Root Words
There are two kinds of gardeners: those who actually understand horticultural society lectures and those who feel a sense of accomplishment when they learn to distinguish a hibiscus from a hyacinth, never mind how to pronounce its botanic name--or why that’s even necessary.
“Talking botanical is not just a way to show off at cocktail parties,” explains Shirley Kerins, who is definitely one of the first kind.
“It’s crucial if you want to be sure you’re getting the right plant,” says Kerins, a landscape architect based in Huntington Beach who trains docents at Sherman Gardens in Corona del Mar and has taught plant identification at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa. “Botanical names are not just random, scrambled letters. They’re like clues of a crossword puzzle.”
Botanical nomenclature describes a highly organized system of naming the world’s plants according to orderly groups and categories.
But “don’t think of this as stumbling blocks created to bring more frustration into your already harried life,” she says. “Botanical names are keys to opening some shortcuts to knowing more about the tremendous variety of plant life.”
Botanical names reveal characteristics about the plants they describe, including places of origin, growing conditions favored by the plants, physical descriptions or references to their uses throughout history.
Describing the many hundreds of thousands of different plants covering the Earth became an orderly task through the efforts of Carl Linnaeus, a Swedish naturalist who in the mid-18th century created a system for classifying and naming plants, animals and minerals.
Linnaeus based his system on Latin, which at the time was the language used by the educated people of Europe. Over time, botanical Latin borrowed roots from Greek and a few other languages.
Sometimes, a person’s surname became part of the plant name, such as Clivia miniata , named for the duchess of Northumberland, a member of the Clive family prominent in South Africa where the plant was discovered.
Fuchsias were named in honor of Leonhard Fuchs, a famous herbalist in the 16th century.
More recently, the flower now almost synonymous with the December holiday season was named poinsettia in honor of Charles Poinsett, the American ambassador to Mexico who popularized the plant.
Plant classification moves from general divisions to classes, orders and then the groups that are the ones most important when talking about or buying plants--family, genus, species and subspecies or variety.
Each plant belongs to a very broad family, such as Rosaceae, which includes--in addition to roses--apple trees, blackberries, and a popular perennial named Geum. Most family names have the suffix aceae.
Groups of more closely related plants are categorized by a genus. This is the first word in the plant’s botanical name and is capitalized. The second word is the species and further explains more distinctive features of each plant.
Take the common marigold. If it’s Tagetes erecta, it’s the American or African marigold, also referred to as tall marigold as the species name indicates. But if you were to buy Tagetes lucida, you’d end up with a far different plant--Mexican tarragon, with small yellow flowers and leaves with a strong scent and flavor of tarragon.
Often, the tags in those nursery plants have a third name. These are the variety or subspecies. They further describe how this particular plant differs from others of its species.
An example of this is Juniperus chinensis, which includes ground covers of just a few inches tall to shrubs growing to five, six or 10 feet, to column types that can reach 20 feet.
The third word in the name eliminates the guesswork by more detailed identification. If you want a spreading ground cover, specify Juniperus chinensis procumbens, commonly called Japanese garden juniper. If you want a graceful, cylindrical tree, ask for Juniperus chinensis ‘Columnaris,’ and you’ll get Chinese blue column juniper, which will grow to 15 feet.
What’s with the single quote marks on ‘Columnaris’?
Those quote marks mean it’s a cultivar, a plant produced through the intervention of humans by hybridization. Another example of this is Ilex aquifolium ‘Gold Coast,’ a yellow hybrid of English holly.
Why can’t we just use the colorful common names we’re already familiar with instead of their scientific names? Some are very poetic, like baby’s breath or love-in-a-mist.
“They can be very confusing,” Kerins says. “A person may think that a ‘Desert Rose’ will be just right for their rose garden in arid Southern California. But they’ll actually come home with an oleander.”
Selecting something as simple as a daisy can also be complicated. Blue daisies are actually Felicia amelloides, commonly called blue marguerites. Yellow flowers that resemble daisies are really Euryops pectinatus, and white can be Chrysanthemum maximum, white Shasta daisies, or Chrysanthemum leucanthemum, known as the common daisy.
The last hurdle is knowing how to pronounce botanical names. Here’s Kerins’ simple advice:
“Rules for correct pronunciation can be so pedantic that it becomes boring,” she says. “The whole point is not to be intimidated.”
Besides, she points out, no one really cares if you make a mistake. “‘The language police aren’t going to arrest you.”
