“The bluebells had not faded yet, they made a solid carpet in the woods above the valley, and the young bracken was shooting up, curling and green.” So reads a sentence in the middle of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, as the unnamed narrator walks through the Happy Valley to the cove. Bracken has appeared several times earlier in the pages of the novel, yet it is only the verb “curling” that evokes an instant recognition in me: fern. Fern is bracken? The English word echoes brackets and brackish. How do those spiky, rectangular and sea-salty words connect with the fern? A plant I have loved as the underbelly of my childhood forests, the magical paproć. That held me in thrall because it blossomed only on Midsummer night and brought luck to those who found the flower, as the Polish folktales of my childhood foretold.

My world shifts, and the landscape surrounding aristocratic, haughty Manderley becomes familiar and known.

How do you do, bracken. Nice to meet you.

Mushroom was easy to remember when I was learning English because it reminded me of muchomor, the Polish word for the red-capped, white-spotted Amanita mushroom of the deep Białowieża forests and fables. Deadly, even if it does serve as a house for forest gnomes, the danger only adding to its mystery and appeal. Once, foraging for blackberries in the forest behind my primary school, crouched among the brambles, I watched a fly crawl on the muchomor’s scarlet dome, seemingly immune to its toxin. I tapped the cap. Was my fingertip now poisonous? The English word would have taught me right away that the fly was doomed: Does “flybane” sound as ominous to English ears as “muchomor” does to mine?

The summer evenings of my Polish childhood were scented with Matthias-flower—maciejka, a profusion of tiny, long-petalled flowers in pink, white, or purple. By June, the fragrance floated through our open windows from the garden of one of the neighbouring houses dwarfed by our five-story concrete apartment building.

I forget about it until twenty-odd years later, when one summer evening, sitting on the deck in my own garden, I realize something is missing. The scent. From the recesses of my olfactory memory, maciejka wafts into my consciousness. I wonder what it’s called in English, and whether it would grow in southern Ontario. The name—evening stock—disappoints. It may have the same romantic connotations to the English speaker, but to me it is dry, scentless.

I still haven’t planted it. Just like its English name, I’m afraid the poor little flowers and their scent will fail to live up to my memories. It’s easier to leave it in the past than to face a disappointment. Maybe if I ordered the seeds from Poland, it would be different.

A brown streak alights on my bird feeder and resolves itself into a rufous-crowned sparrow. Thanks to the Audubon guide to North American birds, I also greet a white-breasted nuthatch and a tufted titmouse. Naming the species gives me a sense of accomplishment, but when I look up their Polish equivalents a wide grin breaks out on my face: kowalik and sikora. These two—along with many other birds—populate traditional poems and songs, occasionally flitting onto the winter windowsills of my childhood. Only after I read their Polish names do I feel I know them, these birds from Jan Brzechwa’s children’s poems—although I notice the North American titmouse does not have the canary-yellow belly and the jet-black cap sported by the Polish sikora.

In grade 8 Polish I learned that poziomka—wild strawberry—was so named because its tendrils stretched po ziemi—over the ground. Is strawberry called so because it grows on the straw of last year’s grass? Buttercup is kaczeniec—duck flower—because of its brilliant duckling yellow, but why “duckweed”? The Polish rzęsa wodna—water eyelash—is so much prettier. Other English names are self-evident: lily-of-the-valley grows in ground depressions, tiger-lily for its vivid colour. But even if I understand the etymology of the English nature names, only the Polish names resonate in the centre of my being. The difference between feeling and knowing, living and learning.

Memories live in the deepest grey matter nuclei in the brain, the amygdala (named so because it resembles an almond) and the hippocampus (shaped like a seahorse). These two structures belong to the limbic system, the most ancient, most primitive part of the brain, the seat of instincts and impulses and hunches, the one we have in common with reptiles. The olfactory lobes are also part of the limbic system, and that’s why scents and smells elicit memories so strongly, even the most deeply buried and hidden ones. Like the maciejka, returning to me on a summer night after more than twenty years.

“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” claims the Bard. I beg to differ. The names we learn in childhood, the ones that grow with us and with use, that acquire layers of meaning, smell the sweetest to us. They hold memories and stories in ways that names learned later in life do not; people who don’t share your experiences or language or culture may not fully appreciate those associations and feelings. They have their own associations, their own hidden meanings curled inside those common nouns. It can be like sharing a secret, or a sort of magic, the act of translating them for one another. Is there a word for this kind of intimacy?

And what of the bracken? It turns out it’s not the paproć of my childhood or the shady recesses of my garden slope after all, but a particular species of fern common in England and Scotland. I’m surprised to learn that in Polish, the plant is named orlica—the term for a female eagle. It is so named because of the evocative shape of the unfurling frond in the springtime. First clutched closed, then partly open, it suggests the movement of an eagle’s claw. Orlica is a striking word, rough and powerful, with nothing to suggest the soft curved fronds of the paproć; it belongs on rocky outcrops where only eagles dare to soar and nest.

The soaring maple tree in my garden—strong and limber enough to withstand the derecho thunderstorms that felled five trees around it last year—is footed in a sea of ferns. These are the ferns of my childhood, gracefully lifting their fronds from the earth. Here, every July, I watch fireflies dance on currents of warm air as they send their love-struck light signals. I have never seen fireflies in Poland even though I knew their name—świetliki. They belong to the forty years of memories of my summers on Georgian Bay and in my Hamilton garden, to the new memories I have made with my husband and my sons.

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Image: Kristina Corre, Portal, 2023, hand-cut wheatpasted collage with photo printed on metallic label