“You say “potato”, I say Solanum tuberosum.
Let’s call the whole thing off…”
(-apologies to George Gershwin…
Botanical Nomenclature
Why oh why? Those “Latin names”; they’re hard to remember! I prefer the charm of the colloquial name, you say. And you would be supported by those who love the history and poetry of the common names as found in literature and mythology, indeed as part of our cultural language of plants. But, among naturalists, botanists, horticulturalists and gardeners widely scattered, there needs to be a common tongue that points with specificity to a plant. That one; that EXACT one. It avoids confusion when purchasing, discussing traits like hardiness and performance, not to mention tracing diseases in plants when they arise.
So, how did this come about? There are several moments in time historians point to. A student of Aristotle’s, Theocratus, inherited his teacher’s botanical gardens in Athens in times BC and began to study and name the form and structure of plants using Greek words (of course!) that compared each plant with other recognizable objects and with other known plants in terms of color, shapes of parts and so on. This laid the groundwork. By first century AD, Pliny the Elder drew from Gerco-Roman scholars and wrote the tome Historia Naturalis. It was one of the few books that survived the Dark Ages and went into print in the 1400’s. Herbalists, a dominant part of the botanical studies in the Middle Ages, added to the terminology and expanded the study. Enter Carl Linneaeus, who was a Swedish mastermind scientist of botany and zoology and a physician. In 1751 he wrote the Philosophia Botanica; he was very focused on the quest for greater precision and coined hundreds of new terms. It was he who adopted the idea of having “binomial names” in his “Species Platarrum (1753), which we call a plant’s botanical name or “species name”.
The first part of the name is the Genus to which a plant belongs. A genus groups plants which have similar, permanent characteristics which belong to that group and not others. This part of the name is always capitalized. It is usually a Latin singular noun drawn from Medieval, Classical or a Latinized version of a word from another language, especially Greek. Here is where etymology, which is the study of the origin of words and their changes over time would come into play over which word would be used to describe the genus. However, the genus could also be named for a person discovering a new genus (a botanist or a naturalist), a place name for where the plant originated or for characteristics ascribed to it in the language of that native area. However, those namers of plants have no been above using anagrams of other genera (genus) or jokes an puns as in “nodantherwun”. Get it?
The second part of the name is the descriptor or specific name that zeroes in precisely. It is not capitalized. It can be an adjective that describes an outstanding characteristic that sets the plant off from others in the genus, like using Latin words for “hairy”, “tall”, “rose colored”, and so on. The second word can also be a noun, like an honorific name for a famous person or it could be a place name where the species was found. Depending on the type of descriptor word used to denote the species name, Latin adds various endings to make the second word agree with the gender (masculine, feminine or neuter) noun of the genus word. Thus we get interesting appendages like -us, -a, -um, -ae, -ii and so on. Latin prefixes and suffixes can also be added to the Latin species word to add even more detail and it helps to learn some of them that appear frequently.
Put the two words together, and you have your species name, i.e. Solanum lycopersicum, which would appear in italics and a different font than the rest of the sentence.
Binomial Nomenclature can’t just happen willy-nilly. Typically, someone decided that there needed to be “some rules around here”–maybe it was the puns? The International code of nomenclature for algae, fungi and plants developed rules, procedures and principles for determining how to arrive at a precise botanical name. There’s also a set of rules for cultivated plants (cultivars) for plants deliberately altered by humankind.
