any other name

Sorry for the long silence. I think of things to blog sometimes, but sitting myself down to write is another story. When I first started, I felt like everything suggested a blog entry. Sometimes I didn’t like that. But it’s also nice to have the blog in the back of my mind, making me more observant of things around me and also making me turn over in my mind how to describe them.

Here is one of the things I was “incubating” (as a friend who visited recently would say).

Plants and animals named after other plants and animals are often lovely or fun metaphors. Here is a little collection.

Two trees that grow here:
Butterfly tree—the rounded leaves grow in symmetrical pairs, and the flowers too, which look especially butterfly-like.
Coral tree—the most common tree has orangey-red flowers that look like clusters of slightly curved pipes.

Because of smell:
Rose geranium, lemon verbena, pineapple guava,

Foreign things compared with familiar:
African violet, African daisy, (and in Danish cyclamen is called Alpine violet)

In Persian a rabbit is called a “donkey-ear” and a strawberry is called a “foreign mulberry”.
An ostrich is called a “camel chicken”. Egg is the same word as “seed”. So an ostrich egg is a “seed of a camel chicken”.

Here’s one for you to guess: What do you think a “camel cow leopard” is?
Think twice and when you think you know, click here.