Books to Sample / Humour / The Wording Room / Q&A /Biography / New / Schedule
BUY BOOKS ONLINE / Submit Sayings / Photos / Contact / Links / Site Map / Home
sample pages from Canadian Garden Words
ISBN 0-316-13343-4
356 pages, fully illustrated, list $ 19.95, published by McArthur & Company
A clematis in my garden in the 1980s
Introduction
Part 1
What Canadian Garden Words is all about is summed up in my subtitle:
The origin of flower, tree, and plant names, both wild and domestic, entertainingly derived from their sources in the ancient tongues together with fancy botanical names and why you shall never again be afraid to use them!
I am a word-nut and an amateur gardener. While blizzards bluster outside my window, the only thing I can plough through are seed catalogues, like many a Canuck green thumb. Dreaming of spring's surge, of peated loam awaiting seed, of rock-garden nooks for new alpines, I also dawdle over garden volumes that explain how to grow plants. But I could never find a book that offered the juicy lore associated with plant names. Because no particular compilation filled Bill's bill, I made my own. Of course, I use the word garden freely. After all, this book includes notes about the names of some Canadian wild flowers and many native trees. But the verdant fields of our dominion, indeed of our earth, are one vast garden. It behooves us to protect it. A step toward that goal is to know better the charm and surprise of its nomenclature.
-- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Surprising Plant Name Origins
Nasturtium = ‘nose-twister’ in Latin.
Its flowers have a pungent aroma.
Pansy = pensée, the French word
for thought, because the flowers
nodded wisely, according to
French gardeners.
Cowslip = cu slyppe, which is
Old English for 'cow shit.'
The plant grows well in
pastures and mucky places.- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Browsing at a garden centre, most of us have squinted at the printed label on a plant and seen two names, perhaps Cornflower followed by Centaurea cyanus.
What? What's Centaurea cyanus when it's at home? Well, Centaurea is the centaur's plant, from kentauros in Greek, a mythical half-man, half-horse, who galloped into the ancient Greek imagination from mountain pastures in Thessaly. When centaurs were feeling poorly—claimed an old Greek folk story—they nibbled on cornflowers and were restored to studly vigour. Cyanus is the Botanical Latin form of kyanos, a Greek colour adjective meaning 'dark-blue' and here referring to one colour of cornflowers. Cyan is also a modern English colour word for dark-blue. The same verbal root appears in the word cyanide. The common name recalls the fact that cornflowers grow wild in the grain fields of southern Europe.
The names we have given plants have interesting stories to tell. Both the common names and the botanical names are easier to remember if you know why a plant was named. This book demystifies botanical nomenclature. It is true that the scientific names for plants can look and sound like ungainly verbal monstrosities, the kind of words that, if they wanted a quick swig, would drop into that monster bar in the Star Wars trilogy. But in fact even long, complicated-looking words in botany have down-home roots. The source of these technical terms is often found in homey metaphors, uses of the plant in old folk medicine, mythology, and even old wives' tales. Discovering the reason for a plant name leads to knowledge of Latin and Greek roots which helps in understanding other words in English. Deconstructing what looks like learned gibberish is fun and can increase your vocabulary.
Botanical names need defeat no gardener. Knowing these scientific labels gives a gardener trying out a new plant some knowledge of that plant's native locale or habit of growth, and so the gardener has a better chance of growing it successfully.
And of course this book seeks to answer the important questions in Canadian life:
Why was spruce tea once peddled as "The Great Antiscorbutic Elixir of the Canadas, Most Easily Made and Necessary To Be Had by All Persons There Resident"?
Which human body part is named after a pine cone?
What tree did both Canadian beavers and the builders of Venice use?
A snotty var is a familiar Canadian tree in Newfoundland. Which one?
Begonia is named after a governor of French Canada. Who was Michel Bégon?
When Acadians were driven out of Nova Scotia, some settled in Louisiana to become Cajuns, and found down south a tree that also grew in their Acadian homeland. In fact, they named the capital of Louisiana after this tree, Baton Rouge or 'red stick' in French. But which tree reminded them of the home from which they had been so ruthlessly expelled?
Discover answers to all the questions above and many more garden queries in my book Canadian Garden Words.
Where did we get our labels for plants?Which plant names are Canadian in origin?
SELECT SAMPLES FROM OTHER WORD BOOKS
