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A Quick Guide to Botanical Names
This short guide offers relief and, I hope, understanding, to those gardeners who have always trembled in the face of fancy botanical names. In brief, clear expository prose I examine how technical plant names work, and look at a trowel full of neat word histories about plants. A more detailed overview is available in my garden book. For a sample of the contents of my garden book, click on the cover shown above.
How Plants Are Named
The science of botany classifies plants by a system with many categories. All living things that are not animals are grouped in a vast and capacious kingdom called Plantae, the plants. In this kingdom are categories from the largest to the smallest groupings: divisions, classes, orders, families, genera, species, and varieties. This brief overview concerns especially the names of family, genus, and species. It seeks to make the botanical name of a species, as well as its genus and family names, understandable, by showing with clarity and a bit of humour, how and why the plants we grow in our gardens and see in nature received their formal labels.
The scientific names of plants are recorded in Botanical Latin, a special form of the ancient language spoken and written by the Romans. For many hundreds of years, scholars who studied our green world used Latin and Greek words to make up the names of plants. And they still do so, chiefly because a name in Latin allows the same plant to be referred to all over the world, by a unique ID tag that is understood by a botanist orgardener who speaks Turkish, Hawaiian, Russian, French, or any other language. Since one plant will have many, different common names in all these languages, using a unique Latin name for each species of plant assures scientific clarity and precision in identification. One internationally accepted Latin label saves having to translate the plant’s name into individual languages.
WORT = PLANT
In parts of Canada , we use a vine called Dutchman’s Pipe to cover parts of verandahs or porches or train it on a trellis as a green screen. An older name for Dutchman’s pipe (named because the flower looks a little like a long-stemmed Dutch clay pipe) is birthwort. Wort is a general Old English word for an herb or a plant. Lingering in English we still have plant names like liverwort and butterwort and lungwort.
BIRTHWORT = ARISTOLOCHIA
Birthwort is a translation by some English writer in the 14th or 15th century. He encountered the Greek name for the plant, aristolochia, which means ‘best for childbirth’ (aristos Greek, best + locheia Greek, childbirth). We know several words that use the Greek superlative adjective aristos. Rule by the best persons is an aristocracy; just as rule by the people is democracy (-cracy < krateia Greek power, rule).
The ancients thought that some potion made from birthwort assisted women who were having difficult labour during childbirth. The picture at the top of today’s column displays a very showy species of birthwort whose formal botanical name is Aristolochia elegans ‘elegant birthwort.’
Why Use Latin & Greek to Name Plants?
Why do botanists use Latin and Greek roots to form their technical names? The simple answer is: 90 percent of all scientific words in English derive from Latin and Greek.
In origin, English is a Germanic tongue based on the Germanic dialects of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who conquered Britain. But invasions of and migrations to the British Isles of peoples speaking other languages, like Romans speaking Latin, Vikings speaking Old Scandinavian, and Normans speaking French, added foreign terms to the basic Anglo-Saxon word hoard. Consequently English now has more lexical items, more words, than any other language on earth, a larger vocabulary than Chinese or French or Russian or Arabic. True, our simple words are still of Anglo-Saxon origin: give, man, father. But almost all our technical and learned words have been borrowed, sometimes through Norman French, from Latin and Greek.
This is a drawing of an inscription in Latin from a Roman temple in Chichester in England. The first two Latin lines are: Neptuno et Minervae templum 'This temple is dedicated to Neptune and to Minerva.' Neptune was a Roman god of the sea and Minerva was a goddess of wisdom and the patroness of working trades and the Roman arts.
Latin, Greek & English Words
For example, donate is a Latin-based verb meaning ‘to give,’ human is a Latin-based word referring to mankind, paternal is a Latin-based adjective referring to a father. Latin terms were borrowed earlier and are often more familiar than Greek terms borrowed later. For example, didonai is the Greek verb ‘to give,’ from which English gets antidote, something given against a toxin, to counteract its effects, from anti Greek, against + dotos Greek, given.
Why Latin? For almost two thousand years, up to the end of the seventeenth century, scientific textbooks were written in Latin. If you were a student at the Sorbonne, at Oxford, or at Bologna, you learned natural history, later called botany and zoology, from books written in Latin but based largely on the writings of early Greek scientists. The first American medical textbooks used at Harvard University were written in Latin.
The Lord's Prayer in Latin from a catechism published in 1551 A.D. The first sentence of the Latin is Pater noster qui es in caelis 'Our Father, who art in Heaven.' Below the Latin is The Lord's Prayer in 16th century Scots dialect.
But again, why use “dead” languages, Latin and Classical Greek, to form scientific and technical terms? First, it is traditional—as we saw above. Second, in a “dead” language, the meaning of a word does not change. It is frozen. Callus will always mean ‘hard skin’ in Latin. In a living language, words acquire new meanings. In 1930, acid meant a chemical like the acetic acid in vinegar. Nowadays “acid” is English slang for LSD, a dangerous hallucinogenic drug. Because precise meaning and precise use of words is crucial in all forms of scientific communication, it helps to be able to make new medical terms from Latin and Greek roots whose meanings do not alter over time.
As you read about the exotic origin of plant names, you will see that much Botanical Latin is derived from ancient Greek words. Why? First, the Greeks got around to studying and naming plants long before the Romans did. So there exists in ancient Greek texts a large vocabulary of plant names. Second, compared to the Latin language, ancient Greek simply had more words, had a larger and more sophisticated vocabulary. Latin is a terse tongue, a language that valued concise utterance. Thus Latin has few words with many meanings. Therefore in Latin, context is everything. This is not as true in Greek, a language with an inherent predilection for forming compound words with felicity, to produce pleasant-sounding and logical names. Unfortunately this aptness and euphony of nomenclature does not hold for all botanical names formed from Greek roots by modern botanists. Some of these new terms are frankly ugly and incapable of being pronounced easily. Yes, there are compound words in Latin, but not nearly as many as in ancient Greek. Stated plainly, it was easier to make new words in Greek than in Latin.
Next we look at some categories of plant names made from Latin and Greek roots, at names given to an individual genus, species, variety, and family.
The Genus Name
All of us who garden or grow plants commercially use some genus names in Botanical Latin every day and think nothing of it: Aster, Chrysanthemum, Delphinium, and Geranium. Aster is the name of a genus. A genus is a basic group of plants. Plants in one genus are more like one another than they are like any other group. Aster is called a generic name. Some other generic names are: Anemone, Crocus, Fuchsia and Petunia.
The Species Name
The second part of a botanical name identifies the species. It is called the species name or the specific name or the specific epithet. Epithet comes from the ancient Greek word for ‘adjective.’
By the way, don’t commit the common mistake of thinking that there is a word *specie that is the singular of species. Species is from a Latin noun declension in which the singular is the same form as the plural. There is no word *specie meaning one plant group. Thus, one might speak of a plant group in this fashion: there is only one existing species of dorkwort, but there are many species of tulips. Now a word specie exists in English, but it has nothing to do with plants. It is a term in finance or numismatics. Specie is coin money as opposed to paper money.
A species (from species Latin, appearance, a kind, a sort) is the most basic unit used in classifying and describing a living organism. Individual plants of the same species can usually interbreed and this possibility of exchanging genes is one of the reasons they are grouped together. An example of a specific name in the Aster genus is: Aster novae-angliae.
Note that full botanical names are usually set in an italic typeface and only the genus name is capitalized. The specific part of this botanical name, novae-angliae, means ‘of New England ’ and indicates that this species of aster is native to eastern North America including southern Canada. Long ago, British and European plant breeders collected samples and seeds of Aster novae-angliae and used it to create garden varieties of asters. In England, these plants which bloom in the late summer and fall are called Michaelmas daisies. Michaelmas (St. Michael’s Mass or Feast) is an Anglican and Roman Catholic religious celebration of Saint Michael which falls traditionally on September 29, and, usually, these asters are in bloom near that date.
But, how apt is this British common name? Michaelmas daisy. Well, it is an aster, not precisely a daisy, although some daisies reside in the genus Aster. However, hundreds of different species are commonly called daisies, many not even in the daisy family of Compositae. Many varieties of this aster bloom at the end of August, long before Michaelmas. You decide which name is more apt. Aster is the Latin word for ‘star’ and refers to the shape of the flowers in this genus, to the star-like, radiating arrangement of its petals.
Cultivar and Varietal Names
There is often a third part to a botanical name, in which the particular variety or cultivar or subspecies of a plant is identified. A cultivar is a variety of a plant produced by selective breeding to perform well as a garden subject. Let’s create a cultivar name out of the blue: Aster novae-angliae var. Alberta Sunset. This is—let us suppose—a wonderful, big aster that can grow almost two metres high with flowers coloured a rich salmon-pink, very much like some sunsets in Alberta. This third part of a botanical name may be called a varietal epithet or a cultivar name or a subspecific.
Family Names
Genera and species are grouped into larger units called families. By convention, most names of botanical families end in the arbitrarily chosen termination -aceae. For example, the Rose family is Rosaceae. The Lily family is Liliaceae. The Iris family is Iridaceae. A few families that were named very early in the history of botanical nomenclature have older-style familial labels. For example, the Daisy family is Compositae, the name derived from compositus, a Latin adjective that means ‘placed together, compound.’ This largest family of flowering plants is named after the compound flowers of its members. Small florets of individual flowers make up large clusters or heads. Other older-style family names are Labiatae, the mint family; Leguminosae, the pea family; and Umbelliferae, the carrot family.
And that’s really all there is to an initial understanding of botanical names. If you know why an aster is called an aster, you will remember the scientific or botanical name more easily. Communication about, reading about, and researching plants, all these activities become easier too. It is good to know the common names of plants, but gardening is more interesting if you can use and understand the botanical names as well. And if, like me, you are a gardener and a word-nut, botany is a trove of many-coloured word histories.
The Shocking Shamrock Experiment
In 1991, botanist E. Charles Nelson wrote Shamrock, the definitive book about the plant long symbolic of Ireland. As research, Nelson repeated a famous botanical experiment designed to test the validity of common names for plants. He sought to determine the exact
scientific identity of the true shamrock. On or about one St. Patrick’s Day he received 221 plants from thirty Irish counties, all shamrocks in the minds of those who sent him the plants. But there were four different plants that the Irish called shamrock!
White clover (Trifolium repens or literally in Latin ‘creeping three-leaf’), red clover (Trifolium pratense or ‘meadow three-leaf’), lesser yellow trefoil (Trifolium dubium), and spotted medick (Medicago arabica).
If he had canvassed England, he would have received a fifth plant, wood-sorrel (Oxalis acetosella). Common names are appropriate but with this caution. After they have been in use over a wide area for many centuries, common names tend to be applied to a larger and larger number of different plants. If one relied only on local names for plants, much confusion would follow. The marsh marigold whose yellow clusters brighten swampy areas of the temperate zone, has more than 80 local names in Britain, over 60 in France, and 140 in Germany!
Clearly, there is a need for botanical names. Common and botanical names are both necessary, both interesting, both worth studying.
copyright © 2011 William Gordon Casselman
Any comments, questions, additional word lore or book orders?
Please email it to me at wordguy@shaw.ca
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Sample My New Book. Click Below.
Jan. 3, 2011
“Mr Casselman,
I wanted to write to thank you for your thoroughly enjoyable [new] book. By background, I am a technologist practicing the somewhat arcane crafts of Information Security.”
David Gamey, Canada
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Thursday, February 3, 2011
Dear Mr. Casselman,
A search for the origins of an improbable-looking word, paraprosdokian, led me to the first piece of your prose I have had the pleasure of reading, "The Bogus Word Paraprosdokian & Lazy Con Artists of Academe." I have just placed an order for Where a Dobdob Meets a Dikdik, Canadian Words & Sayings, and As The Canoe Tips, and will add more of your titles as I finish these.
I have just retired from a 40-plus year career in book publishing, the last thirty years spent as director/editor of a number of university presses, attempting to sort the genuine writers from the "Lazy Con Artists of Academe." Sad to say, the latter have so over-bred the former that I could no longer see the rare gem in the avalanches of offal that daily swamped my office and desk. I visited your website and spent far too long there; it was a pleasure to meet a real writer through his work.
. . . I revisited the paraprosdokian page, and have finally quit laughing again at “Casselman's Conclusion.” You were not unkind to the "profligate prof-lets." During my years as an acquisitions editor, in rejection letters I often quoted Prof. Moses Hadas, classicist at Columbia University, who wrote a young scholar in response to having been sent the prof-let's first book, "Thank you for sending me your book. I will waste no time reading it."
I know I will enjoy your books. Keep up the good work.
Thank you,
Luther Wilson
Director (Retired)
University of New Mexico Press, among others
Click to read my paraprosdokian column.
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