Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... You say klem-AT-is. I say KLEM-a-tis. Some say Latin is a dead language. But in the realm of horticulture, it’s not just alive, but kicking. Taxonomy, the ...

A nagging question wracked your mind when you woke up this morning. "Why do plants have Latin names?" As always, Grumpy is here to reveal the truth and put you at ease. Some people think plants have ...

Botanical names can be a pain. They can get stuck like broccoli in the mouth of a 6-year-old who hates vegetables. All gardeners — beginners to advanced — blush and sputter when trying to pronounce ...

The plants are trying to tell us something — if only we’d learn their official language, botanical Latin. “I am the Allium with just one leaf,” says Allium unifolium. (Get it?) “I am the juniper that ...

When buying plants, the Latin names can seem complicated, mystifying, sometimes irritating and easily skipped over on the tags until you find some English. Some gardeners know all plants by their ...

Latin might seem like an obscure, inscrutable language for naming plants. But it can open up the botanical world in ways you can’t imagine. By Margaret Roach The plants are trying to tell us something ...

Plant names might sound like a chaotic mix of Latin, local legend, and old-school guesswork, but there’s actually a pretty logical system behind most of them. From scientific labels that tell you ...

You may ask, why should we bother learning the botanical names of plants? Carl von Linne developed the binomial system to classify plants so that the same plant is known by the same name around the ...

“The Gardener’s Botanical: An Encyclopedia of Latin Plant Names with More than 5,000 Entries” by Ross Bayton ($29.95, Princeton University Press): This 352-page hardcover book is a botanist’s dream ...

Bauhin documents the Marian and other religious names of plants with source quotes from botanical books in Latin, Gallic (French), German etc. - giving testimony that these names were widely found in ...