“A clear conscience is often the sign of a bad memory.” – Unknown
“Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?” -- Unknown
“My karma ran over your dogma.” – Unknown
“You can be sincere and still be stupid.” – Unknown
“Exercise daily. Eat wisely. Die anyway.” – Unknown
“You don’t stop laughing because you grow old; you grow old because you stop laughing.” – Michael Pritchard
Archive Living with Latin
LIVING WITH LATIN
The Name Game
Now that you’re becoming a bit more comfortable with the Latin names of plants (you are, aren’t you?), let me confuse matters a bit.
You know how you often see more than just the genus and species names when you stare at a plant label? For example,
Viburnum plicatum var. tomentosum ‘Mariesii.’
That’s the name of one of my favorite viburnums, a doublefile form with awesome white flowers and really cool, lateral branching. But what’s with all the names?
Well, let’s break it down.
Viburnum is the name of the genus, and it’s both the Latin name and the common name, which isn’t always the case. The species name, plicatum, means pleated or folded.
Now, there is a viburnum known simply as Viburnum plicatum. It’s the Japanese snowball viburnum. It’s nice, but it’s not the viburnum we’re interested in at the moment, because the one we’re interested in is different.
Sometimes a species is just different enough to warrant yet another name, which is known as a subspecies or variety name. And that’s the case here, because the flowers of the viburnum in question are different from the species, so the plant deserves its own subspecies or variety name, in this case tomentosum, which means densely wooly. Typically the subspecies or variety name will be preceded by var., the abbreviation for variety.
Are you still with me?
Finally, there are cultivated plants (those propagated by people rather than nature) that are bred for certain characteristics such as color or smell or whatever. And assuming those characteristics are stable, that is assuming they are passed along when the plant is grown from seed or cuttings, it is entitled to a cultivar name. In our example, the cultivar name is ‘Mariessi.’ The cultivar name is easy to spot, because it’s in Roman rather than Latin type, and because it’s contained in single quotation marks.
And there you have it. Easy, huh?
