Caroline Harbouri, the editor of the MGS journal - The Mediterranean Garden, has written a very useful note on botanical names, which we have been allowed to post here. I am also uploading it as a separate file for anyone who wants to keep it handy or print it out.
BOTANICAL NAMES
1. Botanical names should be italicised. The first name, that of the genus, should have a capital letter; the second name, the species, should not have a capital (e.g.
Lavandula angustifolia). It may be helpful to think of the genus name as the “surname” and the species name as the “Christian name”.
2. If several plants of the same genus are mentioned one after another, after the first mention the genus name can be abbreviated to a single italicised capital letter and full stop followed by a space before the species name (e.g.
Lavandula angustifolia,
L. stoechas and
L. dentata).
3. When the plant is classified as a subspecies it is written thus:
Lavandula stoechas ssp.
pedunculata OR
Lavandula stoechas subsp.
pedunculata. The abbreviations ‘ssp.’ and ‘subsp.’ are NOT italicised.
4. ‘spp.’ (not italicised) is the abbreviation for ‘species’ (in the plural): not to be confused with ‘ssp.’ for subspecies as above.
5. When the plant is a hybrid it is written thus:
Lavandula x
intermedia. The ‘x’ is not italicised. A hybrid is, roughly speaking, a cross between two different species of (usually) the same genus, made either deliberately by human plant breeders (imagine breeding dogs and deciding that you want to cross a labrador with a setter) or, more rarely, by nature (if two different species of the same genus grow near one another, bees or other pollinating insects may cross-fertilise them).
6. When the plant is a named cultivar (i.e. not a naturally occurring species but a named form bred by human horticulturalists – imagine breeding pedigree dogs for several generations and selecting the parents each time for the longest tail or the thickest coat), it is written thus:
Lavandula angustifolia ‘Hidcote Giant’. The genus and species of the cultivar are written as normal, in italics with a capital letter for the genus; the cultivar name is not italicised, has a capital letter – or capital letters if it’s more than one word – and is enclosed in SINGLE inverted commas (not double inverted commas).
7. When the plant is a variety it is written thus:
Cupressus sempervirens var.
atlantica. The ‘var.’ is not italicised but the varietal name is, like the species name. Things get a bit complicated here: technically a variety is “the category of taxa intermediate between subspecies and forma”, i.e. slightly different from the species type (the “forma”) but less different than a subspecies. All that matters is to remember that a variety, naturally occurring, is NOT the same thing as a cultivar and is written in the same format as a subspecies.
8. When the species name of a plant is double (but it is not a subspecies or variety), then the two names are hyphenated: e.g.
Hibiscus rosa-sinensis,
Opuntia ficus-indica,
Oxalis pes-caprae etc.
9. Botanical names CANNOT EVER be used in the plural. It is not possible to write e.g. “two
Lavandula angustifolias”. Instead one can write either “two specimens of
Lavandula angustifolia” or “two lavenders (
Lavandula angustifolia)”. One can, however, make an ordinary common noun of the genus name and write it in the plural (“two lavandulas”, “two teucriums” etc) but in this case it should NOT have a capital and should NOT be italicised.
10. The names of plant families (Asteraceae, Brassicaceae etc) have a capital letter and are not usually italicised.
11. WATCH OUT: unless the spell-check on your computer is turned off, it will make automatic erroneous corrections to correctly typed plant names. Where a plant’s species name is
ruber, for example, the computer will convert this to
rubber,
involucrata and
maritima become
involucrate and
maritime, etc. Make sure that this isn’t happening and check carefully.