There is always a hidden language, everywhere and in everything.
The Cambridge University Botanic Garden was founded in 1845 and the first plant in the garden found itself studied in 1846. I learned, during a visit for research for my book, The Hidden Seasons, that the labels we find on plants in botanic gardens contain information hidden in plain sight. At Cambridge there was a number at the top left of the black labels, I peered at one example, 20173471*B. It was perfectly easy to see and yet I had gone decades of my life without noticing these details.
This is the “accession number”. The first four digits of the number show the year the plant was obtained and planted, “accessioned”. The last four numbers reveal the order within that year. For example, the plant I was looking at, ‘Tormentil – Potentilla erecta’, has the accession number 20173471*B. This tormentil was accessioned in 2017 and was the 3471th plant accessioned that year. The ‘B’ indicates it is the second accession; there is another tormentil from the same accession planted elsewhere in the Garden, with the qualifier “A”.
The word at the top right of the label is not too tough a code to crack, it tells us the family the plant belongs to. In this case, the word ‘Rosaceae’ tells us that tormentil is a member of the rose family, which is a useful code in itself. It reveals lots about the likely character of this plant – it will have pretty flowers, arranged radially with petals that spread out from the centre. And it could be many colours, but it won’t be blue – flowers in this family aren’t blue. Flowers in the rose family are most likely to have five petals. (But tormentil has four, making it a rebel within the rose family.) The word in the bottom left, ‘Europe’, tells us the plants’ natural range. This is not the only place we will find it, but the places it harks from without human interference.
And now we come to the single letter in the bottom right, which can be considered a richer code, but hardly inpenetrable. The letter ‘W’ indicates the plant was collected directly from the wild, and its origin is both known and documented. ‘Z’ tells us that the plant is from a cultivated plant descended from one of known wild origin. ‘G’ reveals that the plant is from a cultivated plant not of known wild origin (came from a garden). ‘U’ is used if the origin is unknown.
See if you can crack the codes below:
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