Grammar Schools: where a gardening education starts

So it’s quite hilarious that Laura actually got the naming of that sweet pea wrong in the video – it should of course be ‘odoratus‘ not ‘odorata‘. You see there IS something about plant-names that does it for me – and it’s the Latin, of course.
Being a Classics teacher, the genus and especially the species names often tell you so much about what the plant looks, what it does, when it flowers, or where you should grow it. And on top of that, many of them sound wildly romantic.
Thus, we have Lilium candidum – it has got to be white: Roman men wanting to win an election – the ‘candidates’ – wore a pure white toga. Or consider the official name of a very fine fastigiate bay that I saw in a lovely East Sussex garden a couple of weeks ago – Laurus nobilis ‘Angustifolia’: the noble, narrow-leaved bay, but it sounds so much lovelier, and indeed nobler, in Latin.
‘Palus’ is Latin for a marsh, so grow anything with ‘palustris’ in its name in a soggy situation, ‘pratensis’ will give you a plant that enjoys a damp meadow-situation, ‘repens’ – creeping – indicates a low-grower, ‘Sempervivum tectorum’ literally means ‘always-alive-of-the-roofs’ – a perfect place to grow this attractive houseleek.
And there’s Ancient Greek as well……Iris was the Greek goddess of the rainbow, for instance. ‘Hemera’ means ‘day’, ‘kalos’ means ‘beautiful’…how long do you think each lovely hemerocallis flower lasts?!

So it’s all rather a glorious game, with all these beautiful-sounding words helping us to become better-informed, and thus better, gardeners. Though I do acknowledge that we need consistency, am I really bovvered about how it’s put down on the paper?  No chance, sister.  But oh the poetry and magic in the words themselves……..

Yes Grammar School girls all three, but I suspect I was waved through the 11+ on an assumption that the brilliance of my elder sisters, although deeply latent in 11-year-old me, must surely surface soon. We continue to wait.
When I walk around Laura’s garden, bless her, she contorts herself in an effort to remember a plant’s correct genus, species and cultivar names as though the horticultural death squad have given her just 10 seconds to crack it. I’m actually only interested in knowing if it’s hardy and whether it will fit in my hand luggage. That said even I felt faintly let down by society when I spotted Dobbies selling a ficus-type houseplant labelled simply ‘Foliage, £6’. It’s as disturbing as Black Beauty ending up on the taxi rank. When a plant gets hoovered up by mass retailers feeding the British conservatory epidemic, apparently it can no longer expect the en

titlement of its botanical name. Although Elaine is undeniably annoying with her Latin intellectualising, even I expect people to know more about their plants than ‘it’s pink’.
But who am I to complain? My horticultural immaturity is not simply a caricature, it’s real. I found it school-girl funny when Elaine pointed out that my pronounciation of ‘anaphalis’ as ‘ana-phallus’, was incorrect, and when I realised one should apply the intonation in ‘superbum’ on the second syllable, not the much funnier third.
In my world plant naming, and almost every other  challenge, is why God invented iPhones. Double simples.

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