The Perennial Post

"Before Linnaeus hardly anybody used binomial nomenclature. After Linnaeus, almost everybody did."

A Shared Language, A Shared Understanding

Latin, it is often said—especially by gardeners leery and weary of using Latin instead of common names—is a dead language: Nobody knows how to pronounce it correctly, using it seems rather snobbish, and hearing a plant's Latin name often causes the listener to adopt a glazed expression and beg the speaker to "talk English."

Well, just let me say this: For a dead language, botanical Latin is a very precise, unambiguous mode of communication. It beats English hands down.

Since it always helps to understand the logic behind any system, here is a brief overview of what the system of botanical nomenclature is and how it works:

Taxonomy, according to The American Heritage Dictionary, is "the classification of organisms in an ordered system that indicates natural relationships." Binomial nomenclature is "the scientific naming of species whereby each species receives a Latin or Latinized name of two parts, the first indicating a genus and the second being the specific epithet."

Although not the first to use binomial nomenclature, the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus was the first to classify thousands of plant and animal species into a consistent system of hierarchies—Kingdom, Class, Order, Genus, and Species—based on shared, observable characteristics, and to bestow upon each plant and each animal a simple descriptive binomial name in place of the cumbersome descriptions then in use. And he did this in Latin, the shared language of all educated people of the time. As the authors of Flora note, "By writing in Latin he made his work known immediately to the whole learned world of his day. Had he written in Swedish his work would probably have passed unnoticed." Or, as Wikipedia says, "Before Linnaeus hardly anybody used binomial nomenclature. After Linnaeus, almost everybody did."

Plant names are governed by the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature (ICBN), and must follow certain rules. Think of botanical names like phone book listings: Last name (genus), first name (specific epithet), and middle name (subspecies/variety or cultivar). Here is the botanical name of one of the blue-foliaged cultivars of Arizona cypress:

The genus (a Latin or Latinized word) is always capitalized and written in italics. Example: Cupressus

The specific epithet (a Latin or Latinized word) is all lower case and written in italics. Example: arizonica

A subspecies or variety is a naturally-occurring variation on the species, and—okay, this is a little confusing until you get used to it—is a Latin or Latinized word written in lower-case italics, preceded by the unitalicized abbreviation "subsp." or "var." Example: var. glabra

A cultivar is a "cultivated variety"—a plant that originated in a cultivated, rather than natural, environment. Since 1959, cultivar names must be in a modern language (older cultivar names are usually Latin or Latinized); they are capitalized, unitalicized, and enclosed in single quotes. Example: 'Blue Ice'

Anywhere in the world, Cupressus arizonica var. glabra 'Blue Ice' means one plant and one plant only. Just as in Linnaeus' day, Latin is the lingua franca that puts all gardeners on the same page, eliminates confusion, and contributes to a shared understanding of the natural world. Not bad for a dead language.