by Birgitta Eriksson

Translation: Henrik Gistvall, Edited by: Henrik Gistvall and John Biel Birgitta Eriksson is a university lecturer in Botany in Umeå, Sweden.

The Swedish Bonsai Society (SBS) consists of 250 members all over Sweden. The Club is divided in four districts, south, west, east and north. Birgitta is a member of the north district. She lives in Umeå which is far north and the center for the north district. Other members in the north district might travel 100 miles or more to get to a club meeting. The SBS was founded in 1986 by a small group of enthusiasts. SBS reached its peak in 1996 with 800 members, thanks to the cheap Chinese imports that fiooded Sweden and increased the interest for bonsai for a few years. We have a newsletter sent out to all members four times a year, a website with discussion forum and local club meetings. We also have an annual meeting in one of the districts with an invited guest artist from Europe. This fall we had the pleasure of meeting Marco Invernizzi.

Latin names can sometimes be dif. cult in a text, but they have great advantages. They give vital information on the plant’s relation to other species according to the different categories described in this article. It can also give information on where the plant grows or how it looks.

Latin also has the advantage, in this instance, of being an international language. For us Swedes, reading an English text, the botanical names can be of great help. If you are lucky, you recognize the name, or you can easily . nd it in a book in your native tongue. Some of us know the frustration of finding a tree abroad and not being able to identify it because the Latin name is missing. On top if it all, the name of the tree is sometimes written in a language you can’t read.

Latin names are controlled by international rules. For cultivated plants there is the International Code for Cultivated Plants, 1980. When you write in English, you might think that the English common name is good enough. There is one big problem with this: common names can differ from region to region, and even within regions. There are no rules for trivial (common) names in English. This means that those names, unlike botanical names, can’t be trusted to be accurate.

Many of the names we use today, like hyacinth and narcissi, were used by the ancient Greeks. The Romans took them on and “Latinized” them. Parallel with the Latin botanical names, there were common names for medicinal and other plants. Often there were several names given for both common and botanical names for the same plant. This created confusion.

The famous Swede, Carl von Linn‚ [Carolus Linnaeus, later dubbed Carl von Linné, and known in Sweden as Linn since 1850 (May 23, 1707 - January 10, 1778)], tried to create order out of this chaos and suggested plants should be divided into several groups based on the shape of their parts: the fiower, stamen, pistil, their numbers and form. His system of using sexual characteristics is still used to this day in some fioras, as it is easy and practical to use.

There are many botanical names and terms in use and they represent different aspects of the plant, for example: Picea abies, Pinus, Rosaceae to name a few. These names represent different “slots” in the classi. cation system: species (Picea abies), genus (pinus) and family (Rosaceae).

These categories are part of a hierarchic system starting with kingdom, and in falling scale: division, class, order, family, genus, species, subspecies, variety and form. Every species belongs to a genus, every genus to a family, every family to an order, and so on. Some genus are big. For example, there are 800 species under the genus Ficus, but only two under the genus Punica (pomegranate) and the genus Ginkgo has only one species. The categories species, genus, order and class were used by Linn, while the category family comes from a French botanist. The fact that not all categories where invented at the same time explains the illogical placing of family before genus.

The scienti. c name, the botanical nomenclature, is regulated by The International Code of Botanical Nomenclature. I will focus on the species, since this category is the basis for the botanical system and also with which we, as bonsai growers, come into regular contact.

Species (sp.)

What is a species? The easy way to describe this is to say when two different individuals produces fertile offspring you have a species. A fertile offspring will not result from two individuals of different species, hence no species. There are other ways to determine the species when it’s not possible to know if the offspring is fertile. Morphology, the science of determining species based on appearance and shape, is one such way.

The name of a species is described with two words, a genus name and a species epithet, e.g., Picea abies (Norway spruce). Picea is the genus and abies is the species epithet. This way of describing the name of an organism, the binary way, was “created” by Linn‚ in his book “Species Planetarum” 1753. Before that the description of one species was often a lengthy text in Latin.

The genus is written with a capital letter and the species epithet with a lower-case letter. The species epithet often ends with -a, -um, - us, and sometimes an -e (pratense), or - is (pratensis). Other endings are also used. An epithet can consist of one or two words with a hyphen between, e.g., Vaccinium vitis-idaea (grape from Ida mountain, lingonberry). Genus and species epithet can’t be the same. (This is not the case with animals, e.g., Grus grus, crane).

The species epithet can give useful information about the plant:

• Where the plant grows: aquatica (in the water), pratensis (in the meadow)
• How it looks: trifolata (a leaf consisting of three little leaves), rubrum (red), parvi. ora (with small fiowers), serrata (saw like)
• How it grows: repens ( in long strands)

Sometimes the genus or species epithet is based on a name of a person, e.g., Pinus thunbergii (Thunberg was one of Linn’s apprentices who traveled to Japan to collect plants for a botanical garden in Holland). Species is abbreviated sp. If, in a text, an author uses Pinus sp. to describe a pine, the author does not know the species of that pine. But if the author uses Pinus spp., it means there are several types of unknown pines.

Subspecies (ssp.)

Subspecies is shortened to ssp. Picea abies ssp. obovata is a subspecies of the species Picea abies (Norway spruce). Picea abies sspp. is used when describing several subspecies of Norway spruce.

Variety (var.)

Variety is shortened var., e.g., Ligustrum obtusifolia var. regalum or Fuchsia var. alba. The variety is used to separate species or subspecies growing in a limited area or certain environment.

Form (f.)

Form is shortened to ‘f.’ and describes a plant that differentiates itself from the species in respect of a speci. c character, e.g., shape of leaf, color of leaf, or blossom.

Cultivar

When it comes to cultivated plants, the term cultivar is used. It is the equivalent of the category form regarding variations on wild plants. A cultivar is distinguished by putting single quotation marks around the sort name. The cultivar name is always written with a capital letter, e.g., Ficus pumilia ‘Minima’, Ginkgo biloba ‘Fastigata’, Juniperus chinesis ‘Shimpaku’.

Genus

The genus name consists of one word, starting with a capital letter. There are no speci. c endings. The only rule is that already used endings by other categories, e.g., -aceae or - ales must not be used. Genus names often end with -a, -um, -us, e.g., Rosa (roses) or Pinus (pines).

Hybrids

Hybrids can have a binary name (genus and species epithet). To distinguish hybrid names from species an x is placed in front of the species epithet, e.g., Acer x freemanii. This particular hybrid is a crossing between A. rubrum and A. saccharum. It was discovered in a garden belonging to a person named Freeman, hence the name of the hybrid. If both parent plants are known and the hybrid doesn’t have binary name of its own you simple write, for example, Lagerstroemia indica x speciosa. Among many of our cultivated plants hybrid are so common that it’s not meaningful to give it a name of its own. You simply state the sort without the “x” that otherwise is used for hybrids, e.g., hybrids of fuchsia: Fuchsia ‘Annabel’, Fuchsia ‘Superstar’.

Synonyms

A synonym is a different name for a species. In some cases there are several Latin names for one species. Since only one can be correct, the author of the text has to take a stand. Often it is quite simple. There are rules for which name should be used. There is a priority rule that states the oldest name should be used. With an exception, that is names of seed plants published before 1753, none of these are correct. A synonym is recognized by the abbreviation “syn.” or simply by putting the word in brackets, e.g., Serissa foetida, syn. S. japonica. This example is from the book Botanica (editors R.J. Turner, Jr., and E. Wasson, 1999, Barnes & Nobel. This book contains descriptions of more than 10,000 plants with more than 600 color plates). Another example is in Johannes Lid’s fiora from 1987 where, for the birch Betula pubences, Lid uses five synonymous names! Even plants of the same genus can have synonymous names; e.g., Carmona and Erethia, two different names for the same genus. Ehretia is the name used today, Carmona is the synonym.

Author Name

Sometimes one or several letters are placed after the name of a species. The author name the botanical name. “L.” after the Latin name stands for Linn, e.g., Fuchsia L., Camellia japonica L... The author name provides legitimacy to the Latin name. In some cases, the botanical name is followed by two names, the first one in brackets. This means new scienti. c evidence has changed the classi. cation of the plant. It could have been transferred to another genus, or a genus of its own. This is for example the case with alder. Its full botanical name is Alnus glutinosa (L.) Gaertn. Linn‚ placed the alder in the genus Betula (birches), later on Gaertner discovered that this was not the case and placed the species in the genus Alnus.

Italicizing of Botanical Names

The botanical names are made italics in text to make it easier for the reader. In some publications only genus, species, subspecies and varieties are made italic. In other publications all botanical names are italicized.

Spelling of Botanical Names

The spelling to be used is the one first used by the author as long as it is not a spelling mistake. For instance, the species epithet for the Scots pine is “sylvestris”. In older literature the spelling “silvestris” is used, which is the correct spelling in modern Latin. However, this was not the spelling used by the author, Linn. Therefore, using the spelling “silvestris” as the botanical name is incorrect.”