As a child, Lunaria was a favorite flower, for it afforded to us juvenile money. Indeed, it was generally known among us as Money-flower or Money-seed, or sometimes as Money-in-both-pockets. The seed valves formed our medium of exchange and trade, passing as silver dollars. —Alice Morse Earle, Old Time Gardens

Lunaria (Lunaria annua) is ripening in many gardens now, its translucent, silvery seed disks shimmering like full moons. Also called honesty, this is an old-fashioned plant that was once common to English cottage gardens.there is one growing in the lovely garden of Beatrix Potter's Hill Top Farm. She was given the plant by one of the village women; about it, she says, "It blooms in early summer, with lavender, pink, or white flowers. The translucent seed pods that follow are perfect in dried bouquets." The seeds, ground and moistened with hot water or vinegar, are pungent and are used as a mustard substitute.

This is another of those plants-with-a-dozen-names. Its Latin name, Lunaria, is derived from "moon," and one of its names—moonwort—refers to its shimmering moon-like seed disks. But because the seeds resemble coins, it is also called money flower, money plant, or penny flower. In Old Time Gardens, Alice Morse Earle tells a poignant story about an old man named Elmer, who was (in the language of the times) addle-pated. He slept in barns, proffered the seeds of the money plant in return for the loaves of bread and jugs of milk he "bought" in the village, and was fond of saying that he had hundreds of silver dollars put away for the winter. The villagers understood what he meant by this and humored him, but one day some tramps overheard him talking about his wealth and killed him for it. "Scattered around him," Earle writes sadly, "were hundreds of the seeds of his autumnal store of the money plant; these were all the silver dollars his assailants found."

No one—not even the Oxford English Dictionary, that font of linguistic wisdom—seems to know where the name "honesty" came from. All we have is John Gerard's report, in his Herbal of 1597: "We call this herb in English Pennie Flour...and among our women it is called Honestie." I wonder whether poor old Elmer was the only man ever killed for his honesty.

Beatrix Potter, in a letter to her friend Millie Warne, Oct. 12, 1906:
"Mrs. Satterthwaite says stolen plants always grow, I stole some 'honesty' yesterday...I have had something out of nearly every garden in the village."

Read more of Alice Earle's fascinating recollections:
Old Time Gardens, by Alice Morse Earle. Written in the early twentieth century, this book is a fascinating treasure-trove of historical lore about many almost-forgotten plants that bloomed in our ancestors' gardens.