A Quick Guide to Botanical Names This three-page guide offers relief and, I hope, understanding to those gardeners who have always trembled in the face of fancy botanical names. In three web pages, we’ll examine how technical plant names work, and look at a trowel full of neat word histories about plants.
PAGE 1 of 3 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 the14 th or 15 th century. He encountered the Greek name for the plant, aristolochia, which means ‘best for birth’ (aristos Greek, best + locheia Greek, birth). 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 oftoday’s column displays a very showy species of birthwort whose formal botanical name is Aristolochia elegans ‘elegant birthwort.’
© 2005
Any comments, questions, additional word lore or book orders? Please email me at wordguy@shaw.ca
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