A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
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jacob’s ladder
Jacob’s ladder is a plant of damp grassland and limestone scree with clusters of blue bell-shaped flowers and leaves divided into paired leaflets running up the stem in matched rungs. The same name is used for two other things entirely: the shafts of sunlight that come down through a break in cloud, and the rope ladder with rigid rungs that hangs down a ship’s side.
Etymology
All three come from one story. In Genesis, Jacob sleeps with a stone for a pillow and dreams of a ladder set on the earth with its top reaching heaven and angels going up and down it. The plant got the name for its rungs of paired leaflets, the sunbeams for coming down out of the sky in the same slanted way, and the ship’s ladder for being a ladder that hangs from above with nothing under it.
Notes
The sunbeam sense has plenty of company in English. The same shafts are also called crepuscular rays, with the sun drawing water and God’s fingers. They only become visible when there is enough dust, haze, or moisture in the air to scatter light sideways into the eye, so a shaft of light is really a column of particles being lit.