While looking for a topic to inspire my garden article this week, I came across a column published in 2007 dealing with botanical Latin. It was written by Brian Baldwin, who was at that time with the Department of Plant Sciences at the College of Agriculture at the University of Saskatchewan. Unfortunately, Brian Baldwin is no longer with us, but I am sure he would have been OK with the reprint of his well-written article, which reflects his sense of humour and his ability to share important information concisely.
Scientific names have a long history
By Brian Baldwin (1964-2009)
“What’s in a name?” asked Shakespeare. “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”
Off stage though, people have more to do than sniff roses, and plants need names. If you cannot reliably distinguish a carrot from hemlock—they’re in the same family after all and not that dissimilar—you may not need to know about plant names, at least not for long.
Our system of naming plants has not always been consistent or logical. Until 1758, chaos reigned. Any one plant could be known by a myriad of different names, while any one name could apply to a myriad of different plants.
In 1758, Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778), a Swedish botanist from Uppsala University, who later Latinized his name to (Carolus Linnaeus), began to use a system in which every species would be identified by a unique two-word name called a binomial. While Linnaeus was not the first person to use a binomial system, he was the first person to apply it consistently, popularizing it among botanists and demonstrating its great utility.
In the binomial system, the first word of a name is the genus. A genus is a singular Latinized noun that is always capitalized and printed in italicized type, or underlined if handwritten. All maples, for example, are part of the genus (Acer), the Latin word for maple. Every iris is part of the genus (Iris), and every rose of the genus (Rosa).
The second word in the binomial is the specific epithet. Almost every teacher I’ve met has wrongly called the second word the “species name.” Yet, it is clearly not the species name. Since 1758, the entire botanical community has agreed that a species name shall consist of exactly two words. A single word cannot name a species: only a genus and a specific epithet together form a species name.
The specific epithet serves as an adjective modifying the noun (genus) and can describe anything from a physical feature of the plant, its country of origin, its discoverer, or other attribute. For example, we know where (Iris germanica) and (Iris sibirica) originated simply by reading their names. (Rosa rubrifolia) describes the red foliage colour of this rose, and we understand something is sweet about a sugar maple simply by reading (Acer saccharum).
Like the genus name, the specific epithet is always Latin and therefore always italicized or underlined. Unlike the genus name, the specific epithet is never capitalized. There is no quicker way for students of life sciences to demonstrate ignorance than to capitalize a specific epithet.
Once the botanical community had embraced Linnaeus’s system of binomial nomenclature, the effect was so revolutionary that zoologists and all other members of the biological community leapt on board to take advantage of its simplicity and accuracy.
Today every organism, whether living or extinct, from bacterium to blue whale, is named with a binomial. Thus, even though it was extinct for eons before Linnaeus’s birth, (Tyranno/saurus rex) (ruling/lizard king) is named with a binomial. It’s a binomial that even kindergarten children toss about with confidence while being entirely unaware they are employing Linnaeus’s innovative system born almost 250 years ago in a small Swedish university.
NOTE: In many of our articles, we tend to put the scientific name in brackets since we post them on Facebook, which does not readily recognize bold, underline and italicize qualifiers.
This column is provided courtesy of the Saskatchewan Perennial Society (SPS; saskperennial@hotmail.com). Check our website (www.saskperennial.ca) or Facebook page (www.facebook.com/saskperennial) for a list of upcoming gardening events.
