In message . com, Rob
Hamadi writes
On Feb 25, 5:39 am, "Dave Poole" wrote:
Alan Holmes wrote:
Are there latin names for such things as sprouts, peas, cabbage, carrots,
strawberries, runner beans and sweet corn?

Brassica oleracea 'gemmifera', Pisum sativum, Brassica oleracea,
Daucum carota, Fragaria x ananasa, Phaseolus coccinea, Zea mays.

Now that was educational. I saw Pisum sativum, thought "surely peas
can't be a type of garlic!" and googled. I now know that sativa means
sown or cultivated.

How shaky would my ground be if I were to assume that, as a general
rule, the first word of the latin name IDs the plant and the second is
sort of extra information, style of thing?
--
Rob

Depends on what you mean by "the plant". The first word is the genus
which identifies a group of related plants, and the second word is the
specific epithet, which identifies the species, which is probably what a
botanist would identify as the plant.

After that it all gets more complicated - species can be divided into
subspecies, varieties (e.g. Malva moschata var. heterophylla, which is a
variety of musk mallow with less divided leaves), forms (e.g. Malva
moschata f. alba, which is the white-flowered form) and even subforms,
and there are also cultivars - cultivated varieties - of several
different categories, and also selling names. For example Lavatera olbia
'Eyecatcher' is a cultivar of Lavatera olbia, and Lavatera x clementii
Chamallow is a selling name of the cultivar Lavatera x clementii
'Innovera'. Cultivars can be arranged in groups, e.g. Malva sylvestris
Sterile Blue Group, consisting of the sterile (are they all?)
blue-flowered forms of the common mallow.

There are hybrids between subspecies, species and even genera giving
rise to nothogenera (e.g. x Sorbopyrus, which is a hybrids between a
Sorbus - I forget whether it was whitebeam or a rowan - and a pear),
nothospecies (e.g. Lavatera x clementii, the common shrubby Lavatera of
gardens, which is a hybrid between the shrubby Lavatera olbia and the
herbaceous Lavatera thuringiaca) and nothosubspecies. Nomenclature-wise,
when you get to rhododendrons and orchids you also have grexes, which
include all hybrids of a particular parentage.

In the case of large - or even not so large - genera, genera are divided
into subgenera, sections, subsections, series and subseries. For example
the common mallow, and several weedy species belong to section Malva of
genus Malva, and the musk mallow, Malva moschata, the hollyhock mallow,
Malva alcea, and their hybrid Malva x intermedia, belong to section
Bismalva. Subgenera etc are not usually represented in the name of a
plant.

Above the genus plants are grouped into larger categories (all of these,
including the ones described above, are collectively known as taxa -
singular taxon). The required ranks are family, order, class [1] and
division (or phylum), but botanists can also use subtribe, tribe,
subfamily, suborder, subclass and subdivision if they want. (Zoologists
have even more choices.) Informal groups of genera - groups or alliance
- fill the gap between genus and subtribe in some groups.

[1] The recent classifications from the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group don't
use the rank of class, but define a number of informal supraordinal
taxa.
--
Stewart Robert Hinsley