Jane Powers loves Latin names, because they put plants in their place
My sister, who lives in the United States, is a good gardener. Bushels of vegetables and fruits tumble from her weekend patch in the country, while clouds of flowers swirl around her city porch. You'd expect we'd talk of nothing but plants, but it's not so easy.
"My moonflowers are sick," she says.
"Moonflowers?" I ask, confused. "What's their Latin name?"
"Oh, I don't know!" she snorts, refusing to pander to my - as she sees it - pretentious gobbledegook. My plant dictionary reveals that her moonflowers are Ipomoea alba, a kind of morning glory. The conversation can proceed, now that we both know what we're talking about. Yet, we run into trouble again with her "myrtle" - the vernacular name for at least a dozen plants. Despite being fellow gardeners, we're on different sides of the Atlantic, and we don't speak the same language.
Which is a pity, because the language is there, ready for use, so that gardeners the world over can understand each other - no matter what their mother tongue.
Latin binomials (two-part names that denote a species) belong to a rigorously logical system. Take the moonflower: its Latin handle, Ipomoea alba, is similar to a person's name, except the surname (known as the genus) comes first. There are hundreds of Ipomoea (including Ipomoea batatas, the sweet potato), but only one designated alba. The 500 or so Ipomoea belong to a larger grouping, the Convolvulaceae "family". That, in turn, belongs to an even larger grouping higher up on the organisational pyramid: an "order" - which makes up part of a "class", which makes up part of a "division".
Simple. Elegant. Satisfying. Such a neat arrangement makes me (and other gardeners, I'm sure) feel nice and secure. A place for everything - and everything in its place.
We owe this shipshape ordering of plants entirely to the hard-working 18th-century Swede Linnaeus. Don't we? Well, no, says Anna Pavord, author of the recently-published The Naming of Names. "What Linnaeus was doing was mopping up, actually. The binomial system had been evolving for centuries before he came along. He was just a sort of human clickety-clack machine."
As she tells it, fully 2,000 years before Linnaeus, human beings were attempting to name and categorise the unruly mass of greenery in the plant kingdom. Her story begins with a pupil of Aristotle, Theophrastus, who, around 300 BC, wrote the first known book on plants. While those around him were concerned solely with whether a plant was any good for eating, healing or poisoning, he was more interested in what plants actually were, what the point of their various parts was, and what their relationship to each other was.
At that time, plants were dimly understood: nobody knew the purpose of flowers, where seeds came from or even how plants differed from animals. Theophrastus himself subscribed to the idea that plants were animals with their feet in the air and their mouths in the ground. This may seem endearingly bizarre today, but we must remember that the Greeks were starting from scratch. Nobody had asked these questions before.
And nobody before Theophrastus had put so much effort into finding the key to their order. In his Enquiry into Plants he mentions 500 plants, with detailed observations on each, noting which shared common characteristics. He suggested grouping them into four divisions: trees, shrubs, subshrubs and herbs. He realised that it was not a satisfactory classification, but the point is, he was the first to attempt such a feat. He sensed that plants weren't random creations and that as a group they were organised into some big, beautiful system.
After his death, in 287 BC, Theophrastus's original work disappeared for 1,800 years - owing to bad luck, and later, the advent of the Romans. What remained were poorly-transcribed fragments, which were plundered and twisted about by others, including Pliny in his Historia Naturalis (c. AD 77): "an encyclopaedic ragbag of information about science, art, plants, animals", according to Pavord. Around the same time, the physician Dioscorides produced his De Materia Medica, based on the medical uses of plants.
To simplify and summarise (grossly and inadequately) part of Pavord's thesis: it was these two antiquated texts, particularly the latter, that informed almost all European writings on plants until the 16th century.
With Theophrastus's pioneering ideas lost or unrecognisably scrambled, man's view of plants reverted to being wholly anthropocentric. Nobody regarded plants with a dispassionate eye. Medicine, says Pavord, was skewing the plot.
Plant books were invariably "herbals", detailing only the medicinal or magical uses of their subjects. An unquestioning reverence for the ancients meant that "they were all rehashing Dioscorides", says Pavord, "trying to make those Greek plants fit into a completely different landscape".
The lack of a universal language for naming, and Dioscorides's subjective descriptions, meant that nobody knew for sure what his plants were, and whether they grew in the rest of Europe. Where manuscripts - and later, printed works - had illustrations, these were copied and stylised, transmogrifying into nonsense plants: crooked stems were straightened, raggedy leaves were tidied up, wayward fruits and flowers were gathered into neat bundles of bobbles. For centuries, thanks to these gruesome herbals, plant science was a befuddled stew of conjecture and superstition, served up to a credulous public by unthinking medics. A published work, no matter how garbled, carried great authority. (Even today, someone somewhere believes headlines such as "Elvis sings to alien in Florida hot tub".)
It was artists' eyes that were unglued first, around AD 1300, when illustrations based on real plants (rather than on other drawings) began to appear in manuscripts. In the next two centuries flower-painters sped ahead of the plant scholars, who were still regurgitating the same old stuff. The problem, says Pavord, was that the words had not yet been invented to describe the parts of plants, nor was there any clear way of comparing different species.
But by the beginning of the 16th century the spirit of inquiry was surging through Europe. Pliny's and Dioscorides's writings were finally questioned. Theophrastus resurfaced in the Vatican Library. A series of brilliant men - Luca Ghini, Leonhart Fuchs, William Turner, Conrad Gesner, Rembert Dodoens, Andrea Cesalpino, Lobelius, Clusius and a host of other heavyweights - collected plants and formulated descriptions, debating, sniping and nit-picking along the way. A system of binomial nomenclature began to emerge, but the organising of the plant world remained a vexing matter.
Finally, to cut a very long story short, it was John Ray, a deep-thinking and ardent plantsman, who, in 1703, defined a method for classifying plants. His Six Rules, and the arguments that led to them, are too complicated to reproduce here (you'll need to read Pavord's unlikely page-turner to get the whole hog), but they showed the way for Linnaeus to do the donkey work. And allowed plantspeople everywhere to communicate clearly - although not this Dublin gardener and her Massachusetts sister.
The Naming of Names, by Anna Pavord, is published by Bloomsbury, £30. Pavord will discuss her book on Thursday at 8pm, at Airfield House, Dundrum, Dublin. Tickets (€5) can be booked at 01-2984301