RHS Latin for Gardeners: Over 3,000 Plant Names Explained and Explored: More than 1,500 Essential Plant Names and the Secrets They Contain

Product Information

These shows exhibit the best in horticulture by providing show gardens, floral marques and expert advice. The process has even been reciprocal, and my Latin vocabulary is larger now than it was when I was a teenager even though I’ve never taken another Latin course since then.

Despite the serious look of these books, the information inside is really accessible and written in understandable language. It's important to be exact when using plants in the kitchen and knowing the meanings of the descriptive Latin binomial names is helpful for both herbalist and naturalist. On the other hand, you might expect a plant with the epithet melliodorus ( Eucalyptus melliodorus) to be foul-smelling, but actually its name means it has the scent of honey. Most of us are not Latin scholars or indeed trained botanists but, day by day, we need to consult and understand the meaning of both the generic and species names for our plants.He does list genera and species but only in a few short pages at the end of his subject-orientated eight chapters, giving examples relevant to each topic. He feels that ordinary gardeners can enjoy unravelling ‘meanings’ through their historical background. Her previous titles include How to Read Gardens and The Shaker Book of the Garden, and she regularly contributes to Gardens Illustrated and Hortus magazine.

However, I didn't know what the Latin names were based on so this book was fascinating in learning those details. Secondly, even though you would think that having 3,000 plus plant names would answer most of your inquiries, I have found that (at best) I can find the name I am looking for about 40% of the time.In the succeeding chapters he continues to make serious history palatable, an antidote to the scholarly Latin that is an indispensable part of plant identification. But there is really interesting information on the what the Latin names that are applied to plants actually mean. Vernacular names for plants may be pretty but they are often regional and so quite useless for speaking to people round the world as we do with our blogs.