#peter-parker
Evolved over many centuries and often thought to belong to the rarefied world of scholars and scientists, botanical Latin is in fact a very useful tool for everyday gardening.
The naming of plants draws upon geography, social and medical history, folklore, mythology, language, literature, the human body, the animal kingdom and all manner of ancient beliefs and superstitions. #naming #mythology #folk
Although it may be useful to have learned some latin at school, botanical Latin is not the same thing as the language in which you may have read about Caesar's Gallic Wars. The kind of Latin used in the naming of plants does indeed date back to the Romans, and the Pliny the Elder in particular, whose encyclopaedic Historia Naturalis, written between AD 77 and 79, remained a principal source for those writing about plants well into the sixteenth century. Botanical Latin is not, however, the same language as that used in Ancient Rome. Indeed, it is less a language than an international tool, largely invented in the renaissance and refined and more of less standardised in the eighteenth century by the Swedish botanist carl Linnaeus. Many of its words are derived from Greek, while others refer to things - geographical and scientific discoveries, for example - that would not have been known in the ancient world. #language
The good news is that unless you are a professional botanist you don't really need to know much about Latin grammar, nor should you worry too much about pronunciation [...] many of the finer points of botanical Latin are disputed. #relativity
One of the principal reasons for calling a plant an aquilegia rather than a columbine or a granny's bonnet, or any of the many regional names, is that the botanical name can be understood wherever you happen to be - in any country in England and in any country in the world.
William T. Stearn: "How [names] are pronounced really matters little provided they sound pleasant and are understood by all". And the notion of a language understood by all is the very foundation of - and the reason for - botanical Latin.
Genus + species = binominal system (Linneaus)
The naming of things is a fundamental human occupation, helping us to make sense of the world that surrounds us. From the moment of creation, according to the book of Genesis, God brought every beast of the field and fowl of the air to Adam 'to see what he would call them'. #naming #meaningfulness #construction-of-reality
It may seem odd to us today that[Theophrastus] paid little attention to flowers, but these were regarded as a type of leaf for another couple of millennia: it wasn't until 1690, when the English naturalist John Ray published a new method for the identification of plants, that the word petal came into existence. #language
It is one of the principal disadvantages of early herbals that plants were identified for their medicinal value, which meant that anything that could not be used to treat or cure illnesses tended to be sidelined. #sapir-whorf
A very good reason for the use of Latin in scholarly books was that it was a stable language at a time when English, for example, was not.
Herbariums would become invaluable databases, allowing botanists to compare and classify newly-discovered plants. For example, in 1771 Joseph Banks arrived back in England from his expedition in the Endeavour, bringing with him 30,000 dried specimens representing more than 3,600 species, almost half of which were new to Europe.
Colour in the garden tends to be a controversial subject, with one person's "bright and cheerful" being another person's "garish and tasteless." #opinion
Once people started growing plants for pleasure rather than medicinal use, the flower came into its own and colour became something to be sought out. And indeed sorted out. #colour
E. A. Bowles: "One can only throw one's hands up in despair, confronted at once by the inadequacy of language and by the unending variety and delicacy of flower-tones where no two whites or blues are alike, but all have to be lumped under the one rough heading, eked out by such explanatory qualifications as each separate mind has to hammer out for itself, more in the hope of satisfying itself than of carrying a true picture to others" #communication
More familiar is the pomegranate, Punica granatum. The Romans first imported the pomegranate from Carthage and so called it the Carthaginian apple, punicum malum; punicus, the Latin terms for anything relating to that city state, was derived from the Greek Phoinix = Phoenician, the people in whose empire Carthage belonged. Because the pomegranate has bright red flowers puniceus subsequently became the Latin word for scarlet or crimson.
It is something of a relief that botanists do not revise names when political and geographic boundaries change, but this does mean that a sizeable proportion of species names refer to countries and regions that have been lost in time. #history #geography #politics
Given that plants were first studied and categorised for their supposed medicinal value, it is unsurprising that some of them are named after parts of the body. Although many of them do indeed have healing qualities, and are still used in drugs today, one of the silliest notions in early botany and medicine was the so-called doctrine of signatures. This theory, which stretches way back to Dioscorides and was still prevalent enough for John Ray to feel the need to refute it some 1600 years later, was that an individual part of the body could be healed by plants that had features such as seed, leaf or root that resembled it. An originally pagan belief was adopted by Christians on the grounds that the doctrine was an indication of God's benevolence in pointing humans towards the curing of their ills. #medicine
Simone de Beauvoir: "The body is the instrument of our hold upon the world"
The North American Vitis vulpina appears to have been named by Linnaeus with Aesop's fable "Th e Fox and Grapes" in mind. Thwarted in his repeated attempts to reach a bunch of grapes growing high on a vine, Aesop's fox proclaims the fruit sour in any case and so not worth his while - hence the term "sour grapes".
The Latin specific epithet caninus also tends to refer to the less admirable aspects of dogs' lives or their place in the lives of humans. In many cases it means no more than "very common, as plentiful as dogs"; elsewhere it means inferior, as in dog Latin or doggerel. The dog rose, Rosa canina, was once a widespread countryside plant, and because it has single flowers with only a faint scent it was considered infeior to cultivated roses grown for the strong perfume and many petalled blooms.
In a neat reversal of the process of naming plants after people, Linnaeus's own name was derived from a plant. His father, Nils, who came from Smaland, a southern province of Sweden, originally bore only a patronymic, Ingemarsson (son of Ingemar). On entering university, he was obliged to provide a surname and chose Linnaeus, a Latinised form of lin, the Smalandic word for a lime tree, because a large and celebrated one grew on his family estate.
In many ways this is a sad story, like many of those that have gone before, and yet Ellen Willmott lives on in the species named after her. She would no doubt have been pleased, but possibly even more so that she is best remembered not for a species but for a plant nickname, "Miss Willmott's ghost", given to the tall, silver sea holly Eryngium giganteum. She carried seeds of the plant in her pockets and surreptitiously scattered them in other people's gardens when she visited them, a cheeky bid for immortality that no taxonomist could later thwart.
The specific epithet peltatus is usually defined as shield-shaped, and indeed comes from a Greek word for a shield, pelte. In fact peltate is a botanical term meaning that the petiole (leaf-stalk) is attached to the centre of the leaf rather than the lower margin, presumably derived from the fact that this is where the handle of a shield would be attached.