BoyPete wrote:
Yes, I understand that now. Still, it's very off-putting to the likes
of me to see all that Latin in a post, and I tend to skip
them.....possibly missing some useful info.
Yes... "foetida" means the plant smells awful! We still have foetid in
common usage in English. Paederia foetida (Skunk vine) smells like skunks.
Much of English has come from Latin. Many latin names have colours in them,
alba for white, nigra for black. Or clues as to habit, tortuosa, contorta
and prostrata for tortuous, contorted and prostrate. Names crop up too...
anything with williamsii in the name was discovered and catalogued by a chap
called Williams for instance.
Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) started naming plants with two latin names. The
first one being the genus. This just means a group of plants with the same
characteristics. Malus is the group name for apples. Malus domestica is the
domesticated apple we grow for fruit. But Malus sylvestris is the common
crab apple.
I enjoy learning the names, what they mean and getting my tongue round them.
It adds some depth to the hobby. Many interesting links crop up that may
suprise too. The genus Solanum is one...
Solanum tuberosum - Potato
" capsicum - Chilli
" lycopersicum -Tomato
" melongena - Aubergine
If you didn't know the latin would you have thought all these could be
related? (In fact the flowers are a dead giveaway, they all look like old
fashioned turks headgear. It was the characteristics of flowers ie; number
of petals, stamen ect. that Linnaeus first used to catagorise plant groups)
Here's wikipedia on Solanum
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solanum and on the
right hand side of the page you can see the classification order of plants
from Kingdom (Plantae) all the way down to Genus (Solanum). All organisms
are named in much the same way.... Rattus norvegicus is the Brown rat for
example but under the kindom of Animalia down to the Genus Rattus.
And the RHS on plant naming...
http://www.rhs.org.uk/RHSPlantFinder/plantnaming.asp
Les
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Les Hemmings a.a #2251 SA