The big picture
What’s in a name? A great sense of satisfaction, says MICHAEL McCOY, when you know what a plant is, and irritation when you don’t!
My wife is about to take long-service leave, and there is the unquestioned assumption that I’ll join her. As she is heading to the Dolomites and Julian Alps, stretching from north-eastern Italy across to Slovenia, to wade through alpine flower meadows, I haven’t bothered working up much of a contrary argument.
Being trained as a botanist, and now as a plant-obsessed home gardener and designer, I can tell that I’m going to be stupidly smug about the wildflowers I can name, and really irritated by those I can’t. And I’m already embarrassed about the ridiculousness of both responses.
What is it, that smugness of knowing a plant name? It’s somehow an act of power. There is a sense in which, by identifying and naming a plant, I’ve conquered it. Sure, there’s the one-upmanship, or bragging rights, associated with pointing out what you know to others who don’t. I’ve been at both ends of that painful exchange. But it goes further.
With or without an audience, I feel a curiously comforting sense of familiarity with plants that I can name, and a degree of alienation from those I can’t. This may be natural, but it’s lame. I can’t, in any ‘natural’ sense, claim to know a wildflower’s name. It doesn’t actually have a name. It survived for millennia without one.
All I can claim is that I know what someone else has called it, and what the botanical community
has agreed to call it, for the purposes of identification and communication.
The best argument I can come up with for wanting to be able to identify a wild plant, or even a garden plant, is so I can learn more about it, or can communicate with others effectively about it. But there’s a real danger that, having come up with a name of one of these wildflowers (no doubt following some serious brain-googling, trawling through faded head-files, accompanied by knockings of the fist on forehead and clickings of the fingers), I’ll take a picture and walk on, without further thought.
In fact, if by not knowing the name of a plant, I’m summoned to find out more about it, then it may result in a net gain. If, by knowing, I don’t follow up with further enquiry, then my minimal knowledge has only cemented my ignorance.
I’ve been pondering this paradoxical power of name-knowing for some time, then just last week I stumbled on this quote by one of my favourite writers (who, rather pertinently, renamed himself David Grayson in order to escape the limitations associated with his parent-provided name).
Given its clarity and economy, I’ll make it the last word on the subject: “When someone discovers that creative knowledge does not end with names, but begins with them, they are learning to think.”
Michael blogs at thegardenist.com.au