As I run along the valley near my home, I see the long grass swaying in the breeze. The yellow, reddish-blue, and white wildflowers sway toward me, then away, then back again in waves. A purple spiky-looking flower catches my attention, and I want to know the name of it. I go home and try to look it up. After 30 minutes of searching, I can’t give it a name. It could be a common teasel, a red clover, a species of thistle, or something else.
I return to the flower the next day and take a picture. Google tells me that it could be a Bull thistle, a Scotch thistle, or a Canada thistle. I go back once more and look closely at the leaves, the texture of the stem, and the shape, color, and location of the flower.
Inside our grocery stores, products are nicely labeled, organized, and separated from the world in bins or packaging. In the wild, it’s not as easy to name my prickly flower, even with the power of the internet. Honestly, I still don’t know the name of that species.
How to give a name to a wild thing
Because the answer to my seemingly simple question has not opened up to me, I began to wonder why it can be so difficult to find a name. I can come up with three reasons. To assign a fitting name, you must know much about a thing, you must know what it is not, and you must speak it out loud.
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Understand the thing deeply
To accurately discover the name of a plant, you must consider it closely. You need to know how it appears during different seasons and how it matures over its lifespan. Seeking an understand of how individual plants within the same species can vary. You can use more of your senses than just your eyesight to find a name – even all five. You must know the flowers, the fruits, whether they are edible, what the leaves feel like, and where they tend to grow.
Knowing almost nothing about plants, you could probably still identify a “flower,” but that’s not much of a name. With study and experience, you can get more specific. You might realize that it’s a flower in the Aster family. As you learn of the flower, you will notice subtle differences between it and lookalikes.
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Know what it is not
To truly know an individual, you must know something of those like him or her. For example, many people cannot tell the difference between the 13-year-old identical twins that live nearby. I know that one likes to wear red while the other prefers blue. I am familiar with their individual mannerisms, their interests, and the subtle differences in their face shapes. Because I know both boys well, I am able to distinguish between them.
So it is with identifying wildflowers. You don’t truly know wild carrots well enough to eat them until you can distinguish their umbels from those of poison hemlock. You might think you know a carrot but then be so wrong that it kills you.
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Speak it to others
To name a thing is to speak it out loud. It does not matter if you are the first person to ever name it or you are sharing this knowledge with billions of people who came before you. To give a name a flower is to create a shared understanding with others around you. Because you speak the same language in regard to a wildflower, you can teach your friends and family members which to pick and which to avoid. You can correct each other when in error.
You may think we know the name of a thing because you crammed for a test, or because it was nicely labeled on a store shelf, but this is a shallow understanding. If you came across it in the wild, you would not be able to recognize it. You would wonder if it were a noxious lookalike. And you’d have to be pretty hungry to taste it.
Naming wildflowers and people
So it is with the people around us. To truly serve individuals, you should know them well enough to give a name to them. You should strive to learn everything there is to know about them: their pains, their secrets, and their virtues that go unnoticed. You will see how they are similar to and different from others around you and how you can help.
The more you know about them, the more meaningful their names become. They are written in detail on the fleshy tablets of your heart. Consider the lilies of the field and the people around you. Name them individually. Tell others why each one is worthwhile.
Oh, and it was a Bull thistle. The size of the flowers relative to the spiny ball they emerge from, the sharp thorns on the stem, and the color of the underside of the leaves give it away.