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Canadian Garden Words sample page 2
Lilies in my garden, July 1995
Part 2Common Canadian Plant Names
versus Botanical Binomials
Canadians have names for the plants of the field, of the mountain, of the sea, and, perhaps best loved, of the garden.Camas bulbs are grown all over the temperate parts of the world. The plant and the word are Canadian in origin. Camas, camass, commas, kamass, or quamash—there are more spellings for this once staple food bulb than you can shake a digging stick at. Its botanical tag is Camassia quamash. Once Pacific coast peoples used to harvest the bulbs of this blue-flowered member of the lily family and bake them immediately in ground ovens. They could be eaten hot or dried and stored for winter rations. Another name for the plant was bear grass, because black bears would grub for the tasty bulbs in the summer. But humans harvested camas in plump-bulbed autumn.
Nez Percé woman in the Palouse area of Washington prepares the camas harvest.
Camas is the Chinook Jargon descriptive which came from the Nootka adjective camas ‘sweet.’ Tribes on the prairies used a western relative, Camassia hyacinthina, for the same alimentary purpose. The original Nootka name for the place that became Victoria on Vancouver Island was Camosun, 'place where we gather camas.' It survives today in many local names including Camosun College.
The blue stars of the camas flower
From seaweeds like New Brunswick's dulse, to southern Alberta's prickly pear cactus, we have also borrowed plant names from other languages and peoples. The green tapestry of our common and botanical plant names is a story many gardeners have neglected. And Wee Willie of the Greenwood, moi, well, shucks folks, I'm here to set that right.
Did you know early explorers of the Canadian West ate a little delicacy called rock tripe? Was it the "guts" of a rock? Voyageurs thought so, and were grateful to make a sticky gumbo-like stew out of this lichen found on rock faces along the Fraser and the Kootenay Rivers.
Jack-in-the-pulpit, Arisaema triphyllum, the familiar little arum of our moist woods, takes its generic name from Greek for ‘blood arum’ because certain European species have reddish spots on the leaves. The specific triphyllum, also Greek, refers to its three leaves. French-Canadian lumberjacks encountered the plant in Québécois woodlands and thought the spathe that bends over the "jack" or spadix like a little pointed flap looked more like one of their implements, a hand-held log-hook or gouet, hence the North American French name, gouet à trois feuilles 'hook with three leaves.' Iroquois peoples named it kahahoosa 'papoose cradle,' because it looked like the back rack Iroquois women used to carry their babies.
But we also have surprising sources here of plants not Canadian in origin but known to every Canuck. Jingle your bell on mistletoe.
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MISTLETOE
It's so Christmassy! But in its original Old English form mistletan, mistletoe means 'shit-on-a-stick.' Oops! It's the poops.
The ancient druids held mistletoe sacred, hence an old common name for the plant is druid's herb. The druids thought the plant grew miraculously from bird droppings. In fact mistletoe is a parasite sucking nourishment from the tree hosts that it infests. All in all, a curious plant to symbolize the birth of a god.
In Old High German Mist means 'dung.' English belongs to the West Germanic branch of Indo-European languages. Mistel in Old English was the name of the white berries of mistletoe. Mistel meant literally 'shitling' or 'little dropping' and tan was one of the Old English words for 'twig' or 'stick.' The Angles and the Saxons who spoke Old English may have borrowed the word from the Vikings whose language is now called Old Scandinavian and who had a word for mistletoe, mistelteinn 'shit-twig.'
Long after the druids, botanists discovered that mistletoe can be propagated from feces dropped on upper tree branches by birds, after they have eaten the sticky, seed-rich, white berries.
But don't think of this at all next Christmas when you're standing under the mistletoe waiting to kiss your beloved.
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Are all plant names sweet and gentle, summoning to mind Little Mary Green Thumb skipping merrily down her garden path in a gingham frock and Victorian sun hat? No indeed!Orchid means 'testicle' in ancient Greek. The flower that red-faced dudes pin to maidenly bosoms on prom nights was named after certain species of ancient Attica that had twin roots resembling the human scrotum. Does macho claiming then lurk in this innocent dating ritual where the male fastens a symbolic scrotum to his female partner? One hopes not.
Avocado is an early mangling by Spanish conquisatores of ahucatl, the word for 'testicle' in Nahuatl, an Aztecan language of Mexico and Central America. Vanilla flavouring is extracted from seed pods of an orchid first called vainilla in Spanish. Vainilla means 'little vagina,' named because the shape of the vanilla pods reminded a botanizing but lusty explorer of what he missed most. Vaina from the Latin word vagina is still in modern Spanish where it means 'sheath for a sword,' which is the prime meaning of vagina in early Latin.
Eggplant or Aubergine?
Consider too the plump purple of the noble aubergine, the British and European name for what we North Americans call eggplant—a dowdy, frumpish name. Aubergine goes all the way back to Sanskrit, a classical language of India, where it was called vatinganah which means literally 'fart, go away.' Eating the eggplant was considered to be good for suppressing flatulence, quite the opposite of its usual alimentary effect. From Sanskrit, the word and the fruit were borrowed into Persian as badingan, then into Arabic as al-badhinjan. When the Arabic-speaking Moors first conquered Spain they brought eggplants with them. Some Spaniards borrowing the term thought the Arabic definite article al was part of the word, so it went into the Catalan language as alberginia. The French picked this up as aubergine, and English nabbed the word late in the 1700s. As to the anti-flatulent property of eggplants, eaters vote on both sides of the question. Some say aubergines reduce intestinal gas; others claim their consumption is an invitation to a tooting patootie.
Daisy
The daisy, that perky little upstart of side-beds and ditches, began life in Old English, long before the twelfth century, as dæges eage 'day's eye.' The letter g between vowels in Old English had a soft y sound. The eye of day is a splendid label for a daisy.
As I hope you begin to see, knowing the origins of common plant and flower names adds to the joy of gardening. But this book celebrates all plant names, common and botanical. Every language on earth has a stock of simple verbal labels applied to the several hundred plants most important to the speakers of that language. Plants that receive common names are useful for food, shelter, medicine, and ornament. Harmful and poisonous plants also tend to get named; after all, we have survived since our dawn on the African savannahs. Plants of no obvious and immediate use to humans had to await formal botanical nomenclature, which began with the Swedish founder of plant taxonomy, the naturalist Linnaeus, in 1753.
Some green-tower botanists blather away against the use of common names and loudly bray that everyone ought to use botanical binomials. Nonsense, of course. Such "experts" put the monotony in botany. This book, I trust, removes it.
Any ramble in the garden of names leads to the gate of this conclusion: sufficient to their daily uses are the common names of plants. Garden-variety labels suit the hundred or so plants most gardeners and farmers encounter in a life of nurturing ornamentals and crops.
Canadian Garden Words boasts sections about the word lore of annuals, bulbs, herbs, perennials, trees, and wild plants native to Canada. If you need a brief refresher on botanical names, there is even a chapter explaining how they work.
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Aster
The Latin and Greek word for star gives many English words.
Disaster occurs under an unlucky star.
An asterisk * is a star-like symbol used to mark off important words. It comes from an ancient Greek word asteriskos that means 'little star.'
An astronaut is literally, according to its ancient Greek roots, 'one who sails to the stars.'
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