Botanical Latin

"Latin is a language, dead as dead can be. First it killed the Romans, and now it's killing me!" - Unknown author

Do I have to learn the Latin names of plants? I will never remember them! After all, a daisy is just a daisy, isn’t it?

Being a great gardener does not mean you have to memorize Latin names. However, a basic understanding about these tongue-twisters can give you a powerful edge as a gardener. 

Common names are not very specific. For example, there are dozens of plants called daisies – some are related and some are not. There are many differences between daisies – some are perennial, some are annuals. Other differences include size, flower colour and even their care needs.

Some plants have more than one common name. For example, daisies are called bruisewort, woundwort, English daisy, gerbera, lawn daisy, aster…. the list goes on. And yet, each of these is a different plant. Common names can also vary depending on which region or country you live.

Every plant has a unique Latin or binomial name. The Latin name is often listed (in small print!) on plant tags and seed packets. If you want the same plant again, refer to the Latin name on plant tag or seed packet so you get exactly what you want. 

Botanical words are written in special formatting to give additional information. Knowing your seed supplier understands his or her botany enough to cite a proper name can be helpful in assessing who to buy your plants from.

The basic rules for writing botanical and common names for plants are as follows:

Basic Latin names:

  1. Italicize anything that's Latin or pretends it's Latin
Such as canadenses, which is our country, or Hosta, which is from a man's last name  

2. Don't italicize anything that's not Latin.

Example: the prairie chokecherry - Prunus virginiana var. melanocarpa. This is the black-fruited variety of the common chokecherry. Chokecherry cherries are red everywhere, except the Canadian Prairies where they are black, so we have a special variety called melanocarpa. Note that var. is not italicized because it is an English word but Prunus and melanocarpa are because they are Latin. Prunus is the old name of these plants, melano is Latin for black and carpa is Latin for skin. Virginiana also is also italicized even though it's just pretending to be Latin because Virginia wasn't established back then.

For a cultivar:

1. It is written in the language of whatever the plant cultivar's country of origin is, or wherever they plant to sell the most of it, but not in Latin.

2. Because it's not Latin, we don't italicize it.

3. Because the cultivar name is literally the proper name of a single individual plant, we capitalize all the words in the cultivar name - just like we do for your name.

4. Cultivars are unique individuals so they need to be written to reflect this individuality with a name. Since we can't italicize it (typically only Latin gets that treatment), we're going to use single quotes.

For example: Schubert chokecherry, which is a black leaved cultivar of the prairie chokecherry above. Prunus virginiana var. melanocarpa 'Schubert'. Less correct is Prunus virginiana 'Schubert' - this is mostly acceptable but it's not really accurate.

 

For writing common names:

1. Common names are made up by whoever wants to toss words together to sell stuff and can changed on a whim if some other common name seems better/stronger/faster. Common names are not special at all and should not be treated as such. No capitalization, no italics, no special quotes.

2. Treat them like you would every other word in the English language. If it starts a sentence, capitalize the first word. Don't randomly capitalize inside of sentences.

3. The one exception to this is if the plant is named after a proper noun, then capitalize that portion of it. This is why I capitalized Schubert above because he's a man and the plant group was named after him. This is also why we capitalize the Brussels in Brussels sprouts. We don't capitalize saskatoon berries because the shrub wasn't named after Saskatoon, Saskatoon was named after the shrub. To further complicate this, we don't capitalize hostas in common language even though the genus Hosta is named after a person. This is an exception because hosta is so commonly used. This is where your crystal ball or doing a lot of reading from reliable sources helps to recognize what is correct. For most of the examples you'll use in the gardening world, you're better off not capitalizing anything in a common name unless it's the cultivar name or Brussels in Brussels sprouts.

For example: I planted a Schubert chokecherry and a saskatoon shrub in my small, shady urban yard; I have deep regrets.