“What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;“

–Juliet from Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet”

We knew we were going to name our daugter edith way back in the first trimester, the name kind of just came to us and we seemed to know it was right.  However, we were totally lost on the middle name. We were so lost that we gave up even thinking about it for a few months.  A few weeks before she was born we were on a walk in the rose garden, and erin put her foot down and said that we had to choose the middle name that day from a rose that was in the garden (the are hundreds of roses). So we set off looking, before we found a middle name though, we found that in 1924 the portland rose queen was named edith.

This inspired us to keep looking. After a long while, and roses named ‘midnight beauty’ and ‘president kennedy’ erin came across an english rose named ’sister elizabeth’, and it just so happens that i have a sister named elizabeth.

It was getting dark and i was getting tired of squinting at signs trying to read their name, so i found the index of all the roses in the park and scanned it for any name we had talked about.  At the very end of the list, I found ‘etoile de holland’; ‘etoile’ means ‘resembling a star’, and erin had really wanted a middle name that had something to do with stars or space because the night we found out we were pregnant we saw the aurora borealis from our backyard.

And there we had our names.