Gardeners owe major debt to plant taxonomist Carl Linnaeus

Ever wondered how plants get their names? Well, we gardeners can thank a brilliant 18th-century Swedish botanist and zoologist by the name of Carl Linnaeus for the birth of modern plant taxonomy, where plants are named using a binomial system (genus and species).

Linnaeus’s standardisation of plant names revolutionised botany. Much of its global success was down to its beautiful simplicity. Up until then, a baffling variety of vernacular names were used to distinguish one plant from another – as well, sometimes, as the same name for different plants – leading to huge confusion.

An example is the wild bluebell (now properly called Hyacinthoides non-scripta) whose other common names include “wood bell”, “fairy flower” and “bellbottle”. Regional differences further compounded the problem. For example, in Scotland, “bluebell” is used as a common name for a completely different plant (Campanula rotundifolia), while in Australia it refers to a decorative climbing plant (Sollya heterophylla).

But even the formal Latin plant names being used by botanists before Linnaeus’s system was universally adapted were often long and unwieldy. These were typically descriptive of the particular features of a particular plant, the problem being that as more and more species were discovered by plant-hunters, these descriptions had to become longer and longer as a means of clearly distinguishing one from another.

Hence botanists found themselves using names such as Arbutus caule erecto, foliis glabris serratis, baccis polyspermis (meaning “Arbutus with upright stems, hairless saw-toothed leaves and many- seeded berries’), a name that doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue . . . Under the streamlined Linnaean system, this native Irish tree (commonly known as the strawberry tree) is now known as Arbutus unedo L – with the “L” indicating that it was Linnaeus who first named it so.

Linnaeus had his critics. Because his (now much modified) system classified plants according to the number, size and arrangement of their reproductive organs, some accused him of being a botanical pornographer, including Johann Siegesbeck, the Prussian botanist and director of the Botanical Gardens of St Petersburg who called his work ‘loathsome harlotry’. Proving he had a wicked sense of humour and a stylish way of exacting revenge, Linnaeus named a small, ugly weed Siegesbeckia orientalis after Siegesbeck. See botanicgardens.ie and nhm.ac.uk for more information on the Linnaean system