Wealden Times | WT184 | June 2017 | Kitchen & Bathroom supplement inside

Pelargonium ‘Vectis Glitter’
What’s in a Name?
Sue Whigham uncovers the Latin reasoning behind plant monikers
In the days before child booster seats and seat belts,
I took my turn taking six little boys to school. We
would wind away through the back streets of Streatham
to get down to Dulwich. In the back I would have a
motley selection of characters; a lot of entertaining chat
and gentle bickering and maybe one or two catching
up with homework or bizarrely attempting to do their
overdue violin practice in a moving car. This became
even more interesting, and I use that word advisedly,
when we came to a T junction or went round a corner.
And then there would be my son revising his Latin
vocabulary homework. The other son, who went
into horticulture, always remembers from those
journeys the word ‘gladiatus’ meaning ‘swordlike’ and
thinking about the gladiators fighting in the Roman
Colosseum. Now, all these years later, he remembers it
as a description of the leaf shape of gladioli and wishes
that he’d taken more interest in his Latin lessons!
Most gardeners have some knowledge of ‘botanical Latin’
and how it helps when you are trying to choose a plant or
find out more about them. It’s the same really when you
are travelling. As we know, it helps to have some basic
understanding of the local language. A plant’s name is a
unique label and it can tell you where the plant originated,
maybe who discovered it and what shape and colour its leaves
and flowers might be. We know that Latin is the root of
many languages and once you get to recognise the derivation
of plant names it really is so useful. Botanical names though
are constantly evolving and in some cases changing as
scientists recognise more similarities and maybe differences
in plants. For instance the genus name Cimicifuga has now
completely disappeared and become Actaea. All confusing
at first but you do gradually get used to it. It is also the case
that we are also having to accept earlier names for familiar
names as archives in countries like Russia are being studied.
Why Latin? For centuries Latin was the language of
science and learning in Europe and plants were described
in a form of Latin which developed into a special botanical
language which included references to sources like Ancient
Greek and Arabic. It wasn’t until Carl Linnaeus, a Swedish
professor of medicine at Uppsala University in Sweden
took things in hand by developing the binomial system of
naming all living organisms – a life’s work – that things
became more orderly and recognisable. He set out his
‘two name system’ in a seminal work, Species Plantarum
in 1753 which was immediately widely accepted.
The absolute bible at college was The Hillier Manual
of Trees and Shrubs which much to our horror didn’t
have pictures. Once we’d got over the initial shock
and began to understand how plant names were
151 wealdentimes.co.uk