 4. What, doe you weepe Brother? Dor. Like a Watring-Pot; he wud make an excellent Fountaine in the midst of a Garden.
1633. G. Herbert, Temple, Affliction, ‘Broken in pieces,’ ii. As wat’ring pots give flowers their lives.
1660. Boyle, New Exp. Phys.-Mech., xxxiii. 247. A Gardiner’s Watering Pot shap’d conically, or like a Sugar-Loaf.
1752. Phil. Trans., XLVII. 546. The Duke then took one of his silver watering-pots, which was two feet and an half high.
1842. Loudon, Suburban Hort., 499. After which the whole of the hillocks should be watered, from a watering-pot with the rose on.
1915. ‘Q’ (Quiller-Couch), Nicky-Nan, xiii. 165. She set down her watering-pot.
2. Zool. A mollusk of the genus Aspergillum, so named from the shape of its shell. Also attrib. as watering-pot group, shell.
1815. Burrow, Elem. Conchol., 206. Serpula Aquaria, Watering-Pot.
1861. P. P. Carpenter, in Rep. Smithsonian Instit., 1860, 249. The Watering-pots or Aspergillum group. At first sight a ‘Watering pot shell’ would not be supposed to have any connection with ordinary bivalves.
1864–5. Wood, Homes without H., v. 106. The Watering-pot Shell (Aspergillum) is well known to conchologists.
1885. Riverside Nat. Hist. (1888), I. 283. The most noticeable species is the ‘watering pot’ Aspergillum vaginiferum.… This species comes from the Red Sea.
