The name Timothy used to be so common that most people don’t realize it’s also a plant! Sylvester means “of the woods,” but isn’t nearly as common of a name (for humans) as it used to be.
Watership Down contains lots of good plant-based names (Hazel, Cowslip, Woundwort, Groundsel, Campion…). In the Apple+ Foundation series, some of the characters from the forest planet Anacreon have tree-based names (Rowan, Ilex).
There are also some species names that sound like they should be human names. Gleditsia triacanthos always sounds to me like a nice Greek girl, and Mr. Dolomedes could be her friendly old uncle.
I love the book trilogy; I really need to get back to the show, I saw the first 3 episodes. It is curious what they decided to keep vs change but so far I liked it, it just takes so much focus to watch it
Zinnia is gorgeous! My dog’s name is Sable. It’s not a name I personally would have chosen at the time but she was a rescue and came with that name. It’s grown on me over the years though. :)
My last stint in the Dominican republic, I was noticing the black-and-white spotted effect of the sun shining through leafy trees, and that made me imagine a black-and-white spotted cat named Arabuko – the Taino word for “forest.”
Sometimes, finding out the meaning of last names reveals them to be nature-inspired. I had a friend by the last name of Hogaboam. When I looked up the origin, it turned out to be derived from Hoogenboom, meaning tall tree. Interestingly, some time later, she began using a social media handle that included the word TallTree, so i’m thinking she learned her surname’s origin, too.
Yeah, but they don’t mean it as a cat Cat, right? There were also names like Hare, Bull, etc. Most of them transformed into surnames with time and new name system.
Haha that is great! perhaps better than what my username really is from.
Would it disappoint to learn the pronunciation of my username is actually more like “Soon-gurh-ah-mae”?
I’ve always thought that Taku and Massif would be great names for large dogs. Taku is the name of a glacier in SE Alaska and Massif is the term for a connected group of mountains, usually measured at a certain elevation.
My user-name is a nickname given many years ago because I was a bird-fanatic, “nyoni” is isiZulu for Bird. Our lovely golden retriever was named Shumba, the chiShona for lion. [You may know the Swahili form - Simba].
(Yes, that’s ‘my friend’ in Sindarin. Part of the reason I go by Goth Hobbit in so many venues is that I’m the resident go-to among friends and family whenever anyone has a question about Prof. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien and his various works. Also, Edraith is a lovely name.)
This was a major concern for me in picking a name for myself. Considered Dorado but thought it’d be too easily shortened to “Dory” and Robin but it reminded me too much of the comic book character, so I chose Wren… and now everyone thinks it’s spelled the same as Ren from Ren and Stimpy or, worse, Kylo Ren.
Not to go too off-topic but my understanding was that to get to “great” you had to have another gap. Like how you have to have grandparents before you can have great grandparents.
(This is pretty off-topic, so I’ll pull it all together with a connector. Because rules.)
Diana is a dead princess, but Diana can also be a butterfly (Speyeria diana) or a monkey (Cercopithecus diana). Probably other ones, too. I think most names can probably be tied to nature if you’re looking to do so.
We had great difficulty in agreeing on names for my daughters. We finally selected Phoebe and Calandra - good names that can reflect our loves of nature, can be translated into Greek easily and reflect my husband’s birding passion.
I also thought they would not be common names, but it turned out there are several Phoebe’s and Cali’s to be confused with so that part did not work out at all…
I have a sister-in-law named Vanessa… I want to tell her it’s the genus for Painted Ladies but I do not think that’s what her mother had in mind…
