But Mamm-wynn indicated her notebook. “You’ve written down the Latin names, haven’t you?”

“Oh! Yes. Precise nomenclature is how we can identify and separate one species from another. When something is given a unique name, it’s . . . well, it’s like a tip of the hat, in a way, isn’t it? It’s us acknowledging that it is unlike anything else previously named. It is something unique.”

Had she delivered that little speech to her own grandmother, she’d have gotten an owlish blink and then a stiff reminder that such talk wasn’t likely to win a young lady a husband.

Mamm-wynn, however, nodded, sending a wisp of silver hair dancing on the breeze. “Exactly so. And it’s the same with people. Names . . . they matter to us. They shape our souls in ways I’ve never fully understood. But have you pondered the power of them? That the angels instructed parents in what to name the children of promise—John the Baptizer and Jesus, just to name the obvious two. The Lord renamed Abram. Sarai. Jacob. Simon Peter. Saul of Tarsus. Why?”

Libby let her gaze wander the path Mamm-wynn had put them on. “The Long Walk,” Mr. Menna had called it in his introductory speech inside the Lodge that morning. Dozens of plants vied for her admiration—palms, aloes, gum trees, cacti, dracœnas. And she’d always much preferred thinking about them than theology.

But no one had ever put a biblical question to her in such a way. She let it roll about in her mind as they walked at a pace faster than she’d have expected Mamm-wynn to be comfortable with. “I suppose . . . I suppose because the Lord recognized an evolution in them.” She darted a glance at her companion to see if she’d object to the choice of word like Mama would have. But her wrinkled face remained happy, so she pressed on. “They began as one creature—Abram or Sarai or Jacob or Simon or Saul. But through the events of their life, they became something else altogether. Abraham, Sarah, Israel, Peter, Paul.”

Mamm-wynn nodded. “And that evolution couldn’t go unnamed. Because the naming itself is crucial. Part of the change, don’t you think?”

“Part of the acknowledgment of it, at the least.”

“With a plant, to be sure. But people have an awareness that plants don’t—they need to know their name.” The lady splayed a hand over her heart and looked out along the Long Walk as if it took her through the years and not just the Gardens. “I needed to know mine. And I didn’t, not fully, until I married my Edgar and came here, when I realized I hadn’t just taken on his name. I’d truly taken on my own for the first time. And I could hear it in the whisper of the sea breezes.”