The first time she visited my garden, my sister-in-law Mika left me with a gift: a new way of looking at old names for revered flowers and, more broadly, a fresh awareness of the role language plays in garnering respect for other living species.
“What do you call these?” she asked as we passed a profusion of pastels fronting the vegetable garden. “In Japan we call them hyakunichisou. It means ‘flower of one hundred days.’ ”
“That’s beautiful,” I responded. “We call it zinnia, and I have no idea what it means.” (A subsequent search online revealed that it’s just another in a long line of anthropocentric labels we assign our species, derived from the surname of European botanist Johann Gottfried Zinn.)
Upon seeing a cluster of cosmos bursting into bloom, Mika left me with another gem: “These are akizakura. It means autumn cherry blossom.”
The exchange reinforced my growing belief that what we call things matters. While I’ve often encountered arguments in both my professional and personal lives that titles aren’t important, it’s not a sentiment I share. We have language for a reason. When used appropriately, names help us understand where we fit into the world and reflect circumstance and perspective. When misused or manipulated, they can have broad negative impacts on those who can’t speak for themselves, whether they are victims of a modern war waged with “smart bombs” or casualties of a backyard battle fought with EPA-registered toxins carrying elegant labels like “Green Velvet” but spelling death for many critters in their path.
Even the word “turfgrass” is still associated with children and dogs and picnics and lazy afternoons on the golf course; we rarely hear it described as what it has really become: a wildlife-destroying weed that covers more land mass than any other crop. It’s invasive and imported, soaking up chemicals and wasting fossil fuels just to maintain its existence. Though the movement to curtail the obligatory lawn has gained traction in recent years, damage caused by our obsession with grass shows no sign of slowing.
Whether we think of it as truth in advertising or just accurate labeling, more honest names for our surroundings—such as Destroyer of Habitats and Mass Wildlife Killer instead of “grass”—would go a long way toward heightening public understanding. Some legacy descriptions of our most life-sustaining flowers, including Joe-Pye weed, butterflyweed and ironweed, carry a false notion of abundance not seen since the days of Lewis and Clark, when the nation was still flush with wild landscapes. But what gardener is going to want to pick up a plant at the store with the word “weed” on the label?
My Species of the Week carries a similar stigma. If I had the opportunity to rename the common evening primrose in a way that better reflects its value to the modern world, I would call it Moth Life Giver, Bee Brunch or maybe Goldfinch Candy, indicating the rich buffet every part of this plant provides to our wildlife.
Known at certain times in its history by more and less flattering names—from king’s cure-all to weedy evening primrose to hog weed to my favorite, the German “Nachtkerz,” or night candle—the common evening primrose is neither a true primrose nor as common as it should be. But Oenethera biennis does, in fact, bloom in the evening, providing nectar for nocturnal moths.
Growing along roadsides and in abandoned fields and disturbed areas, this species survives by following the path of so many other native plants: It finds a place no human seems to care about—at least not yet—and colonizes it until the grass mowers and leaf blowers and sod strips and poison solutions come by and casually knock it down.
Watching a goldfinch industriously drill into the seed heads on my patio last weekend, I was reminded of how this plant had ended up in my garden: with the help of my avian friends, who’ve given us many gifts around our property. At first skeptical of its intentions—it has an unremarkable basal rosette that doesn’t send up flowers until the second year—I had had enough positive experiences with native volunteers to keep my judgments in check.
When the plant matured the following year and finally flowered, I was glad I hadn’t pulled it. Native to most of the United States and Canada and long valued for its medicinal properties, common evening primrose feeds not only moths and birds but bees, caterpillars, beetles, small mammals and deer. It emits a sweet scent and brightens the night garden. It’s attractive to Japanese beetles—something that might keep some people from planting it, but I’ve found it to be a great deterrent, keeping the beetles away from nearly everything else. And it doesn’t seem to mind the damage, sending up more flowers as the old ones get eaten. This summer I even watched it endure a phenomenon known as nectar robbery committed by hungry carpenter bees.
As the feasting goldfinch last Saturday spent more than half an hour working her way around one plant, I was also reminded of the value of providing food for wildlife the way nature intended. Our humane backyard now feeds birds with the seeds of live plants that sprouted from other seeds that were planted by other birds, in a cycle that should be endless and self-sustaining in all of our communities.
But it won’t be if we continue to mow carelessly over the precious few native landscapes we have left. It’s time to start calling our decades-long attack on the environment what it is—a death march for wildlife—and stop relegating our native species to the margins of our existence, like so much litter on the side of the road. Common evening primrose and other such plants may be listed as abundant on species status inventories, but it wasn’t long ago that milkweed was abundant, too. The images of the American lawn as a place to play with loved ones mask the dead zones that lie beneath and the ripple effect on so many other species who have fewer and fewer areas to get the sustenance and shelter they need.
It’s up to all of us who care about animals and nature to stop believing in the mirage of words and sales pitches about what constitutes an appropriate landscape and start creating a new paradigm, one that restores the outdoors back into a home for all creatures. That means challenging the status quo and questioning the entire framework of our modern life that has somehow persuaded us to think of nature as being not in our backyards but always somewhere off in the distance. It means reconsidering even seemingly everyday words that haven’t changed for hundreds of years. And it means remembering to let the birds and others in the wild, rather than the toxin-filled garden shelves at the home improvement store, lead the way in our quest to plant the seeds of restoration.