How does your garden grow? Is it ablaze with colour, fragrant roses and blooming shrubs, with silver bells, cockle shells and pretty maids all in a row?
Or is it a riot of bum pipes and flapper bags?

Perhaps bloody tongue is wrapped around your fencing panels, sticking to your socks every time you brush by. Stinkin Tam may be hanging around like a bad smell, itchy coo clinging to a corner and soukie soo sprawled over the lawn.

The names may not be terribly familiar, but most Scottish gardens probably harbour at least a few of them. 

Far better known by their more ‘common or garden’ names, they are simply dandelion and burdock, sticky cleavers, feverfew, ordinary dog rose and clover.

The curious and sometimes rather rude ‘slang’ names for some of our most familiar plants have been gathered by botanist Dr Gregory J Kenicer, who became intrigued by the descriptive and often amusing ways in which language, plant uses, myths, history and even children’s games have combined to influenced plant names through the ages.

The curious names, some confined to certain parts of the country and lots no longer in regular use, reflect times when knowledge of plants, identifying them and understanding their benefits or dangers was just part of everyone’s everyday life.

The most intriguing and curious examples have now been gathered into a new book which explores how everyday plant names evolved.

Some conjure up distinct images: marsh-marigold’s large, golden flowers and tendency to be found close to ponds and soggy ditches earned it the name ‘water-horse’s shoe’; hogweed or cow parsnip, is known in some areas as ‘coo cakes’ for its use as a feed for livestock and, evocatively, deid man’s forest, a haunting description of the dead, grey, spindly stems which appear in winter.

While some plants’ adopted names are rooted in myths and legends - foxgloves are ‘witches thimbles’, for example, while in Gaelic, meadowsweet, with its clouds of white flowers, has the unfortunate title Luibhean diolan, meaning ‘little bastard herb’, a reference, says Dr Kenicer, to times when it was picked as a posy offering to a maiden -  “A kind of sleazy impromptu gift,” he adds.

But there are also richly poetic names and others which simply say what they mean: in Roxburghshire, the humble bramble is known as ‘lady’s garters’ and in Forfar the fruit of deadly nightshade is known as succinctly as ‘daft berries’.

Although plants’ scientific names reflect their genus or species followed by their epithet – distinctive characteristic, origins or uses – Dr Kenicer says the array of local names given to plants provide insight into the past, revealing people’s relationships with plants and their ways of looking at the world. 

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The Herald: Kenicer with a Stag’s horn clubmoss plant Kenicer with a Stag’s horn clubmoss plant (Image: Lynsey Wilson)

“In Scotland, there’s maybe 1200 different species of plants, but we have 9000 names for them,” he says. “It shows how rich the language is.

“Lots have just one name or a common name in English. But others, like dandelion, have a whole lot of different names, some of them sound quite rude.”

Dandelions are king of the crops for boasting a variety of names: stink Davie, witch gowan and doon-head clock are less startling than bum-pipe, bumming pipe and Piss-a-bed.

Those bizarre names are not necessarily what they might seem, adds Dr Kenicer.

“Bum sounds ruder than it is. In some areas, particularly Lanarkshire, a foggy bummer is another name for a bumblebee; ‘bum’ is the humming sound that a bee makes.

“When you break the stem of a dandelion, you’re left with a pipe or a tube to blow through – it’s a bit like a Kazoo. And that’s how it gets the name, bum-pipe.”

That name for dandelions is most common in Lanarkshire, elsewhere, others may well refer to it as piss-a-bed, pish-the-bed and pisstebed, references to the weed’s use in plant medicine as a diuretic.

Religion and politics are also reflected in the names given to plants: several are known as ‘Stinkin’ Billy’, a reference to William of Orange, others share variations of Carl and Doddie, a variation of Charles and George, representing the Jacobean and Hanoverian dynasties.

One, ribwort plaintain, a common grassland and lawn plant with a long grassy stem, is sometimes known as Carl-Doddies after a game; children would pluck the stems and flick them at each other, similar to conkers, and play out a mini-battle between the two royal houses.

READ MORE: The plants from Down Under which took root by a Borders river

The Herald:

“The origins of plant names are hugely varied,” adds Dr Kenicer, botanist and tutor at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. “Many simply describe the plant’s appearance, others take a variant, misspelling or mishearing of a descriptive name and end up creating something new.

“Such as meal and folie, a Scots name for yarrow derived from the French, millefeuille which means ‘thousand leaves’ describing the intricately divided, lacy leaf.

“This is taken even further in Anglicised Scots to become the name ‘melancholy’ – a strange concept for a plant used as a vulnerary, a traditional herbal medicine, to help cure wounds.”

The new book is an extension of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh’s Flora Celtica project, set up in the late 1990s to record Scotland’s wild plants, their traditional uses and to capture the host of different regional names given to them, in English, Scots and Gaelic.

Dr Kenicer adds: “The diversity and evolution of plant names is intricate, so delving into the etymology and uncovering the stories behind them has been fascinating.

“Names are very powerful things. They are a crucial part of the way that we see and classify the world around us.”

Scottish Plant Names is published by The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh