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Re: A Pet Peeve and Need Identification Help

Title: Re: [GWL] A Pet Peeve and Need Identification Help
Hi Peter,
Who gets to name it first? If we look at the sometimes weed, lambsquarters, we can imagine an ever so cute flock of sheep cavorting about the meadow with their wee little tails flouncing. However, if we look at the sometimes weed Chenopodium album, we can imagine an ever so cute flock of geese, cavorting about a mill pond with their not so wee little feet flouncing (?) under the water's surface.
In my day job as a wholesaler (This writing-for-a-living gig isn't quite sufficient don't you know.), we make a point to use a specific epithet on all our invoices and, especially, during our conversations with whomever might be ordering plants from us. With a customer base ranging from Canadian Hardiness Zones 2b to 7a, the simple request for a flowering dogwood can be fraught with perils.
In my other day job as a retailer, where the customer is in the nursery, we just go to the plant in questions and say, "Is this it?" Do you have any idea how many plants are called "bluebells" by the purchasing public?
(I just had Graham's e-mail come in referring to bluebells. I wonder if this is the most mis-identified plant?)
When people tease me about "showing off" with those big fancy names, I just tell them that I paid someone a whole lot of money to teach them to me and I need to get full value.
So it goes, eh?
Dan
GWA
 
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, June 25, 2003 1:32 PM
Subject: Re: [GWL] A Pet Peeve and Need Identification Help

Usually, it's research that leads to a name change. Often the name in use, such as Oenothera missourensis, is found to be preceded by another name, in this case macrocarpa. And frankly, since the English misspelled the first species, I much prefer the second, because it was an American who first named it. So the rule is the first to name it gets  the honor and often it takes a century to sort it out. And it's often not bad, either: The first genus for the hosta family was Funkia. Imagine the fix with the misspellings and poor editing of today if that had not been replaced with Hosta. Best, Peter
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, June 25, 2003 1:09 PM
Subject: Re: [GWL] A Pet Peeve and Need Identification Help

My own personal quandry over scientific names is in wondering why some are changed.  Sometimes there are good reasons, such as DNA testing or the like showing that a plant is more closely related to another group of plants than the one it had been placed in.  In some cases, the change seems so arbitrary as to make no sense, or at least is of such a small value that the confusion over the new name offsets anything gained.  
   In my own interest, grapes, I've seen two cases of renaming that illustrate this.  One was in moving the muscadine grapes into a new genus.  That one made sense as the species has a different number of chromosomes from all other grapes.  In another case, a species named after the discoverer was given a "descriptive" name, from Vitis longii (Col. Long's grape) to V. acerifolia (Maple leaf grape).  The latter name doesn't fit all that well and it discards the historical value of the previous name.  
   In the long run, as new people come along and get used to the new names, it probably won't matter, but it now outdates all previous books and articles and will cause confusion in anyone who uses the older references.
   Perhaps there is an article in all this - giving the old and new names of plants and the story behind the change.  
-Lon Rombough

There are occasional articles in Natural History and similar magazines and
journals by people like my late heroes Isaac Asimov and Stephen Jay Gould that
try to explain that science is not about certainty, but the search to
understand.  Karl Linne saw the need to organize the things he wanted to understand.  
We are beginning to reorganize some of his patterns, but it is still about
searching and testing.  I had little exposure to different cultures until 35 years
ago.  I knew a little bit of scientific Latin, but had zero awareness of how
many common names could be hung over the same plant and nobody wants to change
their practices.

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For GWL website and Wiki, go to
http://www.ibiblio.org/gardenwriters

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at: http://www.hort.net/lists/gwlphotos

Post gardening questions/threads to
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For GWL website and Wiki, go to
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