Name That Plant

I love seeing natural places with plenty of trees, grasses or wild flowers. The trouble is, something occasionally spoils the experience for me: not being able to put a name to whatever specimen I am looking at.

It was very rewarding to do a walk on the Great Orme in North Wales recently with a couple of ladies who obviously knew their wild flowers. “That’s a scabious,” one remarked. I was grateful to be enlightened, given that I thought scabious was a disease that made your skin itch. It was satisfying to think that, next time I saw one, I would be able to Name That Plant.

Someone once became very frustrated with my lament about not knowing more botanical names. “You don’t need to know all that!” she protested. “Just enjoy the scene!” And I have to admit that something of the wonder is lost if you are forever fretting about not being able to define what you are observing.

This passion for defining is a relatively recent urge in human history. The Age of Enlightenment was all about men of science examining huge numbers of samples – be they of rocks, animals, plants, languages, viruses, stars or anything else observable – and cataloguing, codifying, classifying them until everything could be put in its place. Clearly this process has brought untold benefits. Medicine has advanced by leaps and bounds because of researchers’ patient analysis of vast amounts of data, spotting connections that may indicate an approach to treating damaged areas of the body more effectively.

Indeed, naming and defining creation has God’s endorsement. We are told in Genesis 2:19, “So out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name” (ESV).

Yet, whenever the gaining of knowledge becomes entirely a matter of classification and analysis, other discoveries can be missed. For instance, there is the valuable deduction that man the classifier and analyst is not above God.

O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens.

Out of the mouth of babes and infants, you have established strength because of your foes, to still the enemy and the avenger.

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,

what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?

Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honour.

You have given him dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under his feet,

all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field,

the birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas.

O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!

Psalm 8 ESV

Fallen angels and men pretend they know better than God. Jesus Christ, Son of Man and Son of God, never went down that road. God the Father crowned Him with glory and honour. He also crowns those who trust in Jesus with reward, because that route is the way to an infinity of new and exciting discoveries.