March in Sonoma County has a particular mood: longer light, cooler nights that still mean business, and gardens that look like they’re thinking about what comes next. It’s also a fine month for word collecting — the kind that makes you sound a little more botanically fluent at the nursery, or at least more entertaining over the backyard fence. This Word Junkie column is a pocketful of uncommon, garden-related terms you can drop into conversation like seeds: some precise, some poetic, all pleasantly weird.

Let’s start with a word that sounds like it should come with a velvet cape: floriferous. It means “bearing many flowers,” which is exactly what you want when something in your yard needs to perform without being begged. A floriferous plant isn’t merely blooming; it’s putting on a show. Nearby is efflorescence, the process of flowering — a good term for that moment when buds stop hedging and go all-in. Bonus: efflorescence also names the whitish, salty bloom that can appear on bricks or terra-cotta. So gardeners get a two-for-one: poetry and patio maintenance.

If you’ve ever watched a vine find its way up a trellis as if it has a plan, you’ve seen circumnutation — the slow, circular movement of growing plant tips. It’s not indecision; it’s a search pattern. Tendrils sweep, pause, sweep again, and then suddenly your climbing plant has latched on like it just won a tiny contest. A plant that climbs by producing small clinging roots is radicant. English ivy is radicant, which is a formal way of saying it will attach itself to whatever it can and pretend it was invited.

March also feels like a good time to appreciate the underground workforce. A geophyte is a plant that survives unfavorable seasons below ground using bulbs, corms, tubers, or rhizomes. Daffodils are geophytes. So are onions. It’s a word that sounds like a creature from a nature documentary, but it’s really a survival strategy with excellent timing. And then there’s mycorrhiza, the partnership between fungi and plant roots — a subterranean trade agreement where the fungi help plants gather water and nutrients, and plants pay in sugars. It’s an entire economy beneath the mulch, and it’s happening whether you acknowledge it or not.