Names of things
Did you ever wake up at 2:30 a.m. and wonder, “Wait a minute! Why do we call it a snapdragon?” Me neither, but it’s a fair question.
Which reminds me… in my garden are a few Beta vulgaris subsp. cicla plants that we call chard, a leafy plant humans just like us domesticated from sea beets native to Sicily and the rest of the Mediterranean. Aristotle wrote about it which indicates we’ve been eating it for millennia.
In mid-19th century, seed merchants in Europe wanted to distinguish it from a French spinach, so in our language chard became Swiss chard. Noted German botanist and explorer Karl Koch, who was making his living in Switzerland, is credited with making the designation, and ever since seed catalogs have listed it as Swiss chard. It has been only in the last decade that a red-stemmed variety named Vulcan was actually developed in Switzerland.
Also growing on hillsides in our area are huckleberries. It you’re of European ancestry, your forbears called this smaller version of a blueberry a whortleberry, aka hurtleberry, but times have changed. Jerry Garica once said, “Change is the only the only thing that doesn’t change,” or something like that, and he was not referring to language, but the comment applies because somebody on this continent in the 17th century starting calling them huckleberries, and we still do. Nothing wrong with whortle or hurtle, but now it’s huckle. Wonder what’s next?
Around 1860, Maria Ann Smith moved from England to New South Wales, Australia. She and her husband bought land with an orchard. One story is she apparently tried to grow French crabapples and dumped a box of crabapple remains in the orchard. Up sprouted a seedling from the pile which she carefully cultivated, and, as it matured, propagated others in her orchard.
Turns out, according to folks who know apple history, the surprise seedling was a chance hybrid of a European crabapple and an unspecified common variety. The apples were crisp, excellent for baking, and turned from light green to yellowish at harvest time in mid-autumn. We know them as Granny Smiths.
While Granny Smith was in Australia working her orchard, Major John J. Bibb practiced law and gardened in Frankfort, Ky. Bibb was a veteran of the War of 1812 and had served in the Kentucky General Assembly. In his garden near the Kentucky River, he grew a smaller crispy butterhead lettuce variety. The soil in that area was rich in limestone, so some called the variety limestone lettuce.
Bibb shared seeds of his popular lettuce around Frankfort, but it was in Louisville years after his death that two teenage girls discovered the lettuce and liked it so much, one of them convinced her father, William Genenwein, to grow it in his greenhouse. He shared it with a grocer who recognized it from his days in Frankfort as Bibb’s lettuce. Genenwein’s greenhouse thereafter specialized in Bibb lettuce because of which we can too (when the weather cools down).
In my northern California garden in 2003, I planted cucumber seeds saved from the preceding year. By early summer, I was harvesting cukes shaped like a lemon cucumber but with the coloration of a typical pickling cucumber. Cool! I apparently had planted those varieties side-by-side the previous year and they crossed.
I named the new cucumber Baghdad because our nation was bombing the snoozle out of Iraq in search of WMDs. Every year thereafter, I saved Baghdad seeds, and they remained true even after I moved to Arkansas. By 2015 or so, however, I experienced two difficult cucumber years in a row and Baghdads faded into history like many other localized prized curiosities. The point is, save seeds to see what you get.
Regarding snapdragons, the easiest part to explain is the blossom obviously looks like the snout of every dragon I’ve ever seen, and if you gently pinch the sides of the blossom, it snaps opens and then closes its mouth. Snapdragons are sometimes called toadflax, which shall remain unexplained here.