I don't know about you, but I'm a mystery fiction fan. Nothing (except a new plant or seed catalog) is more soul comforting to curl up with, on a dreary winter day, than a good who dunnit.
Whether you actually like mystery fiction or not, you embark on solving mysteries as soon as you fall in love with gardening. The biggest continuing mystery in gardening is identity. I've been musing on this recently. The ongoing quest to identify Suite member Clay's Peony root eating pest started my reflections on this subject.
Identity - Plants
Every good mystery includes the elements of love and hate; good triumphing over evil; deduction and proof bringing order from chaos. So it is with gardening. We become gardeners because we fall in love with the flower of a petunia or morning glory. We want it for our own, but before we can get it, we have to learn its name - identify it - so we can tell the salesperson at the nursery what we are searching for. We learn to hate the pests that destroy our beloved plants; we learn how to deter or destroy them so that our plants can grow in triumph. As we garden, our quest for identity becomes more complex. We expand our search to specific species or cultivars to enlarge our collections. For this, we need more tools than a plant's common name. We must turn to the ordered world of botanical nomenclature.
There's another reason we need to learn to identify plants; our own self-protection. Side by side the differences in these two sets of leaves are apparent. But, in the garden in early spring, on young plants, they aren't so defined. One set belongs to a harmless, common, weedy tree, Acer negundo (boxelder) and the other to that arch nemesis, poison ivy (Rhus radicans or Toxicodendron radicans). Do you know which is which? Yes, the ones on the left are poison ivy!
A Name Is A Name - Right?...Wrong!
If you subscribe to a garden email list or newsgroup, you will notice that periodically there is a thread about common and botanical plant names. Experienced gardeners espouse learning botanical names; those newer to gardening moan and complain that they simply can't learn those unpronounceable names and why should they? Everybody around where they live knows what plant they're talking about anyway. This may be so. And, again, it might not be.
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