Botanical Names Part II

Last month I discussed why we need a formal language to name plants. Following on from that I will look at what it all means – well, some of it – and have also moved beyond the world of botany as scientists have had a lot of fun naming animals and other organisms which I just had to include!

When Linnaeus developed the binomial system, he used mainly Latin words to describe the plant or animal with a scattering of Greek and other languages. The oldest names we have come from his books Species Plantarum (1753) and Species Systema Naturae (1758) but a lot has changed since the eighteenth century. The discovery of many new species and the development of new cultivars means that names must be found for them, and DNA testing has resulted in plants and animals moving family, sometimes more than once.  As a general rule, we do not learn Latin in school and society has also become less formal, so names often reflect that (although Linnaeus had fun too).   

Although there are rules in the structure of naming plants and animals (both the genus and species are italicised and the genus with a capital and the species not, for example), there are few rules about the actual names themselves. It must not be offensive (although some are rather near the knuckle such as Clitoria (a genus of pea plants); or inadvertently memorable, Rubus cockburnianus (white stemmed bramble) sticks in my mind from college; use only the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet and may be derived from any language, or none. Names often stem from mythology, real and fictional places and characters, religion, anagrams and names clever in translation such as Eucritta melanolimnetes, which can be roughly translated as “the creature from the black lagoon.”

Now the names themselves. Plant names often give a clue to the plant’s form or colour or place of origin. Here are just a few with examples:

·         Albus – white. Symphoricarpos albus (L.) (common snowberry) The ‘L’ indicates the person who first described it, in this case Linnaeus.

·         Niger – black. Helleborus niger or Christmas rose. ‘But it’s white’ you say… The ‘niger’ refers to its black roots, not the flower!

·         Reptans – creeping. Ajuga reptans (bugle) or Ranunculus repens (creeping buttercup).  

·         Hirsutus – hairy. Helianthus hirsutus (hairy sunflower).

·         Officinalis - for the workshop/home or medicinal, or ‘belonging to an officina’, the storeroom of a monastery. A very common epithet. Salvia officinalis (sage), Hysoppus officinalis (hyssop), Zingiber officinale (ginger). 

·         Vulgaris – common. Barbarea vulgaris (bittercress).

·         Pumilus – dwarf. Trollius pumilus (dwarf globeflower).

·         Japonica – from Japan. Chaenomeles japonica (Japanese quince).

Many plant names give us a sense of history, remembering someone famous or the person who discovered/bred them. So, we have Forsythia suspensa var. Fortunei, named firstly after William Forsyth (1737-1804), the superintendent of the Royal Gardens in Kensington and St. James Palace, and founder of the RHS and secondly after Robert Fortune (1812-1880), botanist and traveller who introduced tea to India. (The ‘suspensa’ means hanging and ‘var.’ indicates that it is a naturally occurring variety).

Magnolia x soulangeana was  named after Pierre Magnol (1638-1715), Professor of medicine and Director of the Botanic garden at Montpellier, and bred by Etienne Soulange-Bodin (1774-1846), horticulturist and writer. (The x means that it is a hybrid).

Some people have their names attached to many plants, reflecting their importance in horticulture in some form.

There are at least 30 plants with the name hookeri and hookeriana, many named in honour of Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817-1911), botanist and explorer and a great friend of Darwin. These include; Banksia hookeriana, Iris hookeriana and Sarcoccocca hookeriana.

E. H. Wilson or ‘Chinese Wilson’ (1876-1930), traveller and plant hunter, who introduced over 1,000 plants into the UK, is honoured in over 60 plant names, including Spiraea wilsonii and Clematis montana var. wilsonii. 

Edward Augustus Bowles (1865 -1954), gardener and plantsman, has over 40 varieties of plants named after him, including Erysimum 'Bowles' Mauve'.

Finally, there are women who have broken into this world, notably Ellen Willmott (1858-1934), horticulturist, resident of Essex – see our page on her here – and sponsor of E. H. Wilson. She has a number of plants named after her, including Ceratostigma willmottianum, Rosa willmottiae, Corylopsis willmottiae and Syringa vulgaris ‘Miss Ellen Willmott’.

Many new species of plants and animals are discovered each year. Most are named after their location or the person who discovered them, but occasionally the taxonomists have some fun. Here I am going beyond the world of botany, for reasons you will soon see.

Some names reference famous people or characters, I’ll let you decide who they are! Agra katewinsletae (a beetle), Calponia harrisonfordi (a spider), Preseucolia imallshookupus (a gall wasp), Psephophorus terrypratchetti (a fossil turtle), Draculoides bramstokeri (a small, Australian arachnid), Scaptia beyonceae (an Australian horsefly), neopalpa donaldtrumpi (a Mexican moth species), Strigihilus garylarsoni (a louse found on owls), Spongiforma squarepantsii (a fungi in Malaysia), Myrmekiaphila neilyoungi (a spider). Others are just fun: Ba humbugi (a land snail on an island in Fiji) or Chaeropus ecaudatus (the pig-footed bandicoot), meaning pig-footed and without a tail, but the original specimen on which the name was based had lost his or hers to a predator. Apopyllus now (ground spiders in Brazil), obviously reference a well-known film. The poor nilgai, a large Asian deer, is called Boselaphus tragocamelus, meaning  ‘ox-deer goat-camel’. Some names are a tautonym, where the genus and species name are the same, notably Troglodytes troglodytes (the wren), Natrix natrix (grass snake) and Gorilla gorilla – guess what?

It’s not just animal naming that has all the fun, some plant names are entertaining too: Ilex vomitoria (Yaupon holly) does not cause vomiting, Lobelia siphilitica (blue cardinal flower) does not cure syphilis and why is Oxford Ragwort called Senecio squalidus, or 'dirty old man'? It seems a little unfair!

Length of names varies immensely. The shortest scientific name is for a bat, Ia io and the longest, at 42 characters, is for a fly, Parastratiosphecomyia stratiosphecomyioides (it was once a crustacean called Gammaracanthuskytodermogammarus loricatobaicalensis – that is 50 characters, I counted so you don’t have to – but this is no longer in use). Plants come in second with 38 characters for ornithogalum adseptentrionesvergentulum or Southern African Ornithogalum. Thankfully that never came up in my plant identification tests!