Stopping to smell the flowers
Botanical Latin
Arlene Marturano

Arlene Marturano is a master gardener, writer, and educator. As an advocate of gardening as a tool for learning, she helped develop the Carolina Children's Garden at the Sandhill Research and Education Center. She is an education consultant with T.E.A.C.H. marturano@yahoo.com

Latin is anything but a dead language to gardeners. It is the language by which botanists and horticulturists communicate vital plant information to each other, the world, and especially to gardeners sorting through catalogs, nursery name tags, seed packages, and plant identification books.

Of course, gardeners don't need to enroll in Latin class before planting. However, those with a background in high school Latin or Catholic mass finally come to appreciate the language through botanical nomenclature.

Carl Linnaeus, mid-18th century Swedish botanist, developed the system for classifying and naming plants in Philosophia botanica, a system still in use today.

Plant names consist of two terms, the genus name and the species name. The binomial system of nomenclature provided a consistent method of naming that was brief, concise, and informative.

The genus name was a capitalized noun in the Latin nominative singular. The species name was an adjective in lower case agreeing in case and number with the noun. For example, Quercus is the Latin genus for oak and "albus" is a species name meaning white. Hence, Quercus albus on a nursery tree label means "white oak".

Whereas, the genus name classifies the plant in a group within a family of plants, the species name is descriptive and can bespeak a plants origin, its favored habitat, its scent, bloom time, color of flower, and shape of leaf. For the gardener the species name is extremely useful in locating just the right plant. Latin enlightens the gardener as well as the garden.