This morning, roses. Dark Lady, Mme. Alfred Carriere, Munstead Wood, the Lady of Shalott. When I cut them in the garden, they were damp from the early sprinkler. I walked under the cascade of Hall’s honeysuckle, just opening, and already the hummingbirds had found the open throats. Rosa canina in full bloom around my bedroom window.
I want the names of everything. The bees in the first tomato flowers — Bombus vosnesenskii, the yellow-faced; the Swainson’s thrush I heard as I went out for my swim–whit, whit; the long roots of Rumex acetosella, sheep’s sorrel, I keep pulling from between the pavers in the greenhouse. The rough-skinned newt, the Pacific tree frog (sometimes the chorus frog, once Hyla regilla, now Pseudacris regilla, though nothing about the frog has changed), Rosa ‘Félicité Perpétue’ by the front door, where the tree frogs lie low in the damp earth.
The names of Ukrainian cities attacked by Russia–Kyiv, Odesa, Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Bakhmut, Dnipro, Poltava. A drone over Chernivtsi, the city where the two women in my grandfather’s papers were photographed at the Atelier Riviera by Ferd. Straub, Hauptstrasse 16. Missiles over Lviv.
The names of the family members who drove from Ivankivtsi to Solkilske to meet me, share photographs, strands of story: Mykola the elder, Liuda, Luba, Nadya, Lidiya, young Mykola. The ones who left the village. Semen, Petro, Ivan, Vasyl. The ones who stayed. Stepaniya, Leontyne, Yurii, Maria.
The roses still in bud: Abraham Darby, the light pink moss, the deeper pink, the Lark Ascending, New Dawn rising above the patio.
...Theresa Kishkan 
“I want the names of everything.” Me too! But I can never remember them for very long!
There are lots of things I forget. But somehow plant names stay with me. Maybe because I spent 4 years working at the Butchart Gardens when I was a university student and although I didn’t work in the garden itself (seed store/gift shop), I had to know names of plants…Imprinted at the right time!