First words

In my family, the story goes that my first words were "Booful flowers." Beautiful flowers.

According to the story, I spoke them in the front yard of my family's first house in Pennsylvania. I'm sure it was the petunias that caught my eye.

I liked to play in the yard, and my parents let me play as much as I liked without worrying about getting my rooster-print sundress muddy. It made me pretty confident, and comfortable with bugs, dirt, worms, water, and leafy things.


I remember the first time I learned a flower's name. We lived in a suburban small town west of Philadelphia. Behind our house there was a small patch of woods that I was allowed to venture a few steps into.

There were evergreen shrubs with pretty, intricate pink clusters of flowers, and my mother taught me their name - Mountain Laurel.

Kalmia latifolia photo by Alan S. Heilman, University Tennessee Herbarium, from US Forest Service

When we moved to Illinois, our house was one of a half dozen or so built in a newly planned subdivision built on farmland in the Fox River Valley. Our house was surrounded by woods and fields. I was given a small field guide to wildflowers, and looked for flowers like Wake-Robin Trilliums, Mayapples, and Jack-in-the-Pulpit.

© 2002 Steve Baskauf

Each spring the floor of the woods was carpeted with clusters of Spring Beauty, or Claytonia virginica.


My mother grew hybrid tea roses - the ones I remember well are Peace, Tropicana, Queen Elizabeth, and Sterling Silver. One summer she used a mulch of cocoa-bean hulls - I can still remember the smell of hot chocolate in the sun. She also grew annuals like snapdragons, sweet alyssum, and pinks.

I am not sure how old I was when I started looking at the Wayside Gardens catalog my mother got in the mail. They were large, expensive-looking volumes, carefully bound, with colored photos and elaborate descriptions. I still remember plants that fascinated me - Corylus contorta, or "Harry Lauder's Walking Stick" hazel - Butterfly bushes and Franklinia trees. These plants are still offered in Wayside's catalog today.

Wayside printed the plants' common names alongside their botanical names. After a time, the botanical names were just as easy for me to remember as the common names.

I've noticed that I have acquired a peculiar talent. I always name the plants I see. Wherever I am, if I see a plant, some part of my brain marks its name. This quirk is always just teetering on the edge between consciousness and subconsciousness; I can be walking down the street with a friend, having a conversation, and as we pass the planter-boxes of the Wells Fargo Bank or the hedge-rimmed library, a little voice in my brain is rattling away, "Buxus sempervirens, agave, that purple lantana you see everywhere, rose - is it "Iceberg?" - a nice dwarf nandina, that variegated daphne, ipomoea, anigozanthus - and oh what a pretty daylily!"

Name the flowers. I've done it since I learned to talk.

Is that weird? Does anyone else do this, too?