All living organisms they are classified into several groups with different degrees of relationship. In the plant kingdom, the various levels of classification include class, order, family, genus, and species.
The purpose of names is to organize the world of plants and most have two types of names: common and botanical.
Types of plant names
Common name
The common name of a plant it is easy to pronounce and is very descriptive. Names like bleeding heart and goat's beard offer insight into the plant's personality or appearance.
Common names they are in different languages and they are not encrypted in any way. They are often confusing, because the same plant can have different names in different places.
Botanical name and binomial nomenclature
For more than 200 years, the classification model of the botanical nomenclature or scientific name of the plant, instituted by Linnaeus (1707-1778.
Linnaeus simplified the naming procedure through the "binomial" system. At the simplest level of scientific classification, each plant has a botanical name made up of two parts, a generic name or genus, and a specific epithet.
Together they are known as binomial and by convention, the name is printed in italics.
Gender
The first word represents the largest group to which the plant belongs, the genus, and the first letter is always capitalized. They are generally in latíThey are not latinized words from other languages, particularly Greek.
Species
The second word is the species and its first letter is written in lowercase. The species name is often descriptive of some aspect of the plant, for example: hawthorn crataegus missouriensis, It was named after the state of Missouri.
Flowers are the most commonly used part of the plant for names. By knowing the terms of the flowers, you will know many names of plants. An example is color, hence the common species 'lactiflora' or 'alba' means white, 'lutea' yellow, 'purpurea' purple and 'rubrum' red.
Once the gender has been used in a paragraph it can be abbreviated, such as S. splendens. An unspecified or unknown species in the genus Sage, it would be written as Kratom sp. If more than one species is denoted in the genus, then it will be written Kratom spp., with two p.
Sometimes, in the plant taxonomy you will see a third nameIn such cases, we are simply getting more specific, taking into account the variation within a species. Normally, this third name indicates a cultivated variety; it will appear in single quotes and its first letter will be capitalized, however, sometimes, this third name indicates a natural variety.
The name of a variety is preceded by the abbreviation "var". Unless the variety name is a proper name, its first letter is not capitalized. Like the genus name and specific epithet, the variety name will be italicized.
The hybrids or crosses between different species, are given unique names that are preceded by an x. Sometimes another word is added after the genus name and the epithet that is not italicized or marked with quotation marks. It refers to the name of the person who first described the plant. These names are sometimes abbreviated. When the name is abbreviated as "L", it means "Linnaeus."
Family
Although binomial nomenclature only includes genus and speciesIt is also very useful to know which family a plant belongs to. This is a great help in identifying plants, since at a family level, they often have similar physical characteristics.
Botanical families are named using a Latin plural adjective ending in "aceae" and the adjective generally describes the most prominent gender or characteristic of the family. Family names always start with a capital letter and are written in a normal script, for example Fabaceae - named after Faba (bean)