When strolling through a garden center or flipping through a plant catalog, you’ll often notice two distinct names on each tag: a common name and a botanical name. While the common name feels friendly ...

Since the mid-1700s, researchers have classified life with scientific names. But some of them have problematic histories and connotations. The botanical community is trying to tackle this issue. Since ...

Plant nomenclature, or the naming of plants, has been around since 1753, and started with a Swedish botanist named Carl Von Linne. Latin names were given at the time as an internationally understood ...

Are you waiting for your snowdrops to bloom? Or do you prefer to call them Galanthus nivalis? “Nearly every kind of plant has more than one name,” said Julie Janoski, Plant Clinic manager at The ...

DEAR GARDEN COACH: I enjoyed your article on plant adaptations; it got me thinking about something I recently discovered when looking for a plant called mock orange. There were two — Pittosporum ...

Botanical names might look like a jumble of Latin, but they’re actually more useful (and less scary) than most people think. Unlike common names, which can change from place to place, botanical names ...

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 ...

For almost 300 years, researchers have classified life on Earth with scientific names — two-word monikers like Homo sapiens that become a kind of permanent label. But there are those who argue that ...

Even though tomatoes are a common ingredient in almost every type of food, their scientific name is hard to remember for both ...

Picking out the perfect baby name is a lot like picking a flower out of a garden or an apple off of a tree. On one hand, “green thumbs’ are looking for that vibrant, aromatic, freshly-bloomed flower ...