English is not an easy language, nor does it make much sense. In the end you “get it” or you don’t, as was clear when my children started primary school and the teacher gave them lists of English anomalies which just had to be learned, as they couldn’t be explained. Above: Eschscholzia ‘Thai Silk Champagne’.
The naming of plants is even more eccentric but learning them by rote does seem to work. I am no longer troubled by Eschscholzia californica because I have been mildly obsessed with it for about a year. When I was on my Wrags* training last year at a Northamptonshire Manor, the head gardener asked me very casually to pass him a tray of Eschscholzia. “I beg your pardon?” I said “Shesholtzia” he pronounced, confidently. “It has a silent e.” He was very reluctant to say Californian Poppy. I have seen Derry Watkins talking about Eschscholzia Lemon Blush: she is American and is fine with using the common name. Not so keen on the common colour of orange: “Introduce just one to your garden,” she urges. “This one.”
The plant stall lady at the village fete a couple of months later was selling trays of “eskoltzia” as she put it, unmoveable on its pronunciation. When I see a word with too many consonants I tend to look no further than the first three letters and the word is never pronounced. This is a bit like learning Latin, which non-Romans translate back and forth but rarely converse in. I tracked down my Latin teacher from school and asked her about the naming of plants. I knew that she would know:
“Johan Linnaeus, 19th century Swedish botanist, devised a system of classifying plants (taxonomy) which has never gone out of use,” she explains. “It has the grand name of binomial nomenclature, ie two names. First is the genus or kind of plant, second the particular individual species, and he turned the words into a rather odd Latin. Eschscholtzia was named after a German named von Eschscholtz.”
While we’re on the subj, I ask why we can’t say “dahhhlia” instead of day-lia, which to my mind keeps this queen of flowers rooted firmly in the island bed tethered to a bamboo stick. Mrs Raphael again: “Dahlias, I believe, were named for another Swede called Dahl, like Roald, so using a flat ‘a’ may be correct, but a bit pretentious, don’t you think?”
I like being pretentious so I’m going to start saying “dahlia” as in Roald, from now on.
*The Women’s Farm and Garden Association organise very interesting training schemes in all kinds of gardens, called Wrags. Not just for women.
Thanks for reading!
I thoroughly enjoyed this post! I’m currently learning ‘plant nomenclature’ by rote as part of my garden design course; I love guessing what the pidgin Latin might mean and I also have eschscholtzia in my garden. Never really thought about how to pronounce it but, now knowing it was named after a German, surely first syllable should be ‘sch’ as in “school” and, second, ‘sch’ as in “shoot”? Thus, Esk-sholt-zee-ah. Hmm, has a nice ring to it. I’ll be sticking with that (and said with confidence, should anyone ask!)
Thanks, me too; good luck with the other consonants on your course…
Being Danish, Ive always pronounced dahlia like Roald – when speaking English that is, it never really occurred to me that you pronounce it daylia. As for the Eschscholzia – I don’t think the suggested pronunciation above is correct – it should be esh – esch – as in Esche, ash, is pronounced esh – scholz – there I almost agree with Caro, no t at the end of the ol, so esh-shol-zee-ah – here in Switerland I have never heard it pronounced any differently.
You are the expert and I will follow your lead on both.
There seems to be a tendency among the English to willfully mispronounce foreign words. This has only become clear to me since moving to America where we are extremely keen to get the native pronunciation right. Hence pasta becomes pahsta, fillet becomes fillay, renaissance becomes renezance and dalia is most decidedly dahlia. Get it? Got it? Good!
I cannot disagree; phonetically the Ameddicans, as smart English people like to say, get it right.