No Man's Land

Another interesting article from Jonathan Wild. Gardening is but a simple pastime - you plant something in the soil, give it some water, make sure it gets a bit of sunshine and, hey presto, you are in business. No drama, and on the face of it something which wouldn’t tax even the most hopeless of grown- ups. For any kids reared on a diet of Blue Peter and hours of digging in the school garden it would be a walk in the park. The most baffling thing for the majority of us though is what are all these flowers called?

For those of us (not me I hasten to add!) who have been schooled in Latin, using the scientific names for the plants is a reasonable way of identifying flowers – a good example is the Sunflower for which the Latin name is Helianthus. 

The Helios bit means sun, pretty obvious eh? However, you would probably be bamboozled by something a bit more tricky such as Schizanthus. It doesn’t get any easier when you realise that there are also alternative names for all these plants - normally derived from the local dialect, they are generally referred to as common names. To make matters worse, most of these common names are often duplicated and corrupted. So, a Black Eyed Susan can be either a North American Rudbeckia or the delightful climber Thunbergia which hails from Africa.

 Even worse are those slightly awkward names such as Family Jewels Milkweed, Nipplewort and Stiffcock - I kid you not, these are genuine common plant names and guaranteed to raise a giggle at the garden centre when you ask if they have any in stock...

I think that unless you are a complete plant geek like me, to try and memorize the scientific names
of even your favourite plants is a big ask. If I had a pound for every time I’ve recited the name of a particular plant to people over the years, I would be a very wealthy man. As I am still scratching around to find the cash to keep my kids in Apple’s finest gadgets, I have clearly missed one of life’s great business opportunities! To be fair, I have always been slightly embarrassed about my ability to identify plants and feel rather more comfortable now that anyone, regardless of their geekiness, can do exactly this by using an app on their phone. Take a look at www.plantsnap.com or www.picturethisai. com You can download the app to get your very own access to extensive databases containing hundreds of thousands of plant names. It still doesn’t get you away completely from the issue of confusing common names or your phone giving up the ghost at the crucial moment - but it does help if I or any of my fellow geeks are not around at the time!

The other infuriating thing with plant names is that they often change for no apparent reason. Just when you think you’ve cracked the Latin names of some of the more common plants in your garden, the boffins discover that actually they’ve got it all wrong and change it. Take for example the good old Chrysanthemum, which is recognised virtually anywhere in the world and who’s Latin name is actually also it’s common name. Well, you’ll be pleased to hear that this has now been re-named Dendranthema and caused generations of gardeners to un-learn a plant name that is as familiar as a Rose or a Snowdrop.

The plant name minefield gets even murkier when you throw in the unscrupulous machinations of
the commercial growers, who make up completely fictitious names for plants simply to give them some selling power. You might be tempted by something called Hot Ice down at the garden centre, but as Confucius famously said, “An oxymoron is worth two in the bush!”