What's in a label? More than you might think, says Charles Quest-Ritson. I was given my first ‘garden’ in a corner of my grand-parents’ apple orchard and that’s where I sowed the seeds we had bought at Woolworth’s. Then we labelled them, using pieces of white-painted wood (query — was that the norm in those days?), on which I used the gardener’s BB pencil to write their names in capital letters.
Sowing the seeds was an act of faith because, later that year, they would turn into flowering plants. But labelling them was an act of ownership. Labels and labelling are an essential part of gardening.
There is nothing more disappointing than seeing a beautiful plant in someone else’s garden and not finding a label to tell you its name. Actually, that’s not quite true, because it’s just as bad when this happens in your own garden. It’s especially embarrassing if you have someone with you who asks the question, because owners are supposed to remember the name of everything in their garden.
There are, however, situations where ignorance is excusable: if you buy lots of new bulbs — tulips or daffodils for example — that you haven’t grown before, you cannot be expected to remember their names as soon as they start to flower. There are gardens, however, where the owners decide that labelling would contradict the spirit of the place that they have created. This is true of Ninfa, the magical Anglo-Italian garden in the Pontine Marshes south of Rome, where labels .