Winter Wisdom

Brought to you in cooperation with the Kansas State University Johnson County Research and Extension Master Gardeners.   Each week we feature interesting topics for winter reading.

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Week of 2/5/01

Hardly a day passes without a question about a plant that is difficult to identify from the caller's description.  A case in point was the subject of an inquiry from a lady who called recently to say that a beautiful houseplant she had received for Christmas had lost all its leaves.  As you may understand, this presents an immediate problem for we are trained to recognize plant material ranging from house plants to ground covers to mighty oaks by distinguishing features, foremost among which are leaves.  Such features as size, type, arrangement on the stem or branch, color and texture are vital clues. When the leaves are no longer there, identification is made more difficult.

Another important clue is the name by which the caller identifies the plant.  This brings us, by an admittedly circuitous route, to the point of the present Winter Wisdom article.  The donor of the caller's gift had carefully removed the grower's or seller's tag, thereby depriving the recipient of any cultural information and any suggestion of a botanical name.  The latter would have greatly simplified identification and accurate description.  Instead, all we had to work with was the "common name", an invention of some advertising person's imagination.

Thanks to Swedish scholar and teacher, Karl von Linne, best known by the latinized form of his name, Carolus Linnaeus, all of us have a way to describe plants simply and accurately and with a minimum of ambiguity.  This is the binomial system, which assigns plants a single-word generic name or genus, and a single-word species name or epithet.  The species may be further subdivided to identify varieties and cultivars.  The binomial system provides us with a name that is consistent, discrete and often descriptive.  Each genus (the plural is genera, the adjective, generic) bears an always-capitalized latinized name, which honors its discoverer, collector or originator.  The source of generic names is often Latin, Greek or Arabic.  In addition to botanists and horticulturists, the names memorialize characters from mythology and folklore like Narcissus.  Species names always follow the genus name and are printed in lower case letters.  They are frequently adjectives describing a distinctive plant characteristic.  An example is Gentiana lutea.  The genus name is Gentiana named for Gentius, an ancient Illyrian king who is credited with discovering the plant's medicinal properties.  The species name, lutea, means yellow, referring to the color of its root.  The botanical name thus fixes the identification accurately and indisputably. There is only one Gentiana lutea.  In contrast, the common name given this plant in England and some parts of the United States is bitterwort.  Wort is a pre-12th century Old English word meaning herb or root.  There are innumerable bitterworts, but only one Gentiana lutea.  And the botanical name is universal.  It is the same in German, French, Swedish, Italian and Urdu.  Wherever you may travel, someone will be able to identify the subject with pinpoint accuracy!

To read more about botanical names and the fascinating information you may glean from them, visit your public library, bookstore or a reference library such as the 700 volume reference collection on gardening and horticulture located in the Johnson County K-State Research and Extension office at 13480 South Arapaho Drive in Olathe, Kansas.  The library is open from 8:30am to 5:00pm Monday through Friday.

Articles submitted by Bill Latimer, Johnson County Extension Horticulture Assistant and Dennis Patton, Johnson County Extension Horticulture Agent.

Previous Weeks' Winter Wisdom

* Winter Wisdom is an information service of the Kansas State Johnson County Research and Extension Master Gardeners.  Research-based responses are provided by Extension Master Gardener volunteers weekdays from March 1 through October 31, from 9:00 am to 4:30pm .  To telephone, call (913) 764-6306 or visit the Extension Office at 13480 South Arapaho Drive, Olathe, Kansas.  Visit their website at www.oznet.ksu.edu/Johnson 

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