I love common names.

I’m not talking about human names (though I confess a fondness for the name Bob, used as a suffix) but the common names of species. The non-Latin ones. I love flipping through seed catalogs and seeing “Good Mother Stallard Beans” and “Moon and Stars Watermelon.” I was utterly delighted to find out that one of the slime molds lurking in my mulch is known as “Wolf’s Milk,” and when I discovered that a type of gelatinous fungus was known in Norway as “Troll Butter” I had to go sit down and fan myself for a few minutes.

Common names are awesome. They are little fragments of poetry. They tell us that somewhere, at some point, somebody lived right up next to this thing and saw it often enough to give it a name. 

In North Carolina where I live, we have insects called Ebony Jewelwings, Red Velvet Mites, and Eastern Pondhawks.

There are native orchids called Rattlesnake Plantain, Crippled Crane-fly, Green Fly and Water Spider. I have been hunting for years for Rabbit Tobacco, with no success, but I manage to grow Sourwood, Little Brown Jug, and Duck Potato, and if only my pond were large enough, I would plant Flying Hedgehogs in a heartbeat.

Endangered plants get no love, compared to animals. People who will rally behind snail darters and endangered mussels get a bit vague when plants come up. (Except orchids. If you’re going to be an endangered plant, try to be an orchid.) But I can’t think that the world wouldn’t be a sadder place if we lost Raven’s Seedbox, Florida Adder’s-Mouth, Carolina Grass-of-Parnassus, Spiked Medusa and Bigleaf Scurfpea.

Seriously, Scurfpea. What is not to love about the name “Scurfpea”? It sounds like a My Little Pony from the wrong side of the tracks.

Sigh. I worry that as we lose contact with nature, among all the other things we lose (and they are many and important) perhaps we’re also losing a store of weird, lyrical little names. And that’s sad. It’s hard to get excited about Stenathium leimanthoides, but I think we could all agree that the Pinebarren Death-Camas is pretty damn awesome.

Maybe not as awesome as Scurfpea, but you can’t have everything.