– John S.Stokes Jr.
Queen of the Missions, March 1955.
Paradoxically, the very literature and book learning which destroyed the oral religious traditions of the Christian countrysides during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries took it upon themselves to record the disappearing externals of those same traditions in the nineteenth. It is thus secular lexicographers, not religious tradition, that we are to thank for the preservation of many of the centuries-old popular Mary names of plants which have come down to us today. For this reason many religious people unfamiliar with the old religious plant names.
Mrs. Lillie Pioneers
However, it was not from secular dictionaries that the Mary Flower tradition took root and found new life in the United States in the early nineteen thirties. It came as an offshoot from the old popular tradition which still survives in the monasteries and countrysides of England. For it was in England that Mrs. Frank R. Lillie, of Chicago,