On the way back from dinner one night in Sicily, I hold my phone up to the lush flora on the wall of a neighboring house, trying to explain, full of wine, that the hibiscus have curled themselves into little quiet origamis for the night. My sister-in-law isn’t that impressed. I promise her that the next time we leave the house they will have unfurled into fat, red hibiscus – I am so proud that I know what they are from sight – and I show her German partner a picture of one on my phone because I don’t have the German word for hibiscus. Der eibisch, he says. Yes, that’s it.

I don’t have enough words for flowers, or plants, or fruit. This is something that I don’t think ever stressed me out particularly growing up, in college or well into my teens. I learned the names of plants as I needed them, or through their presence in food, or tea, rather than from genuine curiosity. I think of moments where my lack of knowledge about the names of things has embarrassed me and I don’t have enough fingers to list them. Asking my manager at the bookshop who had once been a gardener at Brown what a persimmon was, that shining leathery orange bulb on his desk. Persimmon, I repeated back. Never heard of her. I think of walking back from one of the families I nannied for in San Francisco and the corner of Noe and 24^th where the jasmine trees, during this one particular window of summer, would perfume the air for half a block. I only knew what that scent was because I drank a lot of dollar iced tea from Japanese markets. Useless. I try not to give myself too much of a hard time about this. I’ve always loved flowers, but from afar. I sat as a kid in the heap of silken peony petals that would fall from their heavy heads at the back of my parents’ garden and I loved them. I stand in our tiny brick yard in our house now and cup the blood red roses in my hands and am amazed by them. I think the species is called Deep Secret, which is hilarious and magnificent. They bloom year round with their luscious, dramatic petals and violet thorns. They are too big for the garden, but I’d nearly let them take the house.

When I hiked the Wicklow Way in September last year the mountainside was rusting with autumnal colour, but hadn’t lost the fullness of summer. There were butterflies in tiny tornados all along our pathway, constantly, for days. The roadside gushed with blackberries and the air was sweet with them. I couldn’t name any of the plants I saw and it frustrated me. This summer on the Burren Way I spent more time with my eyes grazing the roadside than the strange and vast landscape – because the wildflowers were so varied, so unusual. Orchids smaller than your baby finger nail, leathery red unopened blooms that seemed to seep with some unknown fluid, bluebells so neatly scalloped at the edges it looked as though they’d been done with a scissors and a tender hand. I know an orchid by its shape, but didn’t have the names for any of them. Again, frustrated. I clasped them softly between fingers, photographed them, then posted them online, on Twitter. There on the edge of Clare, in one of the most nakedly ancient parts of Ireland, I was photographing tiny flowers for the internet. I was pretty open about how mortified I was that I didn’t know what any of them were called. I stopped short of making up my own names for them, just about.

Then, a Twitter user called Jess recommended something called Seek. It’s an app that, like some kind of magic looking-glass, identifies the species of what you hold your camera up to. I was dumbstruck and handed a whole world of new language. Sheepsbit, with almost invisible golden pods at the very tip of its sharp, blue-purple petals. Germander Speedwell, which is not the name of a plucky young detective in 1940’s London but a particularly dainty species of orchid. The Creeping Thistle, Bull Thistle, Strawberry Blossoms. I have names now, for them. In Sicily I walk around the garden holding the camera up to things, and am told their names, like a useful secret. I don’t want live, growing, beautiful things to be incidental to my life anymore. I have spent a decade of my life wrapped around steel and pixels and though it is frustrating, in some ways, to be holding the phone between me and nature at least in this case it is giving me something back: language. I want to be able to tell people the names of plants and flowers, to recognise them with fluency. Say, this hibiscus is sleeping but she’ll wake up tomorrow. I want to understand how they work, what they need.

I had a peace lily in my office during the year I spent in residence in Dun Laoghaire. I gave him a name and left him in a beam of light and watered him and gave his waxy leaves a small rub sometimes, a quiet hello. As my work life became more hectic and I began to travel more and more, he wilted, dark and limp and exhausted. Eventually he crisped into nothing and when I came back after a particularly heady month of deadlining from home he had given up the ghost for all but one or two sprouts. I was so ashamed. I had specifically gotten him because I was told they were almost impossible to murder, but what did I know about flowers, anyway, with my nose stuck in the internet? I was collapsing, he was collapsing. How had I let him get so poorly? I gave him to my mother when my residency ended in surrender, and she is tenderly nursing him back to life: he has blossoms again, now. It didn’t take long, just some love. Some peace. Maybe a small bit of talking to, too. I worry if I hold my Seek app up to him, the screen will read ‘Jonathan, the Peace Lily. He is a metaphor for 2019 and you need to get a grip.’

I have said again and again in this column that I don’t have answers, but in this particular case, my draw to soft living things actually has a kind of an answer. A positive conclusion. I say this with full awareness of how absurd it sounds, but I have registered to start my training as a florist. Really. I’m spending the winter taking intensives to get a qualification, a real one. I am going to learn so many new words, so many new textures. I am prepared to be bad at it but I am racked by curiosity, so there is, at least, that. I promised myself to dig my head out of the internet, give my scrolling thumb a rest and there was no end to it in sight if I didn’t begin to broaden my world: language, language, reading, reading, research. I am going to take silken pieces of the world and learn more about them. I am going to place them together in a way that is pleasing. I am probably going to take pictures of them for Instagram but I am confident that I will at least leave this strange experiment able to call the names of the tiny splashes of colour we have in this world. When I told my mother about this undertaking she warned that if I wanted to be a florist, my hands would always be cold. Cold hands, sure, but warm heart.