Identifying Plants By Their Names

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Identifying plants by their names

Common names place plants in the everyday world because their names are easy to remember and usually easy to pronounce. Some names are descriptive–monkshood, bloodroot, bleeding-heart, goldenrod, jewelweed. Others indicate a plant’s use. Boxwood was used to make decorative boxes; woundworts, to treat wounds; chaste tree, to ensure chastity; crampbark to ease stomach cramps; fleabane to ward off fleas; lungwort to treat lung ailments.

For all their beauty and simplicity, however, common names can be a source of extreme confusion. Some plants have more than one common name. Artemisia abrotanum, for example, is known variously as southernwood, old man, lad’s love, and garde-robe. You may know Valeriana officinalis as either valerian or as garden heliotrope. Confusion is also rife when two or more disimilar plants share a common name.

Understanding the basics

The binomial (“two-name”) system that botanists use for classifying and naming plants was devised by Carolus Linnaeus, an eighteenth-century Swedish biologist and botanist. It describes patterns of relationship and provides a means of organizing the complexity of nature.

  • Published on Oct 1, 2001
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