Briar

Maigret was walking along the street with a chap called Baes (a corruption, I think of our word 'boss'). He had his pipe 'en bruyère' and Baes had his pipe 'en terre blanche'. We note at this point that Simenon was a life long pipe smoker and I had a short phase, less than a year, of pipe smoking.

It seems quite likely that 'terre blanche' is meerschaum, or perhaps just a more ordinary white clay. Not too bothered about that one. But what on earth is 'bruyère'?

Next stop Larousse, which talks of a plant which makes me think of heather, without being very sure about it. There is a sketch of the plant which does not greatly help. There is talk of 'terre de bruyère', which sounds a bit like a peat or a compost made from the plant, the sort of thing you might buy in plastic bags from garden centres.

Next stop the new found reference 1, where it is suddenly made clear to me that the word is a corruption of our word 'briar', which according to wikipedia is 'a common name for any of a number of unrelated thorny plants... Plants termed briar include species in the genera Rosa, Rubus, and Smilax'. But not including, heather. With the root of the briar being made into pipes, and with my guess being that the briar in question is the dog rose.

Just to be sure, I go to google which, among a lot of sites for pipe manufacturers which are more interested in sales than information, it turns up reference 2. From which I learn that the briar pipe is made from the root of erica arborea, or tree heather, found on Mediterranean heaths. It dawning on me at last that heath and heather are related.

We get there in the end - with me starting to wonder how much more quickly I might have got to the bottom of this had I been, say, thirty years younger than I am. I don't mind about the confusion arising from the various plants which one might see in a briar patch, but I do mind about not picking up on briar and 'bruyère' or on heath and heather.

PS: later: BH reminds me that briar patch is very much a thing of the US, of 'Uncle Remus' even (see reference 3). And she has just been reading in Bill Bryson about how the Europeans arrived in north America to find all kinds of new things, many of which they named by adapting old words. Thus giving rise to all kinds of confusion when they went back to the mother countries.

Reference 1: http://www.linguee.fr/francais-anglais/traduction/bruy%C3%A8re.html.

Reference 2: https://pipedia.org/wiki/Materials_and_Construction.

Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/the-modern-way-of-doing-things.html.