Many gardeners find botanical names a bit intimidating.
I’ve been working in horticulture for 25 years and I still find some a bit tricky. I know that others in my line of work do too, despite this being the language of our profession.
Common Language
The whole point of using Latin and Ancient Greek for the scientific names of animals and plants is down to fairness; nobody actually speaks these languages, so everyone must learn from scratch.
A botanist or gardener in the US or UK starts from exactly the same point as a botanist or gardener in Japan, China and every other country that doesn’t have English as its main language.
Liriodendron tulipifera, the American tulip tree
Using this common language of taxonomy, the science of classifying and naming things, means that you can communicate clearly with plant enthusiasts anywhere in the world, even if you don’t actually speak the same language; you might not be able to say “hello” but Liriodendron tulipifera is Liriodendron tulipifera anywhere in the world.
At Home
Horticultural professionals really should have a bit more of a grasp of these names than home gardeners. Yes they’re complicated but they are vital if you’re in the business of buying and selling plants.
At home we are all free to name our plants whatever we want. You can have a whole flowerbed of Bobs and Billies, a drift of Alfreds that come up each year, and even celebrate the first flowering of that big Patricia you planted 10 years ago.
Arum maculatum, a British native with many rude common names
The difficulty comes when you want to talk to other gardeners. Different regions around the world have local ‘common names’ for plants, not just in nature but in gardens too. Language barriers aside, it can be difficult to be absolutely sure what you’re getting with common names, particularly when the same name can apply to several different plants or when the same plant has many different names. The British native Arum maculatum, for example, has over 100 recognised common names; a surprising number of these make reference to penises…
The Brits aren’t always uptight you know.
Shifting Sands
If you’ve gone to the effort of learning the botanical names of your plants it can be frustrating to find that there’s now a new name to learn.
It’s a popular pastime to complain about those naughty botanists changing the names of your favourite plants, not entirely fair. Botany, like any science, is about understanding how the world around is made up. The study of plants isn’t solely about finding and naming new things, but also about how plants are related to each other.
It’s not all that uncommon to find that plants previously thought to be very different are in fact closely related, and that plants formerly considered to be closely related aren’t as close as once thought. A good example of this is the rhododendrons and azaleas; botanists in the UK and US held that rhododendrons and azaleas were two different genera, and in order to prove this once and for all a painstaking genetic analysis of rhododendrons and azaleas was undertaken.
Recent botanical research concluded that this is a hybrid gunnera called Gunnera x cryptica
The result not only proved that azaleas most definitely belonged in the genus Rhododendron, they also discovered that while evergreen and deciduous azaleas had common physical traits they weren’t actually all that closely related to each other!
This research ambles along at the same pace as normal, just in more recent years attention has been focussed on plants that are coincidentally popular in gardens. Outside the world of botany few people really care if some obscure Asiatic grass species gets a new name, but when it’s plants we all love and grow the change is most definitely noticed.
The New Names Are Always Hard To Say And Spell…
Maybe, maybe not.
There was so much complaint about the popular herb rosemary being moved into the sages (now Salvia rosmarinus) that nobody noticed Perovskia atriplicifolia, a name I’ve spend an eternity learning to spell and pronounce, is now the much easier Salvia yangii.
Gardeners sometimes struggled with Cimicifuga but Actaea is a bit easier; just watch for that ‘a’ in the middle.
Splitting up the asters annoyed a lot of gardeners, but there were sound reasons for doing so
But yes it’s true that some of the new names don’t exactly trip off the tongue. We were used to Anemone x hybrida (the Japanese anemones) but Eriocapitella x hybrida is a bit more fiddly. Likewise the genus Aster was enormous but at least it was easier to spell than Symphyotrichum, Eurybia, Doellingeria etc.
The late anemones are now correctly called Eriocapitellas, a change first proposed in the 1960s
New names must follow rules, and sadly being easy to spell or say isn’t in the rule book.
Communication
I don’t think the changes are the problem; I think it’s down to the communication.
Generally speaking gardeners don’t spend their time leafing through botanical research. Most of us will pick up on name changes from magazines, the internet and other gardeners. My gripe is with how the news of a change is given.
I hold a fairly strong view that too many people think gardeners are idiots. There’s this idea that we gardeners need everything broken down into nice easy chunks, and that anything deemed too complicated needs to be hidden away from us.
For a brief time this Calycanthus ‘Aphrodite’ was going to be a “Sinocalycalycanthus”!
“Nice, fluffy, happy content” as one magazine editor told a friend.
My opinion, you didn’t ask but I’m going to share it anyway, is that gardeners are perfectly capable of understanding new ideas, but that communication of new information and ideas needs to improve so that information is better articulated. A couple of column inches in a magazine, sandwiched between the monthly article about bees and yet another piece about growing radishes, is not effective communication.
Anthemis ‘E.C. Buxton’ will soon be Cota ‘E.C. Buxton’; no idea why at this point in time
No wonder the gardening community feels as though changes are being made by some shadowy remote body and forced onto us. It’s not true but it’s easy to see how the sentiment comes about given how badly name changes are explained.
It’s unfair to assume that gardeners are uninterested, or unable to cope with change; so little effort is made to share new information. Some people won’t be interested, but it’s more than a little insulting to make the assumption that gardeners need to be treated like children.
You’re right, and it’s not just about names. The demand for “Nice, fluffy, happy content” by the garden media has damned us for years. And may be getting worse.
Reasons to rejoice in the freedom of the digital revolution. Hurray for Garden Rant.
What I can’t abide is the widespread assumption that everyone wants that fluff.
I remember great teachers at school who made difficult and challenging new ideas fun; we need the same approach in gardening.
Well said, as always, Ben. With certain vendors (who shall remain nameless, but use white pots) who give their plant creations common names of 3 or 4 words, Latin is frankly a relief! Never thought I’d ever say that, haha!
I came across an online houseplant retailer boasting that they’d got rid of all those pesky plant names and instead were giving each plant a new and friendly name.
…But of course that also means that customers become reliant on that one company, unable to check prices or look for new information because they didn’t have the accepted name to work with.
At my age, new Latin names become a mental acuity test. I can handle Salvisa yangii (Perovskia) but Eriocapitella x hybrida for autumn-flowering Anemone x hybrida is going to take some work.
There will be a short quiz in due course…
I think this makes it even worse when it’s not all well-disseminated. Half the time you go to a nursery and ask for (for example) Symphyotrichium and all the tags are still Aster. Then, you go to a different nursery and figure ok, well, after the last place, I guess I’ll just ask for Aster this time. Then you get that patronizing look from the employee who gleefully gets to inform you it’s not Aster, it’s Symphyotrichium,
with the judgy how good a gardener can you be if you don’t know this? look. So, really you can’t just learn the new name and work to forget the old one, you still have to know both names and keep that association current for quite a while.
I really dislike nurseries that do not include the botanical name- even if it keeps changing.
The onus needs to be on professionals to keep up for sure. I once knew a nursery where the owner maintained that Pelargoniums and Geraniums were in the same genus, not that ‘geranium’ was the common name for Pelargoniums. He was adamant that this was definitely the case, even though Geranium and Pelargonium were split up in 1789!
oh, wow! Well, I guess one can’t be too hasty about these things, after all, it might change again!
Haha, I think that might be what some people think!
It is a bit of a tongue twister.
I appreciate this rant–there were a few name changes I was unaware of. And appreciate (looking at you Perovskia…). My question is, what is the best source to discover what the new names are? You are right about the communication of the changes–I may not find out for years a botanical name has changed, and only then by accident. If you have a good resource, I would love to stay informed.
Herein lies an interesting problem; there’s no one place where you can get reliable information. There should be but there isn’t…
I nearly always find out by accident, and even then I usually have to go hunting for the reason why something has changed.
Not to mention those plant names being changed not for phylogenetic reasons, but to remove culturally offensive referents.
https://www.linnean.org/news/2024/07/23/international-botanists-vote-to-change-offensive-plant-name
There are some names that we can probably retire. I’ve come across a few common names that are a bit close to the wire but not botanical names, but in the more tropical names there are some that have probably had their day.
The issue for me is less about names being changed but a lack of effective communication.
In my opinion being the same age as my friend allen I always have disagreed name changes when I was a youngman we had the change of Asperula to Galium or Avena to Helictortichon around 2000 they change all Chrysanthemum and now a part is back like Cimicifuga to Actea and Actea get Berries never seen Berries in Cimicifuga i still can continue but being a perennial grower for more than 55 years I do not and cannot learn all new names if it is to difficult for me how difficult is it for the consumer
I guess the question is whether consumers have actually turned away from plants because of new names.
Should horticulture follow scientific advances?
As a former grower I always figured all these damn name changes were foisted upon us by the plant tag manufacturers forcing us to throw out our old tag stock and replacing it with new.
A good theory, but label companies seem to struggle like anyone else.
Please comment or explain why , in he US,A we call Asarums that are evergreen Hexastylis? At least, some of us do.
There’s quite a bit of confusion around Asarums, with some botanists maintaining that we should have Asarum, Hexastylis, Heterotropa, Asiasarum and Geotaenium based on their genetics and floral characteristics. However the argument for doing this isn’t completely resolved, so some botanists hold out on all of these plants belonging to a larger but more diverse genus Asarum.
Asarums, Hexastylis etc. are challenging to identify thanks to their complex flowers; flower parts are easily damaged so they’re difficult to preserve in a herbarium, which makes studying them much harder. I suspect that ultimately it will go in favour of the ‘splitters’, so we’ll have Asarums split into five genera.
New names would be easier to learn if they came with pronunciation guidance.
Absolutely agree, and I think this would be part of that effective communication.
Thank you for your excellent rant, Ben. While I understand the reasons for re-classifying & re-naming plants, for an amateur gardener (& plant geek) like me it would be so useful to have one place to find the new information along with the pronunciation guidance. I try very hard to keep up with the new names when I come across them, but I noticed even most nurseries are not keeping up!
A centralised source of information would be enormously helpful to the gardening community.
Amen Ben. I wrote about this extensively in my American Gardener column – both In Defense of Botanical Names and In Defense of Dumb Questions and Smart Answers. Dumbing down the plant names may make it easier to sell plants to the consumer, but the consumer-gardener and the gardener lose out. The problem with media is much greater in the US than in the UK – so count yourself lucky! -MW
But is it easier to sell plants? There’s an assumption being made that modern gardeners are too stupid to understand things, but previous generations have done OK. Why is there an assumption, beyond arrogance, that people coming to gardening now are unable to understand things that were understood 30 years ago?!
Yes, there is a revolution in taxonomy that began with genetic testing that establishes the evolutionary relationships between plants. The revision is needed because taxonomy, which originated in the 18th century, assigned plants to genera and families based solely on appearance.
The development of new analytical tools in the 20th century has enabled the revision of traditional taxonomy to reflect evolutionary relationships. DNA analysis has revealed some close evolutionary relationships that were previously unknown. Molecular analysis has been particularly helpful when morphology was misleading in the past.
Cladistics radically altered the schematic of the “tree of life.” Each branch, or clade (Greek for “branch”), includes a group of species with one common ancestor and excludes those that are not descendants of that ancestor. Cladistics has organized these branches into three domains of life that finally reveal the importance of fungi and microbes on the “tree of life.” Cladistics has done for biology what plate tectonics did for geology.
It is the public’s ignorance of evolution that explains the nativist ideology, which assumes that species are immutable, native plants are inherently different from non-native plants, and that plants and insects co-evolved their relationships long after native plants diverged from their ancestors, now considered non-native. All of these assumptions are mistaken. While nativists wish to divide all life into just two categories—native and non-native—none of the existing taxonomic systems even mentions that meaningless distinction.
Here is an article about the past, present, and future of taxonomy: https://milliontrees.me/2024/06/01/taxonomy-past-present-and-future/ The article is based on two recently published books about taxonomy.
Thanks for bringing this topic to Garden Rant.
Thank you for adding this extra information.
Great Rant! I agree that the problem is communication. There’s no press release, and plant society magazines don’t keep up as well as they might. I don’t mind learning something new, for some weird reason the latin names are easier for me than the common names, but I do mind feeling like I’m the last one to know about a change. When I’m unsure what is what, I’ve found World Flora Online https://wfoplantlist.org/ to be helpful.
In the UK I tend to go with the RHS and Kew databases, but often they differ. The plant societies should be leading the charge with keeping their members informed.
Well said. Thank you.
Another source for current plant names is https://npgsweb.ars-grin.gov/gringlobal/taxon/taxonomysearch?t=pnlspecies
This database provides current names, synonyms, and citations used for their information. As with any database it will never be completely up to date as scientific research is an ongoing process and, as Ben pointed out, the experts won’t necessarily agree on every new taxonomic proposal.
Still no help with pronunciation though. However I will say this: if you learned how to pronounce Nantucket, Massachusetts (I’m sure there’s something equally polysylabic for you gardeners outside the United States) you can learn to pronounce Eriocapitella.
I don’t believe you’re quite correct about Perovskia. Russian sage, which formerly had the botanical name Perovskia atriplicifolia, has indeed been reclassified. But for horticultural varieties, it’s mostly gone to Salvia x floriferior, not Salvia yangii.
The wild species formerly known as Perovskia atriplicifolia, which has “nearly entire or shallowly and bluntly serrated leaf margins,” is what is now known as Salvia yangii. It is not thought to be cultivated in the US.
All cultivated varieties in the US are now thought to be hybrids. The most common cultivated varieties, especially the ones with more pinnate or dissected leaf margins, are thought to have Salvia abrotanoides and Salvia yangii as parents. This group of hybrids has been designated as Salvia x floriferior.
Thank you very much for this, and indeed for showing just how difficult it can be to chase down new names.
It’s thanks to people like yourself taking a moment to help others that we can have a shot at keeping up with things; I will amend my notes!
It is interesting that botanical names, though meant to create clarity, can still be so tricky even for experienced professionals. I agree that improving communication about name changes could help gardeners feel more involved and informed. Thank you for highlighting the importance of better sharing new ideas and information!
I’m still not sure quite how it would work, whether we need a single source that keeps us up to date, or even who would police it.
However I maintain that not bothering to try and communicate new information is enormously patronising is its assumption that gardeners aren’t able to keep up.