The Names Of Plants.pdf

Towards a solution to the problem
plants. The apothecaries gave us the first centres of botanical enquiry and the plant
breeders of today give us the new varieties which are needed to satisfy our gardening
and food-production requirements. The commercial face of plant breeding,
however, attaches a powerful monetary significance to the names given to new
varieties.
Gardeners occasionally have to resort to botanical names when they discover
some cultural problem with a plant which shares the same common name with
several different plants. The Guernsey lily, around which has always hung a cloud
of mystery, has been offered to the public in the form of Amaryllis belladonna L. The
true Guernsey lily has the name Nerine sarniensis Herb. (but was named Amaryllis
sarniensis by Linnaeus). The epithet sarniensis means ‘of Sarnia’ or ‘of Guernsey’,
Sarnia being the old name for Guernsey, and is an example of a misapplied geographical
epithet, since the plant’s native area is S Africa. Some would regard the
epithet as indicating the fact that Guernsey was the first place in which the plant
was cultivated. This is historically incorrect, however, and does nothing to help the
gardener who finds that the Guernsey lily that he has bought does not behave, in
culture, as Nerine sarniensis is known to behave. This example is one involving a
particularly contentious area as to the taxonomic problems of generic boundaries
and typification but there are many others in which common and Latin garden
name are used for whole assortments of garden plants, ranging from species (Nepeta
mussinii and N. cataria are both catmint) to members of different genera (‘japonicas’
including Chaenomeles speciosa and Kerria japonica) to members of different families
(Camellia japonica is likewise a ‘japonica’), and the diversity of ‘bluebells’ was mentioned
earlier.
New varieties, be they timber trees, crop plants or garden flowers, require names,
and those names need to be definitive. As with the earlier confusion of botanical
names (different names for the same species or the same name for different species),
so there can be the same confusion of horticultural names. As will be seen, rules for
cultivated plants require that new names have to be established by publication. This
gives to the breeder the commercial advantage of being able to supply to the public
his new variety under what, initially, amounts to his mark of copyright. In some
parts of the world legislation permits exemption from the rules and recommendations
otherwise used for the names of cultivated plants.
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