Are you waiting for your snowdrops to bloom? Or do you prefer to call them Galanthus nivalis?
“Nearly every kind of plant has more than one name,” said Julie Janoski, Plant Clinic manager at The Morton Arboretum in Lisle. A plant will have a common name (often several) and a botanical name by which it is known to scientists.
With their curlicues of unfamiliar Latin syllables, botanical names can be daunting to ordinary gardeners. Most gardeners communicate with common names. But there are good reasons to have a basic understanding of the more scientific terms.
“A botanical name is useful because it’s precise,” Janoski said. “There is only one botanical name for any particular plant.” Common names, although they may seem familiar and easy, are rife with complications.
For example, the same common name can refer to different plants. “Snow-on-the-mountain” may mean the warm-season annual that botanists call Euphorbia marginata, or it may refer to the invasive perennial ground cover known to scientists as Aegopodium podagraria ‘Variegatum’. Both have green leaves edged with white.
One plant can also have multiple common names. Allegheny serviceberry may be known as smooth shadbush or Juneberry to people from different parts of the country. To any botanist in the world, it’s Amelanchier laevis.
As people have moved around the globe, they’ve tended to dub plants they come across after familiar plants back home. That’s why so many plants that are not roses have a common name in English that includes “rose”: Lenten rose (Helleborus orientalis), moss rose (Portulaca grandiflora), rose of Sharon (Hibiscus syriacus). The multitude of unrelated plants that are all called “daisies” is even more confusing.
A botanical name can cut through the tangle by pinning down a plant with a name that can only mean one thing.
The first word states a genus, or group of related plants. For example, any oak will have a name beginning with Quercus. The second word, which is called the specific epithet, helps to define the distinct species of the plant. The genus name and specific epithet together name the species.
The species epithet may be based on a place where the plant grows, such as Quercus arkansana (Arkansas oak). It may honor someone, such as Quercus muehlenbergii (chinkapin oak), named after an 18th-century Pennsylvania botanist. Or it may describe a distinguishing characteristic, such as Quercus macrocarpa, the bur oak, which has huge acorns. In Latin, macrocarpa means “large-fruited.”
A plant in horticulture often has an additional name, for its cultivated variety, or cultivar. The cultivar name goes after the species name in single quotes. For example, a popular apple cultivar is Malus pumila ‘Honeycrisp.’
Latin is used for botanical names because in the 1700s, when the system was set up, it was the international language of scholarship. Scholars in every European country spoke Latin.
That’s no longer true. “Even scientists struggle a bit learning to pronounce botanical names,” Janoski said. “So don’t be shy about trying to say them. Just give it your best shot.”
If you’d like to learn a little more about plants’ scientific names and how to use them, the Arboretum offers an online course, “Botanical Names Demystified” (mortonarb.org/ed-trees).
For tree and plant advice, contact the Plant Clinic at The Morton Arboretum (mortonarb.org/plantadvice or [email protected]). Beth Botts is a staff writer at the Arboretum.