Why are they called Jerusalem artichokes if they're not artichokes and they're native to the eastern US? Then again, maybe you're not familiar with Jerusalem artichokes. Maybe you know that plant instead as sunroot, earth apple, sunchoke, lambchoke, French potato, Canada potato or even topinambour. All interesting names, no doubt, but they aren't very helpful for classification purposes. Helianthus tuberosus, on the other hand, tells us immediately that we're talking about a sunflower that produces a tuber. While it's debatable whether Homo sapiens is really “the man who knows,” coming up with an organized system for naming living things was a good idea. Categorizing is just one of those things that comes to us naturally. As a matter of fact, research suggests that such sorting is innate (not learned) behavior. It's how we understand the world around us—sorting, predicting, and testing—in short, the scientific method.
Scientific naming is generally credited to the Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus with publication of his Systema Naturae in 1735. Binomial nomenclature gives each organism a two-word name, the first the genus (which is always capitalized), the second the species name (which is never capitalized, even when derived from a proper name).
Though scientific names are sometimes called Latin names, the names can be drawn from many sources, including Greek and other languages, names of people and places, and even anagrams—the flowering plant species Mullia is an anagram of the onion genus Allium! Quite often though, the species name can be descriptive. A few of California's many paintbrush species illustrate some of these sources.
- Castilleja angustifolia a paintbrush with narrow leaves
- Castilleja chromosa a very colorful paintbrush
- Castilleja densiflorus a paintbrush with very dense flowers
- Castilleja gleasoni from Mt. Gleason, in L.A. County
- Castilleja lemonii named for botanist J. G. Lemmon
Next time: start learning the scientific names of plants!