A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
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anemone
Two entirely different things wearing one name. On land, a genus of spring-flowering plants in the buttercup family with no true petals — what look like petals are sepals — and seeds carried off on the wind. In the sea, a soft-bodied polyp anchored to rock: a column of stinging tentacles around a mouth, closely related to corals but building no skeleton. The connection is purely visual.
Etymology
Greek anemōnē, from anemos (wind) plus the feminine patronymic ending -ōnē — literally daughter of the wind, the flower being said to open only when the wind blew. Anemos descends from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning “to breathe,” which also produced Latin anima, soul, so the flower is a cousin of animal, animate, and animosity.
Notes
For a while English also called the sea anemone a sea-pudding, which is less lyrical and arguably more accurate. They are eaten fried along parts of the Mediterranean coast. Some live well over fifty years.