What’s in a place name? The English appreciation for a well-tended garden is deeply ingrained in our psyche.
So much so, it would appear, that the evidence of this love can be found in the names of the places and streets that we call home.
A recent survey conducted by the Royal Mail discovered that a quarter of Britain’s streets and houses have names inspired by flowers, trees, and foliage, while many villages and towns have monikers inspired by greenery.
Here we take a look at some of the most popular and famous greenery-inspired place names in the UK and abroad and uncover the histories behind the names.
- Streets named after plants
- Villages and towns named after plants
- Famous locations with plant-inspired monikers around the world
The stories behind the place names of villages and towns throughout the UK provide a fascinating insight into the lives of our ancestors and the features of the landscape that they would have come into contact with many years ago.
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Place names were designed to be distinctive so as to aid identification, with many going back to the Medieval, Saxon, and even Roman periods in Britain.
Whether the area was known for its fens, its fords, its sheep, stones, or even its abundance of stinging nettles, you are likely to find traces of a location’s early history in its name.
Streets Named After Plants
The recent Royal Mail survey revealed the British obsession with naming our villages, towns, streets, and houses after plants.
Topping the list was Tonbridge, appropriately located in Kent, the “Garden of England”, with over 2,300 green address names, many of which were flowers.
Other hot spots for greenery-inspired addresses can be found in Fife, Gloucester, York, Guildford, Exeter, and Portsmouth.
In the trees category, over 8,000 streets or places take their name from the beech, followed by hawthorn, yew, oak, and elm.
Just under 50,000 places were found to contain the name of a tree, while over 54,000 places were inspired by flowers.
Occupying the top five spots on the leader board for flower-related place names were rose, primrose, heather, jasmine, and lilac.
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“Street, house and building names chiefly reflect our nation’s heritage and primary interests,” Steve Rooney, head of Royal Mail’s address management unit, explained.
“As a country with such a proud history of farming and a love of the countryside and garden, it’s wonderful to see our appreciation for nature so clearly reflected in our addresses.”
Villages and Towns Named After Plants
Alongside the 70,000 houses and streets named plants in the UK, there are areas whose namesakes are also inspired by flowers, trees, and shrubs.
Many of these names were given by early inhabitants, and often describe the surroundings in which these early settlers found themselves.
Some are perhaps more obvious, such as Leek in Staffordshire – no explanation needed here – while others commonly derive their names from Old English or Norse.
Anyone who has walked in the countryside of the UK has at some point or another fallen victim to the stinging nettle (Urtica dioica or nata in Old Norse).
While they’re now a popular sight across the British Isles, it is thought that this pokey plant was far less common in early times and was therefore useful for distinguishing places.
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Five areas with nettles in their names can be found near Roman forts or towns, including Nettleham by Caistor in Lincolnshire, Nettlehope Hill in Northumberland, Nettleton Hill by Slack in Yorkshire, Nettle Hall near Melandra Castle in Cheshire, and Natland by Alauna in Cumbria.
Trees as a Place Name
Further examples can be found in the vegetable plot.
For example, the Old English for wild celery is ‘merece’, which later came to be ‘marc’. Similarly, ‘ham’ is a common component of many place names in the UK, and comes from the Old English ‘hamm’, meaning a riverside meadow.
In the case of the village of Markham, a name which appears in records as early as 900, we have both combined in one.
Tree name derivations are more common than vegetables and shrubs.
For example, Bix in South Oxfordshire gets its name from the box plant, while Uley in Gloucestershire refers to a yew wood in the area.
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If you’re in or around London, you may like to visit Burnt Oak, first recorded in 1754 and so named after a charred tree in the area, Harold Wood, owned by King Harold of 1066 fame, or Bexley, an Anglo-Saxon place name meaning a box of trees.
‘Leah’ is another common Old English place name, brought by the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, meaning a field or a forest clearing. You can find derivations of ‘leah’ in places such as Shipley, Sugley, Crawley, and Ashley.
The latter, Ashley, was likely referring to ash trees as well as a clearing.
Other parts of these names also provide clues as to what else you may have found in each area: many stones at Stanley (from the Old English ‘stan’), crows near Crawley (Old English ‘craw’), sows in Sugley (from the Old English ‘sugu’), and sheep near Shipley (from the Old English ‘sceap’).
Famous Locations With Plant-Inspired Monikers Around the World
The practice of naming places after plants is not only a practice in Britain, but happens all over the world.
Did you know that one of Spain’s most famous cities is named after a fruit? Granada, literally translating to pomegranate, suitably bears the fruit as its official emblem, and depictions of the fruit can be found all over the city to this day.
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The history of Granada’s name goes back to 1492, when King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella chose to adopt the fruit as a symbol of their final victory over the Moors of Al-Andalus.
The city was then called Elvira by the occupying Muslims before being renamed.
The pomegranate’s symbolic significance harks back to Greek mythology, where it was considered a symbol of life and rebirth, and later as a signifier of fertility and abundance in Iran, Afghanistan, Armenia and, of course, Iberica.
Hill of Strangers
The word Granada likely first came from the Moorish for Karnattah (Gharnāṭah), or “hill of strangers”, meaning that the city itself lent its name to the fruit which grew in abundance in the area.
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Interestingly, Henry the VIII’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon, used the pomegranate as the main symbol in her heraldic badge.
However, she sadly never lived up to the fertile reputation of her chosen image and bore only one female child, the future Queen Elizabeth I, for her husband who so desperately wished for a male heir.
A favourite among music fans is Strawberry Fields in Liverpool, which came to inspire the famous Beatles song, ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’.
Strawberry Fields originated as a garden for a Salvation Army children’s home in Liverpool, and was a place where John Lennon, who later wrote the song in the autumn of 1966, used to play as a child.
Hollywood
Following his assassination on the 8th December 1980, a 2.5 acre plot in Central Park, New York, was dedicated to his memory.
Every year on the anniversary of his death, fans flock from around the world to pay tribute with sprays of flowers at the mosaic bearing the word ‘Imagine’ in the gardens.
Perhaps one of the most famous places in the world which derives its name from a plant is today the centre of the Western world’s film industry: Hollywood in California. H. J. Whitley, a prominent landowner operating in the United States in the late nineteenth century, purchased 400 acres of land in California shortly after his settlement in the area.
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At this time, the land was littered with many farms and orchards and, rumour has it, holly bushes.
The plant’s reputation as a symbol of goodwill, happiness, and health served Whitley’s ambitions for the area as an up-and-coming, wealthy, and popular residential district and he appropriately dubbed it Hollywood.
King William
Another notoriously affluent and popular residential district in California also takes its name from a plant, though this time the origins are a little more regal. Orange County in New York was established in 1683 by early colonisers as an original district of the city.
The county took its name from King William III of England, who was also the Prince of the House of Orange at the time.
Though varieties of citrus can be grown in Orange County, ironically the area does not have the extreme heats needed to ripen varieties of mandarins, grapefruits, or oranges, though its official emblem does of course bear the citrus fruits.
On the other side of the coin, there are also many places which have instead lent their names to the foods which made them famous, such as Melton Mowbray (pies), Eton mess (desert), Worcestershire (sauce), Kendall (mint cakes), Eccles (cakes), and most obviously, the sandwich (after the Earl of Sandwich).