What is in a name? When playwright William Shakespeare asked the question, “What’s in a name?” in Romeo and Juliet, he was referring to the idea that names themselves are a convention to distinguish things or people, but themselves do not have any worth or meaning. A rose if called something entirely different, would still smell as sweetly as it does with the name “rose”.
Recently I wanted to search on Google for a specific old canna cultivar, so I typed the name into Google and expectantly pressed the ‘Enter’ key, looking forward to a rich source of information. Imagine my disappointment when the first 3 pages that Google offered for my delectation where all devoted to cannabis and it appears that Google now automatically converts the name canna to cannabis!
Basically it looks like the crackheads have captured the name ‘canna’, given to us by Linneus several hundred years ago, and it reinforced my own experiences when I was trolled and hacked to such an extent that I closed my two web sites that used the name canna. Web thugs advised me that I was just a total pest (a polite version of what I was called), as when they typed in the name canna in their browsers they were wasting their valuable time making aborted visits to my canna web sites.
Many years ago I would have enjoyed rising to their challenge, but as a senior citizen I now only want a quiet life, and to use the web to pass on the canna information I have gathered over the years. When my cannacyclopedia site was hacked and several thousand files deleted I had enough. I was at the end of my tether and those crackheads obviously meant business, and in any event I could not face rebuilding the site, even though I had regular backups.
Instead I took the old mans way out and gave in, knowing that I couldn’t win against those odds. I called the new web site ‘Thor’s Garden’, so the crackheads couldn’t get upset, and am in the process of spending the cold winter nights building the content with data from 25 years collecting heritage catalogues, books and articles to rebuild our lost history.
My conclusion is that the name ‘CANNA’ is irretrievably lost to the cannabis and google realms. But what alternative name? Our wild species plants all originate from the Americas, and are called Achiras in their originating continent. Equally, it was the people of France who first embraced those wild species to produce the first hybrids and cultivars, using the name Balisier, and even to this day that name is in common use in France. But how can a plant name be changed, and does the canna community want a change?
The name canna is simply the Latin name for cane, and not really descriptive of a plant that bears more resemblance to bananas than canes. In any event, the taxonomists will tell us that only they, as the biological experts, can name plants, so the situation remains that we have lost the canna name, and the canna community has no official organisation that can speak with authority, and the situation will probably just drift along.
Just whisper the canna name.