“What's in a name? That which we call a rose
by any other name would smell as sweet.”
— from Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1-2)
About Botanical Names...
Shakespeare was right, of course. As a thing acquires a common name, what does it matter what we call it? Indeed, common names used for plants will easily lead to misunderstandings because many plants actually share a same common name with very different plants in other geographic regions. Common names may seem an easy way out but if you want to really know the flowers, take time to learn their botanical names. You don’t think of your friends as simply “Curly” or “Freckles”, rather you took time to learn their first and last names, where they live, and some of their traits. So it should be with your flowers. Botanical names reveal much about a plant, and a botanical name makes it clear to others what plant you mean when you talk about plants. As with any technical interest, proper terminology is very much a requirement to understanding and to be understood.
Why Do Plants Have Such Odd Species Names Anyway?
We like everything identified to put order to our surroundings. Start with three big catagories: animal, vegetable, and mineral, then leave out minerals and focus on life forms. Animals and plants are divided into kingdoms: metazoa (animals) and plantae plants). Plants are subdivided by using finer and finer comparisons (division: seed plants; subdivision: angiosperms or gymnosperms; class: monocots or dicots; order: family: genus: ) until a plant is finally not exactly like any other, a species.
Angiosperms [Latin angio (container) and sperma (seed)] are plants that hold seeds enclosed in an ovule. We are typically attracted to the plants in this order because they produce colorful flowers, often with a pleasant fragrance. There are many angiosperms that do not produce showy flowers but these tend to be shrubs and trees, which we humans enjoy for other qualities.
Gymnosperms [Greek gymnos, naked, and sperma, seed] are what we call conifers, i.e. cone-bearing trees. The most familiar examples to us are pines, firs, yew, and redwoods. Gingko trees are a curious if less common gymnosperm but with a broad leaf. You may have seen them at a nursery or county park. Gingkos (Ginkgo biloba; a prehistoric tree discovered still living in China) have an interesting story in themselves, as they are reported to have great medicinal value.
Angiosperms or gymnosperms: either one, we are primarily interested in the last three groups of related plants: family, genus, and species.
A plant family is a convenient grouping of all the plants that share enough distinguishing features to suggest thay they have a common origin. There are some flower families that are closely related while others seem very different. Though characteristics may vary, certain traits are shared. Fortunately, there are normally enough external features to identify a plant to family using characters of petals, sepals, and leaves.
A genus is a more geologically recent division of the family. It is a group of kinds of plants that share many basic indicators of relationship but are different in external details. (leaf shape, flower color or size, habitat)
Species is a subdivision of the genus. It is a relatively uniform individual kind of plant and distinct enough in structure and behavior to be recognized as a named individual plant.
A binomial name is a composed of a Genus name followed by the specific, or species name:
Example: family Apiaceae, genus Daucus, species carota: Daucus is a genus with about 130 known plants, including the common carrot. The common weed called Queen Anne’s Lace is in the family Apiaceae (often called the carrot family) and it has the botanical name Daucus carota, carrota also being the ancient name for the garden vegetable. The garden carrot is a cultvated form descended from Daucus carota and is now the species Daucus sativa, sativa meaning cultivated. I recommend that you take an opportunity to smell a broken stem, or better, a root from Queen Anne’s Lace. It has more carrot aroma than a carrot from the grocery store.
It’s really too bad that Latin and Greek are not still treated as essential studies along with English; clearly some awareness of Latin and Greek word roots is beneficial to the student of plants. Not to worry, there are books which will help decipher words like rupicola, sativus, or capitulum. Some of the books are light in style (like A Gardener's Latin), but the best choice is the scholarly Stearn's Botanical Latin.
Remarkably, it won’t take too long before you see that Latin chunks work like snap-together parts, and these descriptive pieces show up time and time again. Reminder: these Latin roots have much to tell you; it is to your advantage to make a game of learning the meanings.
Alright with the Names Already! How About Some Parts?
The advantage to learning family characteristics is that you will start to see the relationships between flowers you see on a mountail trail and some you might see in a southwest desert or an Iowa prairie, or, for that matter, with some of the vegetables at the grocery store!
Let's move on to looking at the flower families...
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