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 ...

Passiflora incarnata, Nymphaea odorata, Chamaecrista fasciculata, Asclepius incarnata! Sounds like spells from the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, doesn’t it? While these words could come ...

They may seem opaque to most of us moderns who know no Latin or Greek, but the botanical names of plants often translate into crystal-clear descriptive terms. Knowing what they mean can, in a few ...

If you’ve been thumbing through a gardening catalog or shopping at a nursery, you’ve likely noticed two names assigned to each plant, a common name and a botanical name, the latter of which might read ...

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 ...

Often when we receive questions about a plant, all we're told is the plant’s common name. For most of our ornamental plants, that isn’t a problem, but when it comes to edible plants, figuring out the ...

Pea plant's scientific name is Pisum sativum, given in 1753 by Carl Linnaeus. Peas belong to the Fabaceae family (legumes), crucial for nitrogen fixation. Global pea market is expected to reach USD 17 ...

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 ...

Among complaints I occasionally receive, the one heard most often refers to the use of botanical nomenclature for plants. Even though I unfailingly also use each plant’s common name or names (if they ...

When talking to any Master Gardener, you will undoubtedly be told that learning the botanical — often called “Latin” — name of a plant is more important than knowing its common name. And while we all ...