Ever ready to object when I hear the word ‘pretentious’ used to condemn something that might warrant a deeper conversation and a bottle of wine, I have recently found myself defending the practice of naming one’s garden to [apparently] less pretentious gardening friends; and I thought that it might be worth throwing out the topic to a larger audience.
I originally brought up the issue after watching a video posted by horticulturist and fellow tropical enthusiast Irvin Etienne, who with an iPhone and a fantastic sense of humor, walked Facebook Friends around his new garden ‘Dicamba’ on the first anniversary of buying the house and land in rural Indiana.
The ears of horticulturists and activists no doubt pricked up with that last sentence.
Rightly so. Irvin’s choice of names for his new garden is a playful jab at the fact that he is surrounded on three sides by crop fields, and his precious collection of plants is extremely vulnerable to the chemical reactions sloshing around on the backs of tractors throughout the growing season.
Dicamba, the herbicide, is the one he fears the most.
Whether he has created an effective talisman against evil, or just a clever joke to interest and amuse passers-by and visitors, Irvin felt the need for a quick caveat before his audience could begin drooling over his collection of gorgeous tropical foliage. The name was a lovely little joke about life, he told us, and the act of naming it wasn’t intended to be arrogant or snobby in any way.
His sentiment isn’t an unusual one for American gardeners. In fact, it’s probably the norm. Even if we feel the desire to name our properties, the instinct is immediately quashed by…. by what, exactly? Solid middle-class values? Fear of standing out? Fear of being thought to want to stick out? Fear of being tacky? An inflexible US Postal Service?
I asked Irvin for his thoughts about it – “We Americans are a messed up lot.” he said, “Maybe it goes all the way back to those original colonists escaping England and all its stuff?”
There may be something to that. And yet, we still accept without question that Martha Stewart gardens at Skylands, David Culp at Brandywine Cottage, and Dan Hinkley at Windcliff though we cannot give ourselves, or others, the same pass.
We should. Here’s why.
Naming your garden to create a sense of place
As a little girl, I used to study the envelopes of letters that came from all over the world for my father, who had spent his previous life in the UK, East Africa and Canada. UK and African addresses were notorious in those days for being short and to the point, but one thing that most of them had in common was a named property – Quail Cottage, Pentwyn, The Old Lodge…one of them was even named ‘Nanyuki,’ after a beloved town in Kenya where the owners had spent many happy years.
To my young eyes, there was a romance to those names that went beyond the strict utilitarianism of a numbered house and garden. The name might reflect the history of a property – such as The Old Lodge – or pick out a long-treasured feature – such as Wisteria Cottage. It made them special, and often [literally] connected the house to the landscape around it – a beautiful aspect of British design that we tend to shy away from in America.
These are not unique names. There are perhaps thousands of Old Lodges and Wisteria Cottages in the UK. But to their owners, they are unique. They are more than four walls, a roof, and a number plate. Properties become firmly rooted into their villages or neighborhoods by their names. And in time, they become rooted into the hearts of their inhabitants.
Does this mean that you cannot become attached to a 123 Taylor Street? Of course not. But naming a home and garden, or renting or buying one that is already named, forms a deeper level of connection – a stronger sense of place and an emotional investment in the story of that place.
A name bestows life to a home and garden in a way that numbers cannot.
Naming your garden to celebrate ownership
Home ownership is an accomplishment. A primal nesting instinct made manifest. Many of us work for many years to buy that first home and garden, and achieving that goal should be a cause for celebration. Naming one’s property feels like a natural extension of that celebration.
It is no doubt easier to inherit a name and embrace it, than to come up with a name on your own. Our property, Oldmeadow, made it easy on us. The open stream valley had once been used as a pasture and orchard before the Second World War, and for years was referred to as “The Old Meadow” – though the current house wasn’t built until 1975. Our only contribution was to lose the definitive article and the extra space.
Using that name, and letting the expanding garden be directed and guided by that name, seems incredibly natural – and connects us to the previous owners who built the house and worked the property for over 40 years. Someday, new owners will have a choice to go back to the numbers, or embrace that history just as we have – celebrating their part in the story of this place.
Maybe I’ll spring for a sign by then.
Naming Your Garden for a bit of fun
How many ‘Achin’ Acres’ have you spotted over the years on long country drives? Irvin is not alone in his desire to amuse himself and his visitors.
This is probably how most American Gardens get named, as it appeals to both our irreverence as a culture, and our desire perhaps to get away with naming our property without being tarred with the sin of pretentiousness. You can hardly be vilified for making a joke. (Actually, it’s 2020. Never mind.) The British are just as cheeky – maybe even more so – as a quick Google search for “Funny House Names” will attest.
If this is your motivation – have at it! Swamp View. Windy Bottom. Last Hope House. (Costa Pakit has got to be my all time favorite.) Enjoy yourself knowing that you are not only having a giggle, you are connecting to your property in the very same way that the owners of Wisteria Cottage are. You’re just having more fun.
Naming your garden because you’re delusional
…because you seriously think the next owners won’t tear it all out and plant a lawn if you name it.
We all share this fear. How many gardens have I seen over the years dismantled by new ownership? If naming our property gives us hope for some level of garden legacy, is it a bad thing?
And for you judgmental gardeners out there…
I know many people who have no issues with living in brand-new subdivisions with grand names such as “Foxhill Manor” or “Deer Mountain Estates” – subdivisions that have flattened the hills, driven out the wildlife and razed the original manor house to the ground.
Their houses are politely numbered, and if their neighbor was to break with tradition and erect a small sign naming their actual home and garden, all hell would break lose with the Clipboard Police. Yet they are in effect living in a named estate, and they almost always refer to their home’s subdivision, rather than their home’s street address.
Human beings are a nit-picky, critical bunch. Hell, that’s what Garden Rant is all about. But if you laud and applaud P.Allen’s Moss Mountain Farm, love to visit Lotusland, and can’t wait for another weekly missive from Monty’s Longmeadow; yet snidely comment when your neighbor decides to christen their beloved home and garden, you may just be a bit of a snob yourself.
Go on…be brave. Name your garden.
If I’ve changed your mind, but you’re stumped for ideas, try this fun UK site which will randomly generate several choices based on your answers to some fairly obvious questions. My answers yielded some less-appealing choices such as Tulip Poplarlands and Possum’s Barn, but Oldmeadow has now been officially sanctioned.
However, you might want to find the connection with your property before you find the name. “A name does not make it feel more permanent.” Irvin told me. “Quite frankly I think the house made it feel more permanent — or a combination of house and location. My previous house felt temporary even after 22 years. I never fully moved in mentally. New house I was there the first day.”
And that instant connection made a name feel right – even if, in the end, it’s an ironic one.
So, a word of caution – just as you take your time evaluating your new garden for sun, shade, drainage, deer and soil issues, take your time discovering the right name if you haven’t inherited one. Check the county records for your property. Talk to your neighbors. Chances are, the home has history you can draw upon for inspiration. Madame Ganna Walska’s famous garden in Montecito, CA was Tanglewood, Cuesta Linda, and Tibetland, before it became Lotusland in 1945.
Have you named your home and garden? If so, I’d love to hear what it is. Please take a moment in the comments below to tell us what inspired you — or, why you’d never EVER be caught dead doing something so terribly, terribly pretentious.
I love our differences, oh you with the bangs of your foreheads. In the UK I we generally don’t name our gardens and rarely name a house unless it’s a new build. We inherit our house names. It is possible to change them but most people don’t, and having a name instead of a number seems to be pretty ordinary. (Interestingly though, I don’t know how or when it happened. Our house name arrived in the records in the 1940s. )
But we have had a similar awkwardness: we have named parts of our garden. That felt very pretentious and strange, especially when we were naming nothing but a muddy space surrounded by grass. But necessity required it in the end – you need to be able to tell someone where you’ll be or to direct them to a particular part. And now there are, in reality, many garden within our garden. Do you have internal names in the USA then, too?
I love that you respond to an issue with a promise of a discussion over a bottle of wine. We had one of those last night, about whether a great garden can and should be ‘preserved in aspic’ or alternatively bulldozed. I commend that one to you. Xxxxx Anne
We named our house/property On the Rocks as the property contains a lot of ledge and rock out-croppings. You have inspired me to maybe name my vegetable garden, too. How lovely to have the coming months to ponder possibilities.
My dearest and now departed friend’s first question when we purchased our property was what was the name?
Her darling abode in Dallas reflected her love of all things British including being named. She was perplexed that we had not affirmed our connection with our new farm with a name. After much pondering and waiting for the name to reveal itself we finally took the leap. It did feel pretentious. It was in fact tongue in cheek.
The farmhouse was finally determined to be beyond rehabilitation. The pond had deteriorated to the point it was difficult to see much less get to. Poison ivy, brambles and rusted barbed wire fences made it almost impossible to traverse the property. Yet, the view to a high grove of beautiful woods that first fall was a sight to behold. It looked past all the obstacles that would have to be overcome and gave hope to a vision of beautiful fields and gardens (still in process after 15 years). Hence High Grove Farm. Naming does give a sense of place. It is best when the land reveals itself and speaks to you – you just have to be open to looking and listening.
What a fun read, Marianne🙂
Our neighbors named their property…which we previously owned years ago …..Pasture Prime! I often smile at the sign as I go up the lane.
We have never done a sign ….,you probably nailed it when you said a reason was the fear of being seen as pretentious. We named our property Stillwood. When we first moved out from here and I was a young 22yo old mom, I discovered Gladys Tabors Stillmeadow series. So our name is a nod to her and her beloved Stillmeadow!
Hi Marianne, we are fellow Master Gardeners in Frederick County, Md.
For the past 5 years I have been turning my city corner lot into a wildlife habitat called The Pearl St. Garden, I have a FB page with that name. Encouraging neighbors to at least plant a small pollinator garden on their property. Loved this article about naming your garden, I think it makes a garden special 😊
We haven’t got a sign yet, but I’ve happily referred to our little patch as “SunnyAcres” – borrowed from the zoning maps. A bit of irony as our place seems to have the most trees compared to the neighbors on the cul-de-sac.
Richard has dubbed our frog Haven
I’ve been looking for a name for our garden for 18 years now and I still can’t come up with anything. I just keep hoping for inspiration to strike some day.
I have a young garden that was created three years ago for the pollinators, it has been named the Pollen Patch.
Good on ya, Marianne. My husband and I fell in love with the naming of houses while traveling in England. When we found our little piece of heaven in northern Baltimore County, I was absolutely thrilled to see that the original property, of which our parcel was a part, was named Highmeadow. With the move, I needed to come up with a name for my graphic design business, so it immediately become Highmeadow Design. My husband is an artist too, so in some cases we would become the Studios at Highmeadow. It was literally that, 2.75 acres of open meadow-lawn; about the only wildlife we had nearby were several nests of barn swallows around the house. I took a great old engraving of a swallowtail bird for my logo, hoping that it would invite opportunities to become closer to nature at this ranch house on a hill with open view to the west. One thing lead to another: planting trees and digging gardens, building out seating areas to enjoy the view, studying garden design and horticulture. Highmeadow has surely become our little piece of heaven. One day, to our great delight, out at the end of a common driveway with three other houses, a handmade wooden sign went up with the name Highmeadow on it, painted with a scene of a hill with trees in the distance and blue sky, and four little house number plaques hanging one below the next. Somehow, it had never really occurred to us that the other houses on the larger plat were also Highmeadow. Sharing this special piece of ground with our neighbors, under a common name, is something we cherish.
I named my place The Fortress of Solitude as I had 35 acres to myself & lived in one of the most sparsely populated areas of PA. And it was surrounded by rock walls. I divided my garden into rooms, each with a name: the Chaos Garden, (a riot of perennials), the Spring Garden (where the spring & the springhouse were), the Pond Garden, the Bog Garden, the Slope Garden, the Meadow Garden, & the Garden of the Unwanted (where i planted plants that were not doing well elsewhere or had outgrown their spots or that i didn’t particularly like, but still saw value in keeping.
The Garden of the Unwanted is extremely close to my Island of Misfit Toys. These are wonderful names Karl. 35 acres surrounded by rock walls sounds like heaven! – MW
Yes, naming some of our gardens may give a new view to look at for every viewer. When I Visit here, I learned some names of places that really attract the one who may read the name of a certain garden, planning to have one for my garden.
http://www.yvrhedges.ca
I loved this article because I have often felt the same way…I stumbled upon this article having second thoughts about ordering a sign with my garden name on it! Actually putting it on permanent sign made me feel even more self conscious than naming it! Why? That’s so silly! And after reading your article, I now feel confident and am going for it. I not only named my garden, I named my little greenhouse! I call it “The Garden Room” because, to me, it’s not just a place I grow plants. It’s my she-shed, it’s where my husband and I have had dinner for date nights…it’s everything to me! And I named my garden “BloomHaven.” I love it because it IS my haven! I think naming your garden makes you just that much more proud of all your hard work and the love you’ve poured into it!
My question to you is…when you say “Established” with the year…do you say it started the year you broke ground on your garden or the year you named it? Just curious how you’d weigh in on that! Thanks for the article!
So glad you’re naming your garden! For my garden at Oldmeadow, I think of the property (house/garden) as one, and the house was built in 1976 – so if I was putting up a sign, I’d probably use that date. That’s when the previous owner did most of the clearing and improving to the property, including a vegetable garden.
I have finally decided to name my garden ‘Serendipity’. It is a serene garden full of happy accidents, so a name that contains the word ‘serenity’ seemed fitting.
Thanks for the post on naming your garden! I can definitely see where you’re coming from.
I used to think it was pretentious too, but after giving it some more thought, I realized that there’s nothing wrong with wanting to give your house and garden the same level of attention and care that you would give any other part of your life.
In fact, I think it’s a great way to show how much you care about your home and garden. It’s like marking them as yours and saying “this is my territory.”