An authoritative Jack Waterford essay in Wednesday's paper re-stated the case for naming it after Robert Menzies and for finding other ways to honour Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin.

Are we sure, though, that it will properly honour Sir Robert to fix his name to a controversial waterway that Dr Jamie Pittock has just described as "a watery carbuncle on the bush capital"?

One overlooked reason for not continuing to call the lake after Walter Griffin, is that the lake we have is not the lake the Griffins dreamed of. Perhaps they are even looking on, irked, at having a Griffin name attached to this kind of lake.

Nor is it a case of needing to give the Griffins special thanks for the lake. Walter and Marion, enthusiastic canoeists (they canoed, canoodling, together), might independently have wanted some city waters but in fact the movers and shakers of the design competition had already ordained that the city had to have "ornamental waters". Every entry received offered either lakes, or an enhanced Molonglo, or sometimes both. I have at my elbow the George Lawson and David Parr entry that imagined a still quite long and winding augmented Molonglo with an amusing little lake at either end.

In Walter's imagination and in Marion's rendering we see that they wanted something much more artistic than one great big billabong made by plugging the Molonglo at one end. Their idea, is illustrated in Marion's famous 1912 eagle's view of the imagined city. Marion in Chicago, sent up her imagination's virtual eagle, a kind of landscape-ogling drone.

We and the eagle see that they imagined what their biographer calls "a series of five interconnected basins and lakes in varying degrees of formality". Walter and Marionmay have imagined here some intimate, canoeable places (foliage brushing the paddlers' cheeks) among those five watery spaces.

Yes, we do need to find better Canberra ways of honouring the Griffins. Walter is a problem but the way in which we should honour Marion is by renaming the Australian National Botanical Gardens after her.

It's not only that the present name is such a formal, enthusiasm-strangling label, but more importantly that the discerning Marion was a delighted student of Australia's flora. She went on great bush treks to ogle it, to document it and to portray it. Australians' inability to appreciate their continent's unique flora bewildered and irritated her. How she would have hated Floriade!

The Gardens are magnificent at the moment. The Rainforest Walk (where one often encounters Marion's contented ghost, for it was her favourite Canberra place) is one of the Seven Man-Made Wonders of the ACT. The Gardens are devoted, as Marion was, to Australia's flora. It is time to call this wonderland The Marion Mahony Griffin Gardens.