Bookish Gardener

A pronounced improvement

I think I've found the perfect tool—or crutch—for the times when I need to get my nose out of my books, or my hands out of the dirt, and actually, like, talk with other gardeners about plants. I've come upon this book: The New Garden Encyclopedia (—or maybe I should say The "New" Garden Encyclopedia, since it's from 1941), and plan on using it as my reference for (and arbiter of disputes regarding) botanical name pronunciation. The Encyclopedia is a plumped-up dictionary, with concise entries alphabetically ordered. My copy has a mildew-mottled spine (gah, I am such a sucker for these old books), and sits nicely in the hand with its compact (6" x 9") page size. There's a lot in its 1139 pages, and it's ideal for surfing: if you open the book to any page at random, you'll find something interesting, which leads you to something else that's interesting, and so on, and so on (Mom...Mom! Supper's burning!).

Each plant name is accompanied by a pronunciation guide. Test drive: Hydrangea (hy-dran´-je-ah). (Good: "dran", not "drain".) Hellebore (hel´-ee-bor). (Hmm, don't think I've ever said that with a long e before.) Clethra (klee´-thrah). (Oh, I get it—like "ur-e-th—". Ahem. Moving right along...) Narcissus (nahr-sis´-us). Whew...I won't have to use that affected hard "c". And let's not forget clematis: Encyclopedia says klem´-a-tis. Well, that settles it. I'll similarly defer to the Encyclopedia on "-ceae" suffixed family names: see-ee it is. I'll even buckle under and accept ber-jee´-ni-ah for Bergenia, named after a fellow called Bergen (as in ber-gen). But thank goodness for the sensible pronunciation of Weigela (wy-gee´-lah). That one had puzzled me for a while, with lots of folks out there saying "Wy-gee´-lee-ah) [but it's not spelled Weigelia! or Weigelea!] or even "Wy´-zhu-lah" [just before zhuzhing one's sleeves, I suppose].

The Encyclopedia covers genus names extensively, but not species names, so here's a site I'm using as a supplement: Landscape Plants of the Upper Midwest, produced by our very own UW, where you can hear the plant name pronounced at the press of a "play" button. This was helpful for Cotinus coggygria (cog-gy´-gree-ah), and will save me from having to call sweet autumn clematis "Clematis maximumblemumble" (Clematis maximowicziana...kindly disregard the cle-mat´-is).

(Of course, no criticism is intended, whatsoever, for folks who say any of these names in a different way... my goal being only to gain the confidence to articulate botanical names as elegantly as Mr. Giles.)

The New Garden Encyclopedia: A Complete, Practical and Convenient Guide to Every Detail of Gardening, Illustrated with 250 Halftones and More Than 500 Line Drawings Made Expressly for This Work. "Written by a group of horticultural experts [including the famed rhododendron expert and hybridizer Clement G. Bowers, and our old friend G.A. Stevens] and edited by E. L. D. Seymour, B.S.A." Wm. H. Wise & Co., 1941. Out of print, but this Bookfinder.com listing shows many copies available through various sellers.

Once more, with Giles

I've been very late to the party on the whole Buffy thing. So it's only recently that I caught the first episode of its final season, in which Willow is taking the rest cure in England, and summons a blossom of, er, passionflower vine from the good green earth. Rupert Giles points out, "It doesn't belong there," and further observes, "Passiflora caerulea. Native of Paraguay." Pahss-i-FLOR-a kah-eh-ru-LEH-a. May I never utter another botanical name unless I can say it just like that. Ah, the thought of Anthony Stewart Head reciting the Index Hortensis, entry by entry, cover to cover. A gardener's dream (and, no doubt, an actor's nightmare).

I say clem-a-tis, you say cle-mat-is

In a moment of serendipity, I flicked on the TV the other day while getting dressed for a meeting, just in time to happen upon a segment of Martha Stewart's daily show which featured Dan Hinkley of Heronswood Nursery. One of these days I'll order the Heronswood catalog, primarily to see the plants he's introduced from Korea (the flora of Korea being an interest that's gently simmering on the back burner...for now). My mental picture of Dan Hinkley is constructed from Jamaica Kincaid's descriptions in My Garden (Book): (pub. info. here), in which he appears as a friend and companion traveler on a seed-gathering expedition in China. I don't know quite what I expected, but I remembered this image from the book:

...but I could not keep up with Dan; he bounded up the mountain like a four-footed furry mammal (a bear) and disappeared. I only knew how to follow him by seeing the trembly branches and flattened undergrowth that were left in his wake.

On TV? Definitely not the wild-eyed, sunburned explorer...rather, a mild-mannered regular guy, wardrobe inspired by Mister Rogers (albeit with v-neck sweater instead of cardigan), who clearly has done a good job of remembering to use his sunscreen. He and Martha chatted about seed gathering and seed exchange organizations, and did a little "show-and-tell" on seeds collected from their respective gardens.

So, Dan Hinkley pronounces clematis "clem-a-tis". I myself bounce back and forth, but mainly settle on "cle-mat-is". This dictionary accommodates both. But I like Lauren Springer's attitude in her plant portraits' pronunciation guide in The Undaunted Garden (pub. info. here):

The pronunciation guide is not meant to be a rigid put-off--it is a guide, nothing more. There is no wrong way to pronounce a botanical name unless the syllables are out of order or a person's name is mangled in the process.

(By the way, Lauren favors "clem-a-tis".)

The pronunciation guides in the back of Horticulture magazine are also of interest, and helpful in using phonetic spelling ("KLEM-uh-tiss") as the guide instead of those symbols that I haven't thought about and can't remember since eighth grade. (Quick...what's the schwa sound...and the symbol for it?) I loved, in the way that only a true geekazoid can, this footnote in Horticulture's November/December 2003 issue on the pronunciation for Agave:

The pronunciation uh-GAH-vay, whether as a common name or a generic epithet, is nearly universal for these plants. The origin of the word, however, is not Spanish (which the common pronunciation might lead one to expect), but rather the ancient Greek agauos, meaning illustrious or noble. When agauos is Latinized as Agave, the rules of pronunciation for botanical Latin require a long a sound in the second syllable, hence uh-GAY-vee, which is favored by several authoritative sources. Of course, readers are free to regard this as nonsense and pronounce the word as they darn well please.

However, my faith is sorely shaken by Horticulture's prescription for anemone (September/October 2003 issue): an-ih-MOE-nee. Really? Have you ever met anyone who pronounced it that way, instead of ah-NEM-on-ee? Dictionary.com lists only one pronunciation (hah! the right one).

Then there are the blasted botanical family names, all ending in "ceae". It's been quite a trial, going from high school Latin pronunciations to Anglojurisprudential Latin pronunciations to, now, botanical Latin pronunciations. (Wish I'd had this, which is both a handy cheat sheet as well as an interesting historical guide to competing ways of pronouncing words in Latin.) It was hard enough figuring out in law school that "res" ("the thing" in Latin) wasn't to be pronounced "ress" anymore (as in "quae res et cibi genere et cotidiana exercitatione et libertate vitae" from the fourth book of Caesar's The Gallic Wars, not that I ever read that far), but "reese". Now, when I want to say Malva-ceae, or Ranuncula-ceae, or Lilia-ceae, the rules of botanical Latin seem to augur against the more mellifluous "see-aye" (without a glottal stop), and, instead call for "see-ee" (impossible to say without a glottal stop). Hard to pronounce without feeling like Nicolas Cage at the payphone in Honeymoon in Vegas, tripping over native Hawaiian ("is that 'Ka-pu-ah-ah' or 'Ka-pu-ah-ah-ah'?"). But here's another problem--wouldn't the purist call for the "C" to always be pronounced as a hard "C"? (Nar-KISS-us instead of Nar-SISS-us?) Thus, not "see-aye", and not even "see-ee", but "kee-ee"? Forget it. I'll do in Rome as the Romans do, once the Romans figure out what they're doing.