Botanical Latin, By Sara Hoblitzell, KC Master Gardener, 1998
Recently, Carter Giltinan presented a continuing education lecture for KCMGA on botanical Latin. Many members requested more information and the suggestion was to have a column featuring a different area of botanical Latin and a different plant each issue. The subject is so large that we will by no means be able to cover it completely, but we will try to offer a fun and interesting column in order to get members comfortable with seeing names in catalogs, on plant labels, in arboretums and the many other places that botanical Latin names are used. Our thanks go to Carter, who generously gave us her notes. She credits the following sources for her talk: Botanical Latin, new edition, by William T. Stearn; Gardener’s Latin, a Lexicon, by Bill Neal; and Hortus Third, by the staff of the L. H. Bailey Hortorium, Cornell University. The following introduction is taken directly from her notes.
“Botanical Latin is an international language used by botanists the world over for the naming and description of plants. Its use is obligatory only in describing plants new to science, but little research can be done in systematic botany without recourse to earlier literature written in botanical Latin” (source: Botanical Latin, William T. Stearn). During the past 250 years, to facilitate precision and economy of words for scientific use, it has become a language distinct from classical Latin. It is interesting to realize that people have written descriptions of plants beginning with Theophrastus, a disciple of Aristotle, in the first century A.D.! He used Greek names as he studied the characteristics of plants in Aristotle’s botanic garden (approximately 500 plants) and his basic concepts of plant morphology stood almost unchanged for some nineteen centuries after his death. Then the development of lenses and the microscope revealed the functions and intimate structure of the flower with its sexual or gender characteristics. Discovery of the male and female functions in plants stimulated the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus (1707-78) to produce a system of classification based solely on them, and necessitated a vast new Latin terminology. Latin had to be adapted and extended so that plants could be given internationally acceptable Latin names and their characters clearly and accurately recorded. Here, we have to understand that in the Europe of the 18th century, Latin was a universal language. To establish a simplified form as the international language for the formal naming and description of plants meant that systematic botany could be brought out of confusion. Linnaeus and his successors accomplished this so well that the system succeeds today. For our purposes, as gardeners, not scientists, we probably don’t need to study the grammar, which is complex. We will focus on the vocabulary.
First, you need to understand that plants that have been identified and named fall either under the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature or The International Code of Nomenclature of Cultivated Plants. Classifications include: Kingdom, Division, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species, Variety or subspecies, Cultivar and Forma. The first four have little significance to the everyday gardener, so our study will start with Family. We will look at the Dogwood family – one familiar to all of us.
Family names usually end in –aceae (add this suffix to a legitimate genus for a family name).
For example: Family: Corn + aceae = Cornaceae.
Genus (always capitalized and italicized): Cornus.
Species (lower case and italicized): Cornus florida (Flowering Dogwood).
Variety or subspecies (lower case and italicized with the word var. in non-italicized print: Cornus florida var. rubra (with pink to pinkish red flowers). This is a term assigned to plants displaying a marked difference in nature or sometimes a specific geographic distribution not designated by the species name.
Cultivar (non-italicized, capitalized and included in single quotes): Cornus florida var. rubra ‘Cherokee Chief’.
OK. Enough for this issue. Before closing, let me add that using botanical Latin is the only way to pin down a particular plant name. When your neighbor says their favorite plant is a snowball bush, are they talking about a hydrangea or a viburnum? The American hornbeam can be called iron wood, muscle wood and water beech. Learning the Latin name can help you identify whether the plant will be tolerant of wet conditions, where it is typically found growing, or provide some clue to its habit or color. If cultural information is lacking, some knowledge of botanical Latin can go a long way. Future articles will cover country of origin, color, growth habits, leaf features and more. If you are interested in more before the next issue, try one of the resources given above or check on the internet by typing in botanical Latin in a search engine. For a list of commonly used terms go to http://kanawhagardenclub.org, go to the horticulture page and at the bottom of the page click on the link for some common English/Latin equivalents.
Here’s some food for thought on a popular summer perennial:
Rudbeckia (black-eyed Susan). There are hundreds of different varieties and cultivars of Rudbeckia; listed below are many of the species under which they fall. Rudbeckia (many are wholly American natives) was named by Linnaeus after Olav Rudbeck, a Swedish botanist.
Some of the more common species you will see are:
fulgida (orange coneflower), hirta (hairy/rough coneflower) laciniata (cutleaf
coneflower), maxima (giant coneflower), nitida: (shiny coneflower), subtomentosa (sweet coneflower), and triloba (three-lobed, brown-eyed coneflower)
Other species include:
alpicola (mountain or alpine), auriculata (eared), californica (California), columnifera (Mexican hat or upright) glaucescens (smooth), graminifolia (grassleaf), grandiflora (rough), heliopsidis (sun facing), maxima (great), missouriensis (Missouri orange), mohrii (Mohr’s), mollis (softhair), occidentalis (Western), scarifolia (roughleaf), and texana (Texas)