Latin or Common: The Naming of Plants, Part 1

An overview of the naming of plants.

Lavandula x 'England'
Item # 63197 		Lavandula 'England'
England hybrid Lavender

each $5.99
3 or more $5.79
  • Topic: Gardening for Beginners
  • Author: Cindy Bellinger
  • Keywords: history, plant names, Latin, common name, Other
  • Date: December 2003

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For gardeners Latin is anything but a dead language, which is unfortunate for those of us who aren’t even good with English. For myself, I stubbornly stuck to the common names when it came to plants; until I started working for Santa Fe Greenhouses.

You should hear the Latin flying around this place. It’s like being in any foreign country, though; pretty soon you pick up the lingo. Especially when the boss tells you to use Latin. OK, I said, but continued my grumbling. Until last summer.

I wanted a quick growing groundcover so decided to plant some Silver Brocade. It loves lousy soil, thrives on neglect, even in the hot sun, even at high altitude. My kind of plant. Then once in the ground, it looked suspiciously like Dusty Miller, a plant my father grew all over the place—at sea level.

Well, guess what? Silver Brocade is also Beach Wormwood is also Dusty Miller, and Dusty Miller is a common name for all kinds of gray leafed plants. And they all belong to the Artemisia genus.

OK. Lesson learned. Latin pinpoints an exact plant within a group of the same plants. It’s a process of narrowing down, and we owe this plant classification to Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778), a Swedish naturalist who worked to bring order to the plant world. Others had attempted it before him but nothing was consistent.

One of the consistencies he started was the use of Latin, the written and spoken language of the educated of his time. It was a language that people from different countries could use to communicate with.

Linnaeus broke down plant genera (groups) into 7,300 species then devised a system of plant names based on the genus and the species. It’s a system based on the structural features of a plant, and these include many identifying points such as flower structure, leaf shapes and root structure.

The genus name (capitalized) was a noun. The species name (lowercase) was an adjective. Sometimes there is a third name denoting a subspecies, which is a naturally occurring variety. Nowadays, a capitalized name in ‘single quotations’ following the genus and species indicates a cultivar. A cultivar is a plant selected for its desirable characteristics produced by spontaneous mutation or human hybridization.

Here at Santa Fe Greenhouses, we follow the established naming system so list our plants in this order: Genus species ‘Cultivar’ (Common Name). An example is: Agastache aurantiaca ‘Shades of Orange’ (Shades of Orange Hummingbird Mint). A name with an x indicates a hybrid such as Lavandula x ‘England.’

One thing botanists are famous for is naming plants for themselves, or others. When Johann Siegesbeck, an opponent of Linnaeus’ system, became fiercely vocal about it, Linnaeus got his revenge. He named a useless European weed Siegesbeckia.

The second part of this article is available here.