by John Singer Sargent This is only a piece of the painting....

Naming is such an important human activity. It frustrates the heck out of me when I don't have a word or a name for something. Like when I'm flying and I look down over the landscape. What's that city? What's that river? That mountain?

And in the garden, I love to know my flowers by name. Sometimes it takes me years, though, to come across a particular flower in a catalog or magazine or online and recognize it as "that one over there by the butterfly bush."

Friday night we went to the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley to walk their acres and acres of gardens. In one of the gardens I stopped and exclaimed to my husband, "OH! That's the flower I have been trying to name for years! That's the pretty sprig of pink flowers that shows up in the butterfly garden in early summer! Now I know what it is!" It's called Lynthrum, or Morden's Rose. Yay.

We walked on among more gardens, and I said, "What was that name again? I have to remember it!" "Lythium?" he says. "You are useless," I huffed. (This is the guy who calls Clematis "Chlamydia" for godsake.) I went back and wrote it down. Lynthrum.

Here's what it looks like - this is not a great photo; it is late summer so it is half spent, but I still enjoy it.


I didn't even know we had this until after a couple years, because we would pull it thinking it was a weed before it ever flowered. Now I let my butterfly garden (which is where it lives) go pretty wild so that I don't miss this pretty pink, tall (3.5-4 feet) visitor. And, now that I know what it is, I can go find more!

I learned another name that has been confounding me this year. It's this plant, which I learned is called Ground Cherry:



This is a weed. It is invasive, and tries to poke its way into my garden every which way, everywhere. It's strong, fairly elegant in how it holds itself and spreads its branches. And the flowers and fruits are fun. The flowers are yellow with a dark star in the middle and then they grow these little lanterns!

Inside the lantern is this "cherry."



I like this plant. It is a weed, as I said, but, it is so interesting that I will usually let one or two of the plants stay and thrive just so I can watch it grow. And the lanterns always bring to mind Sargent's famous painting "Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose."