So What's In A Name?

If you do not know the names of things, the knowledge of them is lost, too.
Carolus Linnaeus, Philosophia Botanica, 1751

Yesterday I wrote about the pet names I have for my plants. When the Hubster read my post he asked me if I'd had any commenters saying that of course they didn't have names for their plants because they already had a perfectly good Latin binomial, courtesy of Linnaeus and friends. Of course, I haven't had any such comments!

But how much attention do we pay to the genus and species? I am a nerd. Because my garden is supposed to be one in which a dinosaur would feel at home I have to have some degree of palaeontological accuracy. So I have the Hartman Prehistoric Garden angiosperm list saved onto my mobile phone for those garden centre panic moments. I also have three cladograms (for the non-nerdy, these are like family trees, showing how each group of plants, in this case, are related to each other):

  

When I buy angiosperms (flowering plants), I aim to buy mainly from the left hand cladogram, some from the middle cladogram, and none at all from the right hand cladogram. Sometimes it doesn't work like that, and sometimes there are exceptions. For example, courtesy of a very generous forumer, I have a lump of Miscanthus to plant sometime. Miscanthus is a grass, which is a definite no-no for palaeontological accuracy, despite being a monocot, therefore on the left hand cladogram! All this is a roundabout way of saying that when I buy a plant I don't consider firstly whether it will look good in the garden, but what it is. So the binomial is incredibly important to me, but of no use to other gardeners. My mother is about to get cottage garden flowers in her garden, and I'm pretty sure she doesn't know the Latin name for a hollyhock, but she'll know which variety she wants for the correct colour.

Is anyone else as nerdy as me? And while we're on the subject of binomials, does anyone else get annoyed at how marginalised ferns are on shows like Gardeners' World (and Ground Force, Garden Invaders, all the ones on UKTV Gardens)? For a pretty flower, they'll say "Ooh, this is Flowerlicious pinkywinkii Candy Floss" and put the name up on screen so you can make a note of it. And then they'll have a beautiful fern specimen and say "And it looks great with this fern". The name of that fern really matters to some of us!