What Is In A Name?

The etymology of Yellow toadflax begins with it older and more useful cousin. Although Yellow Toadflax has been in North America for the last 300 years old, compared to its namesake, flax, it is still a youngster. Flax was one of the first crops cultivated by civilized man. Therefore some suggest it was native to the Orient and then traveled south to India and north to Europe. The Swiss Stone Age People of the Mediterranean used the fiber and the seed. The Egyptians wrapped their mummies in linen woven from flax fibers.  

Now no one denies the connection between the true flax and its weedy cousin. Many of these weedy species of Linaria look very much like flax. However, this link makes tracing the “toad” in toadflax somewhat unclear.  Some say that toadflax got its name because the word “toad” was a spurious, or counterfeit, of the origin plant. Considering the plethora of common names gives to yellow toadflax, this seems plausible. Common names often take on the observer sees. Some see a cow’s nose, or Calves Snout, in the orange lobes. Others suggest that the plants structure (the two orange lobes) resemble a toad’s mouth.   A third theory is that toads were often found hiding among the leaves.  The butter & egg, or wild snapdragon, is one of 130 species of Linnaria, native to Eurasia.