'Rocks, Moss, Stonecrop, Iron, Merd'

English is rich in words that can mean the opposite of what they appear to mean and even seem self-contradictory. Linguists know them as auto-antonyms. Some of the better-known examples are cleaved, dust and oversight. But the word I just encountered, stonecrop, is more poetically suggestive. It sounds like a biblical curse. Erudite gardeners will recognize it as the name of a flower, or rather a large group of flowers, members of the genus Sedum. Yet the word implies a harvest of rocks or barren, unproductive land suitable only for growing stones.

In A Retrospect of Flowers (Jonathan Cape, 1950), the Scottish poet Andrew Young (1885-1971) pokes fun at Dr. Johnson for defining stonecrop in his Dictionary as “a sort of herb.” Johnson was no botanist but neither was he a fool. In Chap. 10 of Rasselas he observes that a poet “does not number the streaks of the tulip, or describe the different shades in the verdure of the forest.” Rather, he is “to exhibit in his portraits of nature such prominent and striking features, as recall the original to every mind; and must neglect the minuter discriminations.” The general supersedes the particular. Science and modern literary taste judge otherwise but for Johnson a flower was a flower, and a poet gets no credit for minute description.

The OED confirms a simple etymology: stone + crop = stonecrop. In Old English: stáncrop. It first show s up about a thousand years ago. Most of the dictionary’s citations are drawn from dictionaries, herbals and early botanical texts. A brief search disclosed that John Clare left a fragmentary poem beginning: “The stonecrop that in summer comes.” Best of all is Eliot’s use in “Gerontion”:

“The goat coughs at night in the field overhead;

Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds.”

See the OED on merd: “dung, excrement; a piece of excrement, a turd.”