Bonny

Bonny is the name Anne Shirley gives to the apple-scented geranium on the windowsill at Green Gables, an act of naming that exemplifies her need to infuse the domestic world with personality and imagination. This small gesture—asking Marilla Cuthbert for permission to call the plant Bonny—becomes a recurring touchstone in Anne's early life at Green Gables, appearing in her prayers, her daily routines, and her conversations, and it crystallizes the tension between her imaginative inner life and Marilla's practical, unsentimental worldview.

Naming and the Need for Kinship

On her first full day at Green Gables, still uncertain whether she will be allowed to stay, Anne turns to the geranium on the kitchen windowsill. She asks Marilla, "Didn't you give it a name? May I give it one then? May I call it—let me see—Bonny would do—may I call it Bonny while I'm here?" When Marilla dismisses the idea, asking "where on earth is the sense of naming a geranium?", Anne explains her philosophy: "Oh, I like things to have handles even if they are only geraniums. It makes them seem more like people. How do you know but that it hurts a geranium's feelings just to be called a geranium and nothing else?" This moment reveals Anne's core belief that objects, like people, deserve individual recognition and that naming is an act of relationship. She immediately extends the same treatment to the cherry tree outside her bedroom window, calling it Snow Queen, and later renames the Avenue as the White Way of Delight and Barry's pond as the Lake of Shining Waters. Bonny is the first of these domestic renamings, the one that takes place inside the house, and it establishes a pattern: Anne will not accept the world as it is given to her but must reimagine it into something friendlier.

A Presence in Daily Life

Bonny becomes a quiet but persistent presence in Anne's early weeks at Green Gables. When Anne returns from her first disappointing Sunday-school experience, she sits down on the rocker "with a long sigh, kissed one of Bonny's leaves, and waved her hand to a blossoming fuchsia," explaining to Marilla that "they might have been lonesome while I was away." The geranium is treated as a companion who shares her solitude and needs reassurance. Later, when Anne is learning the Lord's Prayer under Marilla's instruction, she tips the vase of apple blossoms near enough to "bestow a soft kiss on a pink-cupped bud" before returning to her studies. This gesture mirrors the earlier kiss to Bonny and shows that Anne's habit of affectionate attention extends to all the plants she has befriended. Bonny is also included in Anne's first improvised prayer, where she thanks God for "the White Way of Delight and the Lake of Shining Waters and Bonny and the Snow Queen," listing the geranium alongside the grand natural landscapes that have moved her. For Anne, Bonny is not a trivial detail but a genuine blessing worthy of gratitude.

The Geranium as a Marker of Anne's Imagination

Bonny functions as a small but reliable index of Anne's imaginative engagement with her environment. Unlike the grand renamings of outdoor places—the White Way of Delight, the Lake of Shining Waters—Bonny is an indoor, everyday object that Anne elevates through attention and affection. The geranium itself is ordinary: an apple-scented plant on a windowsill, part of Marilla's neat, precise household. But Anne's act of naming transforms it into a friend, a confidant, and a recipient of her kisses and farewells. This transformation is exactly the kind of imaginative work that Marilla finds baffling and that Mrs. Rachel Lynde later dismisses as nonsense. Yet the geranium, unlike the Haunted Wood or the story club, never gets Anne into trouble. It is a safe outlet for her imagination, one that Marilla tolerates even if she does not understand it. Bonny thus represents the quiet, domestic face of Anne's creativity—the part that does not disrupt chores or provoke scandal but simply makes the world feel more inhabited and less lonely.

Contrast with Marilla's Practical World

The exchange over Bonny's name highlights the fundamental difference between Anne and Marilla. Marilla sees a geranium and thinks only of its botanical identity; Anne sees a potential friend who needs a name. When Marilla finally says, "Goodness, I don't care," she is not granting permission so much as surrendering to a logic she cannot follow. Yet the geranium remains in its place, and Anne continues to treat it as a companion. The plant becomes a silent witness to the gradual softening of Marilla's attitude. By the time Anne has been at Green Gables for a year, Marilla has come to accept—though never to share—Anne's habit of personifying the world around her. Bonny, like the Snow Queen and the Lake of Shining Waters, is part of the imaginative landscape that Anne creates at Green Gables, and its persistence in the narrative suggests that even the most practical household can accommodate a little poetry.