By Any Name, It’s Still a Rose

The Boston Globe 

I'm taking a gardening course this spring, not for obvious reasons. Not just because a friend said, "You have to!" (She's seen my garden.) And not just because I want to grow something other than daffodils, which are in bloom now and look lovely but will be gone in days, leaving the round patch of dirt at the top of my driveway bereft for another 11 months.

I signed up for the seven-week course at Milton High mostly because I want to learn the names of things. Because I want to be able to look at a field full of blue and say that's vinca or lupine or lavender. Because I want to be like my friend Anne is with birds. "That's a hooded warbler," she tells me on a walk. "That's a black-capped chickadee," she says on the phone, identifying birds not just by sight but by sound. I call her and say, "Listen," and she will know in seconds that the bird at my feeder is a winter wren, not an American robin.

I want to be that way with flowers.

Plus, I figure that if God went to all the trouble of creating annuals and perennials and big trees and little trees, I should finally, after a lifetime of ignorance, at least try to learn a few of their names.

I know the names of some, of course. Forsythia. Daffodils. Tulips. Roses. Oak trees. Pine trees. Daisies. Rhododendron. Geraniums. I know the Tom, Dick, and Harrys of flora.

But arborvitae? Bradford pear? Silver bell? Japanese maple? Cosmos? Nasturtium? Verbena? All the beautiful people? The Lizbeths and Camerons of the plant world? We had never been properly introduced.

Until now.

Kristen Kleiman is my teacher. She loves all things green and beautiful. She loves flowers and foliage. Mellifluous, poetic words roll off her tongue: Alyssum, delphinium, amaryllis belladonna, stewartia. I repeat them in my head. I write them in my notebook. I practice saying them on the way home.

But by the time I get there? I can't remember which is a tree and which is a flower and which grows where and which doesn't grow here.

And what were all those names again?

Kristen must anticipate this botanical amnesia because she writes down the names of everything she talks about. She gives us lists of shrubs and trees that are her favorite. She gives us lists of shrubs and trees to avoid. She shows us pictures and tells us how high each tree grows, which like shade and which like sun, when they bloom and when they rest. And you'd think, with the lists and the pictures and this totally-in-love-with-plant-life person standing at the head of the class, with this bombardment of the senses, that some of this information would stick.

But it doesn't. Not to me, anyway. 

I stopped at a nursery the other day to look at trees. Trees are "the most important garden choice," Kristen says. Trees are "the bones of a garden." I wandered among them rows and rows of skinny sticks and great green things thinking about how Kristen told us that some trees give dappled shade, some give dense shade, and some give high shade. And I thought about how I love the words "dappled" and "dense," how they make me remember the Dick and Jane books I read as a child, all the trees green and perfect and in neat rows there, too. And I thought about "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn," a book that wasn't about a tree, really, but about the capacity of living things to survive and even bloom where they are planted.

And I thought that maybe I should have joined a book club instead.

A book club or a memory course. These would have suited me.

"What's that blue flower, Mom?" my daughter asked as we were walking to the library last week. We were passing a lawn that was blue with ground cover.

"Vinca," I told her. But I wasn't sure. It could have been little hyacinth or tiny blue daisies.

But she was impressed. "Wow, Mom. You learned this in your gardening course?"

I told her I did. And for a moment, I felt like my friend Anne.