Many gardeners find botanical names a bit intimidating.
I’ve been working in horticulture for 25 years and I still find some a bit tricky. I know that others in my line of work do too, despite this being the language of our profession.
Common Language
The whole point of using Latin and Ancient Greek for the scientific names of animals and plants is down to fairness; nobody actually speaks these languages, so everyone must learn from scratch.
A botanist or gardener in the US or UK starts from exactly the same point as a botanist or gardener in Japan, China and every other country that doesn’t have English as its main language.
Liriodendron tulipifera, the American tulip tree
Using this common language of taxonomy, the science of classifying and naming things, means that you can communicate clearly with plant enthusiasts anywhere in the world, even if you don’t actually speak the same language; you might not be able to say “hello” but Liriodendron tulipifera is Liriodendron tulipifera anywhere in the world.
At Home
Horticultural professionals really should have a bit more of a grasp of these names than home gardeners. Yes they’re complicated but they are vital if you’re in the business of buying and selling plants.
At home we are all free to name our plants whatever we want. You can have a whole flowerbed of Bobs and Billies, a drift of Alfreds that come up each year, and even celebrate the first flowering of that big Patricia you planted 10 years ago.
Arum maculatum, a British native with many rude common names
The difficulty comes when you want to talk to other gardeners. Different regions around the world have local ‘common names’ for plants, not just in nature but in gardens too. Language barriers aside, it can be difficult to be absolutely sure what you’re getting with common names, particularly when the same name can apply to several different plants or when the same plant has many different names. The British native Arum maculatum, for example, has over 100 recognised common names; a surprising number of these make reference to penises…
The Brits aren’t always uptight you know.
Shifting Sands
If you’ve gone to the effort of learning the botanical names of your plants it can be frustrating to find that there’s now a new name to learn.
It’s a popular pastime to complain about those naughty botanists changing the names of your favourite plants, not entirely fair. Botany, like any science, is about understanding how the world around is made up. The study of plants isn’t solely about finding and naming new things, but also about how plants are related to each other.
It’s not all that uncommon to find that plants previously thought to be very different are in fact closely related, and that plants formerly considered to be closely related aren’t as close as once thought. A good example of this is the rhododendrons and azaleas; botanists in the UK and US held that rhododendrons and azaleas were two different genera, and in order to prove this once and for all a painstaking genetic analysis of rhododendrons and azaleas was undertaken.
Recent botanical research concluded that this is a hybrid gunnera called Gunnera x cryptica
The result not only proved that azaleas most definitely belonged in the genus Rhododendron, they also discovered that while evergreen and deciduous azaleas had common physical traits they weren’t actually all that closely related to each other!
This research ambles along at the same pace as normal, just in more recent years attention has been focussed on plants that are coincidentally popular in gardens. Outside the world of botany few people really care if some obscure Asiatic grass species gets a new name, but when it’s plants we all love and grow the change is most definitely noticed.
The New Names Are Always Hard To Say And Spell…
Maybe, maybe not.
There was so much complaint about the popular herb rosemary being moved into the sages (now Salvia rosmarinus) that nobody noticed Perovskia atriplicifolia, a name I’ve spend an eternity learning to spell and pronounce, is now the much easier Salvia yangii.
Gardeners sometimes struggled with Cimicifuga but Actaea is a bit easier; just watch for that ‘a’ in the middle.
Splitting up the asters annoyed a lot of gardeners, but there were sound reasons for doing so
But yes it’s true that some of the new names don’t exactly trip off the tongue. We were used to Anemone x hybrida (the Japanese anemones) but Eriocapitella x hybrida is a bit more fiddly. Likewise the genus Aster was enormous but at least it was easier to spell than Symphyotrichum, Eurybia, Doellingeria etc.
The late anemones are now correctly called Eriocapitellas, a change first proposed in the 1960s
New names must follow rules, and sadly being easy to spell or say isn’t in the rule book.
Communication
I don’t think the changes are the problem; I think it’s down to the communication.
Generally speaking gardeners don’t spend their time leafing through botanical research. Most of us will pick up on name changes from magazines, the internet and other gardeners. My gripe is with how the news of a change is given.
I hold a fairly strong view that too many people think gardeners are idiots. There’s this idea that we gardeners need everything broken down into nice easy chunks, and that anything deemed too complicated needs to be hidden away from us.
For a brief time this Calycanthus ‘Aphrodite’ was going to be a “Sinocalycalycanthus”!
“Nice, fluffy, happy content” as one magazine editor told a friend.
My opinion, you didn’t ask but I’m going to share it anyway, is that gardeners are perfectly capable of understanding new ideas, but that communication of new information and ideas needs to improve so that information is better articulated. A couple of column inches in a magazine, sandwiched between the monthly article about bees and yet another piece about growing radishes, is not effective communication.
Anthemis ‘E.C. Buxton’ will soon be Cota ‘E.C. Buxton’; no idea why at this point in time
No wonder the gardening community feels as though changes are being made by some shadowy remote body and forced onto us. It’s not true but it’s easy to see how the sentiment comes about given how badly name changes are explained.
It’s unfair to assume that gardeners are uninterested, or unable to cope with change; so little effort is made to share new information. Some people won’t be interested, but it’s more than a little insulting to make the assumption that gardeners need to be treated like children.
