Identifying Plants By Their Names

By The Herb Companion Staff
Published on October 1, 2001
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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.

The first part of a plant’s name gives its genus, the group to which it belongs and with which it shares many features. Both garlic and onions belong to the genus Allium. A plant’s species name consists of the genus name and a specific epithet, which indicates a group of individuals that have common attributes and can breed together. Garlic belongs to the Allium sativum species while onions belong to the A. cepa species. The abbreviations of the genus name to the first letter, as in A. cepa for Allium cepa, is used only when the genus is clear. Names enclosed in single quotation marks following species names indicate a single cultivated variety, or cultivar. Lady lavender’s botanical name, Lavandula angustifolia, is often followed by its cultivar name, ‘Lady’, on nursery identification tags.

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