Time in a Garden: A linguistic look at gardening
Posted: Thursday, February 4, 2016 7:00 am
Time in a Garden: A linguistic look at gardening
Words matter. As a former linguistics major, I'll admit I'm obsessed with them. A word's meaning and its etymology (how it got that way) are a complicated business. Nowhere is that principle more fascinating than in the world of plants and gardens.
Take the word nursery, for example, a place where young plants are grown. It is an extension of 'nursery' as a location in which someone cares for young children, from Old French nourse or nurse, a person responsible for that care. From the get-go, the tending of plants and people become inseparable.
In ancient Latin, planta means sprout or cutting. Over time, plant came to describe any generic living organisms that manufacture nutrients through the green pigment or chlorophyll in their leaves. An ultimate give-back, the process by which plants struggle for survival — photosynthesis — creates oxygen, upon which all organisms (even people) depend. A powerful role model for industrial "plants" and how they function.
Behind every daisy or petunia, there is a taxonomy or Latin-ate pedigree that links the plant to its relatives. The hierarchy starts with kingdom, phylum, class, series, order, family, genus and narrows to a plant's species. A linguistic mouthful and Latin hasn't been the language of choice for ages!
I once vowed to learn the Latin names for at least most of my favorite garden plants, but slowly gave up. Check out the taxonomy of the common dandelion and you'll see the problem. Fortunately for those still working at it, a simpler binomial (two-name) system helps. Common dandelion— aka Taraxacum officinale.
Those Latin names can be useful. Popular names for plants aren't really common at all. Take the weed Glechoma hederacea, for example, a member of the mint family Lamiaceae. It is commonly known as creeping charlie, but depending on where you garden, it also answers to ground-ivy, gill-over-the-ground, alehoof, tunhoof, catsfoot, field balm, and run-away-robin. I am still marveling over the bit about "mint family."
It may not help my weeding skills to know that the origin for the word garden is Old North French gardin (13th century) used to describe kitchen gardens, orchards and palace grounds. A whole host of similar words in Latin, old Germanic, Saxon and other languages mean "enclosure." But the word's history does a lot for my inner gardener. I am not alone in my passion for green things growing.
"What's in a name?" Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet wonders. A lot, it seems.
Spring. Over 1,200 years ago, Old and Middle English used springen to describe the origins of a stream. With the same rush of energy our thaw eventually will come. And with it a wonderful new vocabulary of gardening possibilities.
Long-time Bay View resident, author and columnist Mary Agria is an avid community gardener during her summers in Northern Michigan. On the bestseller lists of area bookstores in 2006, her novel "Time in a Garden," full of gardening wit and wisdom, explores the links between gardening and the ability to cope with love and loss in the changing seasons of our lives. "Garden of Eve" and the just published "From the Tender Stem" round out her Life in the Garden Series. All three books are available at area bookstores and online at http://www.maryagria.com. Send questions and/or comments to Mary Agria at agriainc@msn.com.
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