Friday, March 28, 2008

Hearty, Creeping Hair Bells

Cartoon of cats spitting up hairballs onto a table at a meeting. One cat says, Does anyone else have something to bring up?Last year, I saw a Home Depot ad that touted their selection of hearty perennials. While the dictionary defines hearty as "exhibiting good health" and even "vigorous," I doubt that's really what Home Depot meant... no, they were intending to say the plants were hardy, which means "capable of living outdoors over winter without artificial protection."

I must say, that example of an eggcorn did little to assure me that Home Depot is the place to find knowledgeable plant sellers or good plants.

Today I was perusing the Minneapolis neighborhood paper The Bridge and ran across an article about The Wild Ones, a group of native plant enthusiasts. The description of one gardener's yard contained a plant name groaner:

...she started ripping out the backyard buckthorn, honeysuckle and creeping hair bells with an eye towards an overhaul.
Hair bells, huh? Are those like the hair balls my cats cough up?

I think the writer meant harebells... and actually, I haven't heard the plant they're referring to called creeping harebells, but rather creeping bellflower (Campanula rapunculoides) which I have written about in another post on this blog. The U.S. native harebells (Campanula rotundifolia) are relatives of the creeping thug the gardener was trying to eliminate. So that's where the name conflation comes from.

By the way, when I googled "creeping harebells" I got just two hits, so I would guess that name is not in common usage; an alternate spelling, "creeping hare bells," returned no hits. ("Creeping hair bells" earned me a Google prompt: Did I really mean to search creeping hairballs?)

Of course, I know plant names and nuances like this are beyond arcane. But hey, a gardener's got to draw the line somewhere.

Otherwise, it was a nice issue of The Bridge.

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