My wife is a volunteer with the Washington Native Plant Society. Plants right now are going through a massive and wide-ranging reorganization, as DNA testing is demonstrating that previous understanding of plant taxonomy was rather, um, faulty. Plants are being moved from family to family, and families are being split. Things are no better at the genus level. The result is that, it seems to me, most Washington plants have a current scientific name, which is different from the one they had 5-10 years ago, which is different from the one in the Washington botanist?s bible, commonly known as ?Hitchcock? (the author?s name). Now days, it seems the constant is the common name in botany, even though the names are regional and inconsistent.

Unfortunately, things like the North American asters (part of the common name of many plants of the family Asteraceae) are no longer in the genus Aster, and are now divided amongst at least 10 new genera.

The confusion is almost humorous to watch; when I first started birding 20+ years ago (around the time that towhees and orioles were being renamed), the botanists were chiding birders for using common names, instead of the ?immutable? Linnaean binomials. :)

== Michael Hobbs
== Kirkland, WA
== http://www.marymoor.org/birding.htm
== http://www.marymoor.org/BirdBlog.htm
== birdmarymoor at frontier.com

From: Dennis Paulson
Sent: Friday, March 18, 2011 7:04 PM
To: McComb Gardens
Cc: TWEETERS tweeters
Subject: [Tweeters] Re: Common names for plants

Thanks, Jane. I suppose what I was thinking of was trees, as I am fairly certain there is an "official" list of tree names for North America. That does leave an awful lot of plants in limbo . . . . but of course they don't care what we call them!

I'm all for official common names. We generated them for dragonflies, and I think one of the consequences was that the interest in that group took a tremendous uptick. But thank goodness we have scientific names, which are constant for anyone in the world no matter their native language.


Dennis
-----
Dennis Paulson
1724 NE 98 St.
Seattle, WA 98115
206-528-1382
dennispaulson at comcast.net


On Mar 18, 2011, at 6:13 PM, McComb Gardens wrote:


"but more and more groups of animals (and I guess plants) have "official" common names now"

I wish this was true; but, it is not.
I know of 4 different species of plants that are called chokeberry.
It is geographic and cultural.

Wings,
Jane

Neil W. Burkhardt & Jane Stewart
McComb Gardens
751 McComb Road
Sequim, WA 98382-7882

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