A few weeks ago I started building raised garden beds in the now mostly-cleared part of our property which will become our food garden. I’ll be progressively adding new beds over the next couple of years and eventually we’ll have probably 20 or more beds, so I decided a naming scheme was needed. As a gardener I need to be able to think “time to put some manure on bed x” or “these seedlings will go into bed y”.
Rather than numbering the beds, I decided to give them all names, in alphabetical order and honouring the great men and women of science and philosophy. With the help of my friend Kirsty I’ve got most of the letters of the alphabet covered, but there are some blanks. Any suggestions?
- Archimedes
- Babbage
- Copernicus
- Darwin
- Einstein
- Fibbonacci
- Galileo
- Hoffmann
- I
- Jung
- Kinsey
- Leonardo
- Marx
- Newton
- Orwell
- Plato
- Q
- Russell (Bertrand, not Jane)
- Sagan
- Turing
- U
- Von Bingen
- Wittgenstein
- Xenophon
- Y
- Zeno
Only Archimedes and Babbage have actually been built so far, so alternative suggestions for any of the others are also welcome.
Hi Paul
For the letter “i’ you will probably have the best luck with someone Italian. You could try Inghirami… that’s the only one I could think of.
For the letter “I”, you could go with ‘Immanuel’ as in Immanuel Kant. Flies in the face of the convention you’ve got going, but its a garden bed and there’s a time and a place to be anal about such things I would say (not knowing you personally, what I suggest could in fact be the greatest heresy you’ve heard all week) …
Other than that, sorry, can’t seem to come up with much, but “Y” does seem to distill an element of the whole idea just as it is.
You’re right about “Y” – I guess this does seem like an odd thought process but it makes sense to me, and once I have a few beds going it will be nice to know them by their names rather than numbers or just “that big bed up the back that had potatoes in it last year”…
I like Immanuel, although as you point out it breaks the pattern. I could expand the inclusion criteria to include potential heroes in any worthwhile endeavour, which makes the process a bit easier. And of course there’s no rule saying I have to have one monument for each letter of the alphabet…
Don’t know if these fit into your scheme but you could try:
Ignatius like ignatius of Loyola
Yakov as in Yakov Druskin
They’re just suggestions
How about Qi (Chinese philosophical equivalent of ‘vitalism’) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qi
For I: Ibn al-Haytham (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_al-Haytham)
For Y, Thomas Young perhaps? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Young_(scientist))
Q is for Willard Van Orman Quine of course!
I like “Qi” for Q…and howsabout:
I = Io
Y = Yule
U = Ursa