Police in Sydney, Australia recently received multiple calls about the sound of crashing furniture and a man screaming “I’m going to kill you, you’re dead! Die! Die!” Police arriving at the apartment discovered an arachnophobic tenant attempting to kill one of Australia’s infamous spiders.
Christina Ricci confesses to a phobia about houseplants. Nicole Kidman’s phobia is butterflies. Johnny Depp and Justin Timberlake both also hate spiders, while Stephen Spielberg and Woody Allen both are phobic about insects in general – but then Woody’s scared list seems almost endless . . .
The word phobia is derived from the Greek ???o?, ph?bos, meaning aversion or fear. The Mayor Clinic defines a phobia is an overwhelming and unreasonable fear of an object or situation that poses little real danger but provokes anxiety and avoidance. But almost 10 percent of people worldwide are said to suffer from such fears.
The most common are phobias involving spiders (arachnophobia), snakes (ophidiophobia), heights (acrophobia) and blood (hemophobia). But there are plenty of other, rarer phobias that could bother gardeners, such as that of Christina Ricci, which is technically botonophobia. This, incidentally, is not to be confused with bananaphobia – yes, that is right, fear of bananas.
How to garden, for example, if one suffers from dendrophobia (fear of trees), lachanophobia (fear of vegetables), pteridophobia (fear of ferns) or even mycophobia (a fear or aversion to mushrooms). And what of the poor sufferers from seplophobia, a fear of decaying matter?
Limiting the choice of colours in the garden would be the fate of sufferers of erythrophobia, an excessive fear of the colour red or porphyrophobia, ditto of the colour purple. Then there’s xanthophobia, fear of the colour yellow and leikophobia:, phobia of white. Fortunately little in the garden is likely to be truly black, ruling out melanophobia.
A gardener who is scared of rain, omborphobia, has problems, unless they are from California, where many seem to be suffering from xerophobia or fear of dryness.
Scarlett Johansson is terrified of cockroaches, so is said to suffer from katsaridaphobia. Others admit to an irrational dislike of ants (myrmecophoibia), termites(isopterophobia), wasps (spheksophobia), even moths (mottephobia).
“To qualify as a phobia, a fear must be lasting, intense, and seen by the sufferer as excessive and irrational,” says psychologist Nick Haslam adding there are many other strange fears: “The clinical literature records phobias of rubber bands, dolls, clowns, balloons, onions, being laughed at, dictation, sneezing, swings, chocolate, and the wicked beady eyes of potatoes.”
Happily it appears it is only houseplants that arouse Christian Ricci’s botonophobia. She has a sweet pea tattooed on her pert ankle. Obviously she does not have anthophobia, a fear of flowers.
However, for those who have indulged in other of these gardening columns past only to groan at the puns inflicted upon them yes, there is one for them also: enetophobia, an aversion to puns.
Wes Porter is a horticultural consultant and writer based in Toronto. Wes has over 40 years of experience in both temperate and tropical horticulture from three continents.
