plant words - Felicia Davin

Felicia Davin

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plant words

A collection of 8 posts

Scape, landscape, escape

Scape, landscape, escape

SCAPE, n. In my part of the world (the northeastern United States), late spring and early summer is the season to eat garlic scapes, which are the long, curly stems of the plant. They often grow in these beautiful, twisty loops, but their name’s etymological path into English is

Mastication

MASTIC, n. We had mastic candy from Turkey in our house this week. (This newsletter is not #sponcon, but the candy came to us through our Universal Yums subscription, which is incidentally also the reason licorice was on my mind a few weeks ago.) I had never encountered mastic before,

Spiny things

ECHINACEA, n. Today my beloved was planting purple coneflower, Echinacea purpurea, a plant native to North America, sometimes used in medicine, that looks like this: Echinacea, a word that no longer looks real to me after the number of times I have typed it into Google, comes from the Greek

Ricolisse

LICORICE, n. This is the name of a plant whose roots can be dried and use to flavor food. It comes from a Greek term meaning “sweet root,” glykyrrhiza, which became “liquiritia” by the time Late Latin speakers got a hold of it. The way we spell it in English

Pith

PITHY, adj. Sometimes questions have easy answers. Today in my house, we wondered if “pithy,” as in “concise, meaningful,” is related to “pith,” as in the white stuff under the peel of a citrus fruit, and the answer is yes. “Pith” goes all the way back to Old English (that’

A rose is

ROSE, n. This week I was reading Tiffany Reisz’s novel The Rose and a character suggested that an artifact with “rose” in its title was named “after Eros,” and I will happily suspend my disbelief for magic, but not for linguistics. “Rose” is attested, beautifully, all the way back

Just pleachy

PLEACH, v. This verb means “to intertwine young branches to form a hedge.” These are pleached trees: Really I just wanted to brag that I read “pleach” in This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El Mohtar and Max Gladstone, made the Libby app define “pleach” for

Nuts to all that

Nuts to all that

PECAN, n. I’ve been reading, very slowly, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. The author is a botanist and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and the book is a beautiful collection of essays about gratitude and reciprocity and