![]() Some for the cactus and some for the canes. There are fancier names if you think they sound sweeter, You may think at first I’m indulging in patter,īut I tell you - a plant must have four different names! First comes the name that tells us its genus. ![]() ![]() It isn’t correct to think all are the same. The naming of plants? It really does matter. If nothing else, it makes the world of binominal nomenclature less intimidating, and much more fun. Whether Linnaeus would approve, I can’t say, but I’m sure that Eliot would. If you’ve long enjoyed the poem, you’ll hear it echoing below. If you’re not familiar with Eliot’s poem, you can hear a recording of him reading it here. Eliot’s wonderful poem, “ The Naming of Cats, and a parody was born. When t he phrase “the naming of plants” came to mind, it evoked T.S. His system categorizes plants by genus and species, and every two part name, like Oenothera speciosa, refers to only one plant.Įventually, as I became more comfortable with the system, the thought of having a little fun with binomial nomenclature - those two-part names - occurred to me. Scientific names can be long, difficult to spell, and harder to pronounce, but the two-part naming system formalized by Carl Linnaeus serves an important purpose. Oenothera speciosa ~ aka pink evening primrose, aka buttercup Eventually, we sorted out our confusion: learning in the process that using the flower’s scientific name, Oenothera speciosa, could have eliminated hours of good-natured argument. For two years, I assumed a friend meant a certain spring-blooming yellow wildflower when she mentioned her love of ‘buttercups.’ In fact, her ‘buttercup’ was my ‘pink evening primrose,’ a flower also known as showy evening primrose, Mexican evening primrose, pink ladies, and pink buttercup. On the other hand, some people called the yellow flowers blooming among the Gaillardia coneflowers others called them brown-eyed Susans. In the photo above, the red flowers - a species of Gaillardia - were introduced to me as Indian blanket, blanketflower, firewheel, and brown-eyed Susan. When I began roaming in nature, I often was confused by names given to the plants I encountered. The Nature Conservancy’s L ove Creek Preserve near MedinaĪfter poetic reflections on the importance of names for the natural world’s trees, birds, and rocks, it seemed fitting to end the series by considering the names of the flowers that surround us.
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