Why do we bother with botanical names? If you say tomato, I’m likely to know what you mean. However, consider daisies- there are at least 20,000 species of daisies in the Asteraceae family. On top of that, there are plants from other botanical families that are often referred to as a daisy. To make matters worse, one person’s bee balm is another person’s bergamot; one person’s bachelor button is another person’s cornflower. Botanical names are unique to each plant.
Botanical names aren’t entirely reliable either, because occasionally as new knowledge of a plant emerges it
becomes clear that it was miscategorized. The plant generally gets a new botanical name when that happens. For the most part however, the clearest description of a plant will be its genus, species and variety (or sub-species) names. Back to tomatoes: the Roma variety of tomato would be Solanum lycospericum v Roma.
Botanical names also have the important advantage of helping us understand how plants are related. For instance, tomatoes are from the family Solanaceae. So are peppers and eggplants, and they all share many growth traits. They are intolerant of cold, they are hungry eaters, and when transplanting them much of the stem should be buried because they can form new roots on the stem.
Once we get the garden fully annotated, the metal labels will have the common name on the front of the label, and the botanical name on the back. Take a look at the botanical names; after a few dozen times they’ll start growing on you.
