Essay
You Can Take the Boy Out of Boston…
But he still has trouble with plants
My husband is from Boston, Massachusetts, and although he has lived thirty years in England, there are still things that amuse, enchant and baffle him about his adopted country.
Like the ritual of afternoon tea, with its finger sandwiches and scones and its accoutrements of teapots and tea strainers and tea cosies and the inviolable rule of warming the pot.
Then there’s the tendency of Brits to declare that every aged person who has just died has ‘Had a good innings.’ He does not, of course, understand cricket.
As for the habit of Brits to back their cars into parking spaces, it infuriates him. He has a flair for compound phrases and refers to such car parkers as Back-em-in-Joes.
But chief among his bafflements is the Brits’ knowledge of plant names, not just common names, but the Latin too.
He didn’t arrive from Boston a complete novice in plants; he could tell the difference between a flower and a tree just by looking, but the Latin lexicon and the Linnaeus taxonomy of plants had not permeated the depths of his being like it does your average Brit.
One day when we were planting a sapling in the garden, our neighbour peered over the…
