When I was a wee girl in Glasgow, I loved to go with my Dad to his allotment. I can remember so well: being lifted up to peer into the mysterious stillness of the deep water in the water butt, the smell of dahlias and tomato leaves, pulling carrots and shelling peas, all the sheds and huts made out of old doors and corrugated iron (though my Dad and his neighbour Mr Gavin, a joiner, built a very fine greenhouse with a brick base and proper windows against the wall of the cemetery which backed the plot). All the plots were fenced and had their own gates. I have memories of carrying home vast bunches of flowers.
One year Dad grew a patch of the most beautiful daisies I had ever seen. The purity and freshness of the big white flowers in the dirty old city was enchanting and I knew that one day I would want to grow daisies like these. Not just any daisy, but this exact daisy, so I memorised the name - chrysanthemum spectabile 'Cecilia'. When I rattled it off at home I was accused of 'showing off' (Scottish children were never encouraged to show off!) so I kept quiet about it after that, but was hooked on the latin names. I loved them, and never had any trouble remembering them. When I went to secondary school I studied Latin, and, older still, when I was given a copy of the Reader's Digest Encyclopaedia of Garden Plants and Flowers by my sister and brother in law, I just read it from start to finish, as you would any book, and without really trying, the latin names stuck.
So if it sounds like showing off, I don't mind - they read like poetry to me, and meant a lot to me in the years when I dreamed of having a garden of my own in the country and growing all my favourite flowers.
One year Dad grew a patch of the most beautiful daisies I had ever seen. The purity and freshness of the big white flowers in the dirty old city was enchanting and I knew that one day I would want to grow daisies like these. Not just any daisy, but this exact daisy, so I memorised the name - chrysanthemum spectabile 'Cecilia'. When I rattled it off at home I was accused of 'showing off' (Scottish children were never encouraged to show off!) so I kept quiet about it after that, but was hooked on the latin names. I loved them, and never had any trouble remembering them. When I went to secondary school I studied Latin, and, older still, when I was given a copy of the Reader's Digest Encyclopaedia of Garden Plants and Flowers by my sister and brother in law, I just read it from start to finish, as you would any book, and without really trying, the latin names stuck.
So if it sounds like showing off, I don't mind - they read like poetry to me, and meant a lot to me in the years when I dreamed of having a garden of my own in the country and growing all my favourite flowers.
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