I notice in myself, and have observed in others, a lamentable lack of accuracy as regards the proper names of weeds. Even some that I know the best, and hate the hardest, I really cannot put any name to. Now this is not as it should be. Everything, however detestable, has a name of its own, and that name ought to be used. You may not like a man, but that is hardly a reason for calling him “What’s-his-name,” or “Thingamy.” It is true that in the West of Ireland it is regarded as a very unsafe thing to mention any of the more malignant powers by their right names. The Sidh, for instance, if spoken of by their proper title, invariably fly at you, and do you a mischief. The only way of avoiding this peril is to use some obscure and roundabout designation, which is not their real name at all. I do not know whether the same mode of reasoning has ever been held to apply to weeds. If so, I cannot say that the plan appears to me to answer. At least I can safely swear that I have never called one of them by its proper botanical name in my life, yet they rush in on us from all sides, and persecute us none the less impishly.
There is one particularly diabolical individual, which has clearly marked this garden as its prey, and marches continually to and fro of it like a roaring lion. What its correct name is I shall in all probability never know, though I have carefully cross-examined several botanical works on the subject. It has narrow fleshy leaves; a mass of roots, constructed of equal parts of pin wire and gutta-percha; the meanest of pinky white flowers, and a smell like sour hay. It is not the leaves, the flowers, the roots, or even the smell, that I so much object to. It is the capacity it possesses of flinging out offshoots of itself to incredible distances, which offshoots no sooner touch ground than they begin to weave a kind of ugly green net over everything within reach, enmeshing it all into as dense a mass of leaves and roots as is the parent plant.
Although I am no nearer extirpating it than I was before, since yesterday I have at least been able to name it, a satisfaction which many a poor Speaker must have been thankful for, especially in an age grown too picked and tender to allow of even the most obdurate obstructor being despatched to either the Tower, or the Block.
It was Cuttle who provided me with that satisfaction, and it is not one of the least of the many debts that I owe him.
“What can be the name of this thing, I wonder, Cuttle?” I said, rising exhausted from an effort to hinder a fresh colony from enmeshing and strangling a line of “Laurette Messimy” which had been recently planted upon the top of a slope.
“I’m not sure as I can tell you its proper name, ma’am, but about here we calls it ‘Snaking Tommy.’ ”
Admirable Cuttle! “Snaking Tommy” of course! The instant I heard it I felt convinced that in that preliminary naming of all plants and animals performed by Adam in the garden of Eden, that, and no other, must have been the name bestowed upon this. It is true some theologian might assure me that there were no weeds in the garden of Eden, but that I think is not particularly likely, because, whether there were weeds in that garden or not, there are certainly no theologians in this one. Moreover we all know that the snake was there, to everyone’s immeasurable discomfort. And if the snake, why not, let me ask, “Snaking Tommy”?
September 14, 1899
HOWEVER it may be in other gardens, seed-sowing, I find, to be the very centre and kernel of this one. The sowing of seeds is apt to be accounted merely a matter of the raising of a due supply of annuals, salpiglossis, nicotiana, lobelia, nemophila, clarkia, bartonia, godetia, “and a long etcetera.” With us it is the permanent, the perennial occupants of our flower-beds which must either be grown from seed, or else not grown at all. This fact was early impressed upon our minds, and in a very summary and effectual fashion, such as Nature’s fashion of instilling indispensable truths for the most part is.
It was three years ago, and we were a pair of destitute garden-owners. We had however good friends, with large gardens. The connection was perfectly self-evident. Without a moment’s hesitation the basket went round. The response was noble. Plants came to us from North, South, East, and West, especially West. Alas for those plants!