I suppose in the “lonely” versions, the epithet could be regarded as a hypallage–transferring the idea of ‘lonesomeness’ from the life of a cowboy to a plant located in the scene.

Good idea, making it semantically as well as phonologically plausible.

Ah, someone else who fell in love with the Alec Guinness character, Gulley Jimson, in “The Horse’s Mouth”! I remember being inspired to read the book after seeing the movie and enjoying it too, but missing the paintings themselves that featured so wonderfully in the movie. Thanks for the background on Jamestown > Jimson > gypsum. I didn’t know “Jamestown” hiding in there; same sort of loss of transparency as in “bedlam”, “maudlin”, etc.

Ah yes, the paintings; they do a lot to make the movie work.

I decided not to throw in bedlam/maudlin/etc., since there were so many threads already. But definitely relevant. (By the way, do we have a name for these opacifying phonological reductions?)

This is guaranteed to be hopeless. Unless you are a truly rare memory phenom, your memory for the exact details of things you heard in the past is utterly undependable.