What's the real name of your plant?

What’s the real name of your plant?

?

? Linda Buzzell, 2023

Like many of you, I’m a gardener. Having recently learned about the new movement to decolonize botany, this morning as I was working in the garden I wondered: What is the real name of the lovely bulb Watsonia that graces us with stately white and pink flowers each spring?

It’s pretty obvious that this South African native plant was named for the white dude who “discovered” it rather than using the original name given to it by that land’s native people before it was brought to Europe (appropriated/stolen) to add luster to European and American gardens. He was Sir William Watson, an 18th-century British botanist.

And then of course the plant was also given a new, official, “scientific” Latin name in European botany: Watsonia borbonica. Not sure who “borbonica” was supposed to honor but it probably wasn’t an Indigenous South African.

I don’t necessarily object to the Linnaean categorizing system invented by Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus. It’s been very useful in gathering knowledge about global species. But it leaves out some important facts.

Google was only slightly helpful, taking us backwards from the secondary European colonizers (the English) to the previous European invaders, the Afrikaners or Afrilaams Dutch, described as “a South African ethnic group descended from predominantly Dutch settlers first arriving at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652.” The plant was “known as the Cape bugle lily or rosy watsonia [presumably by the secondary invaders]. The Afrikaans common name kanol is a phonetically corrupted version of the original Dutch word knol, meaning a corm, and is applied to many cormous species, although mainly to species of Watsonia.”

No mention of the original native name given to the plant by the native people.

Fortunately, more gardeners are learning to fill their gardens with the species native to wherever we find ourselves. And perhaps, if we are settlers on others' land, we are fortunate enough to learn their proper names from the Indigenous peoples of the place we live. But many gardeners also love and tend beloved immigrant plants as well - and as long as they’re not thuggish we’re often loathe to throw them away without deeper consideration.

Finding and learning a plant's original name is one small thing we can do. But of course much more needs to happen if we are going to wisely and compassionately decolonize Western botany.

As a tiny contribution to this necessary shift, what if every gardener took it as their task to research and use the real, native names of every plant in their garden if that can be found?

I’m still searching for the original name of the lovely “watsonia.” Perhaps you know and can tell us?

Resources

Gray, Ros & Shela Sheich. The coloniality of planting: legacies of racism and slavery in the practice of botany, Architectural Review, January 27, 2021 https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/the-coloniality-of-planting?

Watsonia, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watsonia_(plant)