You can see I love names. If you want to know more about these, see here.
I love names, they are full of history.
Even the terrible Latin names of plants and most of the Common names. (Those which were not just invented by people who think we can’t cope with proper names). The names I’m thinking of right now are the names of all kinds of places. And even then, not so much those names which America has stolen from Britain. (New York? We like the old one. Pennsylvania? In Gloucestershire, UK. I think there are over 600 thefts like that)
But I understand that you don’t name your houses? Why don’t you name your houses? It’s definitely a fun thing in the UK, even if it can make it very hard to find the house in question in the middle of the countryside.
We inherited the name, which appeared in records in the early 20th century.
Apart from the houses of the mega rich and tradesmen’s properties, our houses didn’t generally have names until around the 1860s, with the coming of the railways and subsequent arrival of the suburbs. Apparently “the new suburban houses were ripe for naming because numbering could only be sequential once all the houses in a street had been built.” See ‘How house names tell the story of centuries of social change in Britain.
You’ll be wondering where plants manage to get in here. Well, they don’t, much.
But – which of you names parts of your gardens?
When we first came and began to make a garden in our two acres it seemed terribly pretentious to name any bits of it. That was certainly something the grand garden owners did, but we were mucking around rather helplessly in two fields. However, my first effort was a Veg Plot and that was what you might call a common or garden name. And as more garden was made it became apparent that we needed to be able to tell each other where we could be found. Or at least, that was the idea. I still find Spring problematic because that is where trying to find Charles in the house becomes trying to find Charles in the house or garden. We have just acquired (we believe) four extra fields, so this search will not have become easier. Still, he went off to a field this afternoon and actually told me where he was heading before he left.
This is what we have (so far) =
If you’d like to see a clearer image, with visible names try here.
Most of the names came effortlessly. A meadow is a meadow; a few fruit trees, an orchard; an ex coppice, a coppice. When we acquired a wood, that became ‘Charles’s Wood’ because he had fought the Forestry Commission for a long time to persuade them to let us buy it. But truth is, we call it ‘The Wood’. The Front Garden is where and what you might expect. But if anything isn’t obvious it’s more difficult. I think the process is that you think of a name and try it out. If it doesn’t work – meaning it never gets used – it fades out of use, and something else may pop up instead.
So in truth, most of the garden names are rather prosaic. Though some have history almost accidentally – ‘Chris’s Seat’ is a courtesy name because Chris Young was visiting when we were trying to get the shape right, so that the slope was cunningly disguised. His help was very helpful, so hence the name.
The Wild Garden is so named because I have simply planted into the original field, without clearing it. Surprisingly when Noel Kingsbury reviewed the garden in Gardens Illustrated he said “The planting is not nearly complex enough to evoke a natural habitat, or structured enough to be successful as a border.” It strikes me that this and that part of the garden are interesting as unusual horticulture. Anyone else done this planting straight into grass/pasture thing? A different kind of ‘no dig’.
Some names already speak of history – we have a Cotoneaster Walk, and the name now commemorates the cotoneasters which we loved and which died of fire blight. Though there are some seedlings begining to make their mark and maybe heralding a return.
We are in the process of adding four fields (Just as our contemporaries downsize) and
naming them brings us back to the question of how do you do it? Well, one may be obvious. It had a cottage in many years ago, and someone planted snowdrops. Which have spread wonderfully, right up to the wreck of a car which someone once added, maybe later. I think it may be the snowdrop field, but the car or the (invisible, buried) cottage may take over?
We have no idea how anyone got this car into the bottom of the field.
But the snowdrops set it off nicely.
So the question is – if you don’t name your houses, do you still name parts of your gardens? And if you don’t, isn’t that problematic?
Delightful~~ and to hear your voices describing your unique and lovely garden or perhaps I should say gardens? was so much fun! I always name my houses, whether they are tiny or large, and of course I name the areas of my garden as well. My tinest house was Five Gables, then I moved to a large home that was already named Alvictus. You can find it on line as it was built by Eisenhower’s Chief of Protocal, Victor Purse. Now, I live in a home I named Chez Kabree, recently adding a two story wing I named La Vie en Rose Atelier. Thank you for the spectacular map of your garden. What a grand idea! Wishing you surprises that bring a smile to your face and a jolt to your soul!
And names are such history, aren’t they? – all your memories of these homes which the names would bring back. And I did indeed find Alvictus online. Wonderful!
The plan was originally made – by hand by Elizabeth Holden, – for my first book, the Bad Tempered Gardener. It was one of the joys of doing the book, and since then we give our garden visitors copies of it so they can find their way round the garden.
Thank you for the wished for surprises!
We name things. We bought 10 acres on the high bank of a river in 1995 and promptly named the it The Highlands due to the high bank and my husband’s Scottish origin. We planted thousands of trees in the former corn field but left a clearing near the river for camping. It was named The Opening. We built in 2012. We planted a prairie on the mound left from excavating the basement and it is called the Prairie Mound. The short root prairie over the septic system is the Septic Prairie. A little opening in the woods with a bench was named The Sylvan Glade by my husband. A path through the pines next to The Sylvan Glade is Michigan Trail as the pines remind us of vacations in northern Michigan. He also recently made another path that we called Redbud Trail as the entrance is through a stand of, you guessed it, redbud trees. I do have garden beds near the house and by the road but most of the land has been or is being restored to its native habitat.
Excellent! Your telling takes me round your acres in my imagination – loving The Highlands best for it’s dual meaning and humour, of course.
How does one keep gardening records if the various beds don’t have names? The gardens on my little quarter acre lot in Maryland all have names and my home is Saint Clair Cottage (and I often wonder if I’m being pretentious naming my little cottage). Naming is a charming and useful habit. And occasionally I give plants their own names, too. I raised two Japanese maples from seed from my two trees. They are for a friend, are now entering their fifth spring, and are called “the girls”. Naming things is a delightful pleasure and declares ownership, so to speak! Name on!!
Well, i have to tell you that there is a small settlement about five miles away from me – called Maryland. See what I mean??
I am so glad to hear of your names, including naming your maples. That’s brilliant.
Well, I’m in Maryland, USA, not 5 miles down the road from you
I realise – otherwise, we might have met!
Well, having a town plot only 150′ x 83′, not much reason to name areas. My husband still loses me. Probably because I’m usually on all fours below the plant height. Names are usually directional. North garden, etc. (dad was surveyor/civil engineer. We had to know directions. He never said turn right or left. It was easy or west). Years ago the neighbor boys named the compost pile, potting area Tib’s trash pile. I made a point of tidying it up. No lovely names here.
Well, I love Tib’s Trash Pile, but of course, that is a very American name!
We have three acres and when I go out…I don’t necessarily want to be found….OR at least the searcher takes so long to find me that they’ve forgotten what they were going to ask…(“what’s for lunch?” For example) hence… no names …
Hm, that’s next to cheating, but totally comprehensible……
Hope you never find yourself lost.
A great piece, Anne. Thank you.
Yes, I name things. Sometimes the names reflect history. The house I used to live in was Glen Villa, named after the large resort hotel that once stood nearby. Now I live in York House, named after the people who built it. I use locations to name things. The garden area that was down the hill from Glen Villa was/is the Lower Garden and the area higher up the hill was/is the Upper Room. Some names are descriptive. The elevated channel of water is the Aqueduct, the flat area where I used pieces of broken china is the China Terrace, the large swathe of uncut grass is the Big Meadow.
I use words in ways other than naming, and throughout Glen Villa Art Garden, words suggest connections to poetry, philosophy, history and ideas in general.
I wish people used words more often in their gardens. They add immensely to the character and richness of the experience.
You are so right about what names add. It’s so right to acknowledge history, and indeed by naming things to make it. And then the relation between imagination, garden naming and garden creation would be a post (or a book!) in itself.
As an American, I never thought we were allowed to name our houses even though when I was growing up our house was called Iverton bc built by an English guy bc in the 19th century our little town called Chestnut Hill, outside of Philadelphia was an English vacation resort and many homes here built by Brits. I think you have liberated me to name my little cottage in the woods. I might called it The Forest bc our city friends in NYC call us the Forest People. Thanks Anne!
I’m so glad you now intend to take the plunge and have a name. In the UK, people all have postal addresses, which include the house name. You have to get permission to change the name (to secure postal services I imagine) Is there a way that your new name will become ‘official’?
There is no name for our house, although we call the garden Bronze on Gold which is a combination of our last names and the name of our road. Most areas of the garden are named for their dominant plants: the rhododendron garden, the orchard, the olive mound, the New Zealand mound. The most improbable name is an area of dwarf conifers that we call the Pacific Northwest located in the southeast corner. And so it continues to the back alley called Trail’s End which is the home of plants that have been banished from the main garden but given a second chance.
Thanks for the names of things Anne. May the snowdrops prosper and the car turn to rust.
Thanks – the snowdrops are prospering – but the survival of that car speaks volumes for how sturdy it must have been when it was new!
I’m beginning to think that plants and function get too big a role in the naming, but it seems everyone has at least one name that has gone off piste.
In my experience, many Americans don’t name their primary residence, but do assign names to their vacation homes, even when they are a modest cottage or hunting camp in the woods.
My husband is the third generation owner of a summer cottage on a small island in the Georgian Bay in Ontario, Canada. The locals call it “The Little White House”, not only because the cottage is painted white, but because we are one of the few Americans owning a cottage in the area and the original family owner was recognized as the leader (President) of the community. He even named the large rocks on the island. My favorite is “Cocktail Rock” where we gather each evening to watch the sunset and enjoy a glass of wine. There’s “Casting Rock” where we fish for Walleye and Northern Pike, and the “Garden Rock” where three generations of family members have established a native plant garden in a shallow crevice formed by a glacier.
We have friends whose Canadian Cottage in southern Ontario was named “Wasted Acres”. It was a popular weekend party venue. This small, modest cottage was set in a wooded lot on top of a sand dune and the interior walls were covered in beer caps glued onto the plaster board instead of wallpaper. No formal garden, just ferns, moss, trees and a view of Lake Erie.
Those are great tales emerging from naming. I wonder why holiday homes but not main residences? And of course rocks should have names.
This is a great post, Anne. I love reading about your names as well as others here. Our home has a name, Wren Song Cottage, named of course, for my love of wrens and our small rural home. My garden is relatively new (20 years) but we’ve planted many trees, three of which are named after beloved dogs who aren’t buried under the trees but for each one, we bought a tree to aid in our grief. And so we have a Molly tree (Chestnut), a Libby tree (Korean Maple), and a Bud tree (Katsura). My equipment, supplies, etc are in a small building I call the Garden House…..there is no possible way anyone was ever going to refer to it as a ‘she shed,’ at least in my presence! At first, names seemed too precious, especially since there is no real history to our home or garden. But then it became important because birds and dogs, in particular, are part of us in our time here.
I think there’s always a small awkwardness in using a new name – until it has bedded in. Trees do make sweet memorials.
We rent a cottage in Maine each summer known as Whaleback after the shape of rock outcroppings on the property!
That’s a good name.
Of course I name the parts! How else can I remind myself in lists and notes where something needs to be done? Most names are things like “front of house” and “fence garden” but there is also the “pool garden” which is not at all what someone would think: it is a filled in swimming pool with the only water a birdbath. “The long end” and “short end” are two borders that were outside the walk around the pool. There’s also the “installation” because it was installed in a great project of removing turf, bringing in some rocks to make some terracing, etc.
One of the things I love about names is the way they preserve history.
I’ve named our house: Three Ivies, for the plants that were growing crazy there when we moved in (English ivy, ground ivy, and poison ivy).
O, yes! I lived once in a house which was originally called ‘Ferndene’ – on account of the mass of bracken filling the garden. The bracken went, with the name……
We are building a house a a street named Crossvine. It’s already Bignonia in my brain and we’ve yet to put a shovel in the earth.
Got to be!
Jim Dronenburg & Dan Weil, also in MD, here. We discovered Wintersweet, Chimonanthus praecox, and have at least twelve bushes of it around the place, so we call our house Wintersweet House. We named our beds/areas too-that comment above re keeping track of the beds was spot on. We have Courtyard, Greenhouse, Studio, Shade Room, North Alley, North Walk, Hesperides, Crater, North Forty, Highway, Hellebore Stairs, and Hellebore Alley. The names come in handy because Dan takes photos of our garden of 1.2 acres, and the names help to organize them.
Some of those are intriguing!.
Ha ha. I live on a typical inner-city lot, a historic neighborhood in Dallas, Texas. (A 108-year-old house is old in Dallas, where old is not respected or valued.) My gardens are called Front Yard and Back Yard.
As a Brit I can never make a ‘yard’ into a garden in my head!
My late Mother named our garden. During a phone call home to Minnesota, I was lamenting all that needed to be done in our shady Hosta filled yard, just south of Buffalo, NY. After patiently listening to my long list of projects and little time, she remarked, as only a Mother can do, “you’re at your wits end aren’t you?” With a last name of Whittemore, often shortened to “hey Whit”, it was a good fit! We name portions of the garden to keep everything organized in our maps. Including one portion named The Sex Garden, which is filled with hosta’s that feature names like Big Daddy, Erotica, Seducer, Strip Tease, Hard Knight, Limey Lisa, Naked Lady to name a few.
Love that! That’s naming as an art.
Thanks for a great article, Anne. It was also really fun to see the map of your amazing garden — hope to visit someday! When we retired to this town and bought an architect designed house on a hill from a daffodil expert, we prepared the house and moved in early April. There were more than 30 varieties of daffodils planted everywhere and blooming. We were giving the construction workers huge bouquets to take home to their families. Our 10-year old daughter named the house ‘Daffodil Windows’, which I loved, but never dared share publicly — it would seem pretentious here in Oregon. We downsized to a far simpler house 9 years ago this spring with a bare slate of flat garden. I’ve tended to name the garden areas by the major tree or shrub that I planted there — even if it was still tiny. The Thornless Cockspur, Chief Joseph, Goldilocks, etc.) or by an evocative shape: Nike Swoosh!) I do use directionals — NW corner, South Berm and characteristics — Shady Corner. All in less than a 5th of an acre — but still essential to keeping records straight. Names do evoke history — even the simple ones.
A shame you didn’t feel able to adopt Daffodil Windows! And that history thing – yes, we’re creating it and maintaining it. I was recently thinking that of the theatre ‘box office’ which in Shakespeare’s time was the literal place for the box with the takings in.
Thinking about Maybud as the name for our farm. Derived from British botanist, Miss Maybud Campbell. I learned of “Miss” Maybud in a book called the “Rum Affair,” a wild tale of botanic fraud in the Hebrides. I liked the name: Maybud. We’ve floated the prospective farm name to lukewarm reaction. Better than Bushwood, the name of the elite, private golf club in the comedy movie, Caddyshack. Need to come up with something better and local.
Needs testing out. People can get used to a lot. But you need to be using it, and I guess parts of the garden get used much more than the name of a place you live in. At least for the liver in.
What about May Rosebud? That honors your lovely wife too!
Talk about stealing names! Our bit(2 acres) of land in NW Connecticut is called “Arden”. For many different reasons, not all of them to do with gardening. My husband is a High School Dramatics and English Teacher and we have referenced Shakespeare’s “Forest of Arden” many times in theater and poetry jams. The woods around us are lovely and grow an array of forest plants and trees. I have a small kitchen garden(herbs) and a small flower garden, surrounded by a lovely forest retreat. Admittedly I need to do a little more research about what was growing the the “Forest of Arden”.
O, you must!
I have an absolutely miniscule garden in the Bay Area, about 1/10th of an acre. Still, it’s useful to have names for things so that I can say “the little patio” instead of “the two L-shaped raised beds on the west side of the bedrooms” or whatnot.
I don’t feel the need to name my house though, because I live in a big city and my street name is pleasant, and evocative of the area. Almost all of the ranch/winery properties in the hills have names though, even the ones that are not commercial. If I lived in a rural setting though, you’d better believe I’d name my house!
House names do seem, then, to be more of an option there than i imagined.
Dear Ms Wareham
Over the years I’ve read your rants and admired your garden from afar through your pictures and perused your thoughts on various topics. Soon I will be able to experience your garden in person in May and sit on that fascinating bench I so admire. I have many questions and hope to learn much from you and The Handsome Gardener as well. Perhaps we may also have a chat on your comment “those names which America has stolen from Britain” above as my ancestors settled my hometown in New England.
Excellent! I look forward to meeting you – with Marianne?
Yes!! I am so looking forward to meeting you and visiting Veddw.
Our home and gardens are named Arcadian Haven. – John
Naming places is wonderful! Our land is called Willowmere after the (I think) English word (mere)for a wetland boundary or near a river. I might be completely wrong but it sounded good when I made it up. We have a small river bordering our back line. I also name my gardens – mostly directions, such as southeast border or northeast lily bed. When I write about them in my journal it gives me enough information as to where I should look or what needs work. They’re not big spaces but they bring me joy. I also like to fantasize that someday someone will read my garden journal and try to find those long lost beds – botanical archaeology. Perhaps you could name the new field “Cardrop” which would cover both obvious features. I love your “rants” because I get to travel vicariously. Thanks for the tours.
I too dream of the coming botanical archaeology. I saw it once from a hotel window: my great grandparents had owned the hotel and photographed the garden. It snowed and the 19th century garden reappeared. Co-incidentally when we were there – how amazing was that!?
The house I acquired in 1988 is an 1896 Queen Anne Victorian, used to be inhabited by Reed College students who named it The Cosmos in the early 1960’s. The name has stuck through all the decades and now has its own metal sign on the front porch. The garden parts tend to be named according to what they are (High Path, Low Path, Red Rock Steps, Wide Steps, West Steps) or what’s growing in them (The Rose Garden, Peony Bed, Telephone Pole Bed) or where they are (Garage Bed, Front Bed, House Bed East, H. B. South, H.B. West, Terrace Beds, Top Canyon Slope, Big Canyon Slope). Some parts haven’t yet gotten the right name (after circa 20 years), hope they will come! Like your writings very much, keep up the good critical work!
Maybe the human impulse to name things is eternal!
I think so. A foundational part of language (& thought?) and how far back does that go? A few hundred thousand years?
Something like that!