Re: Plant names

**t* <t*@gmail.com>**

On Mon, Feb 25, 2013 at 12:54 PM, Jo Ellen Meyers Sharp
<hoosiergardener@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> What do we do w/a paragraph like you have below? My inclination would be to let it go lower case and include the botanical names as needed. I keep thinking we should develop a style sheet for us to use.
>
> On Feb 25, 2013, at 10:08 AM, mbyrnew@comcast.net wrote:
>
> I agree with you, Jo Ellen -- common names of plants  should be lower case. But then we get sentences like this:
> "Spring-flowering shrubs that may be pruned once bloom is completed include lilac ( Syringa spp.), pieris, daphne, azalea, rhododendron, spirea, forsythia, spring-flowering viburnum, weigela, flowering quince ( Chaenomeles spp.), red twig dogwood ( Cornus spp.) and deutzia."
> Is this "right" or just more confusing?
>
> Michelle Byrne Walsh

For that paragraph (for a newspaper), I'd leave out the botanical
names and go all lowercase. Even if you know quince can be either
Chaenomeles or Cydonia, the modifier "flowering" tells you which one
it is. If I wanted to include all the botanical names, I'd format it
as a bulleted list rather than a sentence.

I've been writing a newspaper column on native plants for several
years. For the first column, I included Latin names, because common
names can be ambiguous and because I was more familiar with the Latin
names! I find the botanical names of native buckwheats more
descriptive than the common names, for instance. But by the second
column I realized that, with a limited word count, it made more sense
to add context if the common names were ambiguous. I always include my
email address, so anyone who wanted to know the botanical name could
contact me (but no one has!).

Common names such as "mock orange" are problematic: on the west coast,
we have Australian pittosporums and native (and nonnative!)
Philadephus spp. I can get around that by saying "native mock orange
shrubs"  or "western mock orange" but sometimes it's clearer to use
the Latin name. It also depends on whether the plant is a passing
reference in a list, or the topic of a paragraph or two. You do have
to know which common names are unique and which ones can refer to
different genera.

Another alternative is to use cultivar names. So I could say Goose
Creek mock orange, or the Goose Creek cultivar of western mock orange.
afaik it's correct to use cultivar names without the single quotes if
you're using them with common names (vs. botanical names), but I
*always* capitalize the cultivar names because they are  proper names.

For a newspaper, specifically, I wouldn't assume that any formatting
would come through, so I avoid using anything that would require
italics or single quotes. Unless you can have a conversation with the
copy editors (and again every time new ones come on the job), I'd
assume that single quotes would be removed or converted to double,
with punctuation in the wrong place, and that italics would be
removed.

Tanya Kucak
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