BED

Wild Word Friday!

This time of year (summer) I love to spend my free moments in my flower BEDs. Because we built our house on a rocky alcove, I have an abundance of stones and boulders to use as accents for my flowers. Odds are that I have more rocks than flowers, but each year I plant a few more perennials  and hope to eventually even those odds.

I’ve wondered for a long time why flower gardens are often referred to as flower BEDs. When I finally decided to delve into that small mystery, I came up with a bit more history from the human family’s ancient past.  If we go way back thousands of years to the Indo-European language, we find base word bhedh, which refers to a sleeping hollow in the ground. In the Welsh language, we have a closely related word, bedd, to bury, and in Breton, bez, a grave, but both of these words find their antecedent in the Indo-European word, bhedh. By the time bhedh got to modern English via the Anglo Saxon word bedd, it was an easy step to BED, and easy for us to forget that our ancestors slept in hollows dug into the ground. When I dig up the earth to plant my flowers, I’m simply giving them a BED, much like the ancient humans used for sleeping.

I have to admit that I’m delighted with my memory foam mattress and heated BED pad. Although if I’m camping, I don’t mind sleeping in a bhedh.  (If I have a sleeping bag!)

What’s the worst place you’ve ever had to sleep? (The worst place I NEVER had to sleep was in a tent in a thunderstorm in the Rocky Mountains. We packed up and sought lower, safer ground!)

Blessings!

Sue

(Photo from Wikipedia. Some information from A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in The Principal Indo-European Languages by Carl Darling Buck.)