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Guest Speaker, Dr Dale Dixon talked about Understanding Plant Names.
Dale Dixon is a botanist and horticulturist, former Curator Manager at The Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney, and Chief Botanist at the Northern Territory Herbarium for 10 years.
He did his Ph. D. in plant taxonomy at J.C.U. Townsville, and now lives on his 4.5 acres at Mount Ninderry, near Yandina on the Sunshine Coast.
Systematics and Taxonomy are two lines of discovery in the plant world.
Systematics has revealed much about plants through study of their DNA.
Taxonomy is the identification, naming and classifying of plants,and this is Dale’s area of expertise.
Carl Linnaeus started it all in 1753:
His innovation was to give each plants a short two word description
called a binomial (bi= two, nomial = name).
He gave us a shortened name to replace a clumsy Latin description:
In 1753, Linnaeus actually named three Tillandsias!
There are three types of plant names:
Scientific- Latin or Greek words.
Common- in any language, and
Cultivar- a registered name of a species or hybrid.
ICBN International Code of Botanical Nomenclature governs the use of scientific names of plants. The plant name must be published, and described.
From 2013, this can be in Latin or English.
The earliest published name has priority, unless the ICBN rules otherwise.
Our Red River Gum is Eucalyptus camaldulensis, named for the Camaldoli monastery near Naples! How come? The plant was imported into the estate of the monastery in the late 18th century. There, a botanist first gave it a scientific name in 1832, and that name has priority!
Plant names can be
-Latin, Latinised, or Greek
-Descriptive
-Honoring
-Simple words
-Compound words.
Understanding the makeup of plant names can unlock a lot of information.
Connection or Possession:
Colours :
green = Viridian, chloro
blue = cyaneus, cyanea, caeruleus, azureus
purple = purpureus
red = rubra, erythro, rosea, rhodo-
yellow flowers are purple on the underside.
Thanks Dale for a talk, both entertaining and educational.
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