What's in a name? - the pursuit of botanical identity

The cover of my book with its photograph of the doyen of botanists, Charles Austin Gardner, responsible for identifying and naming hundreds of Western Australian native plants

Some years ago, I was involved in an interesting project: researching and writing a book on the history of botanical science in Western Australia. I enjoyed this, because I have had a lifetime interest in plants, especially trees, and have worked closely with many professional botanists. The project also led me to reflect on the esoteric business of how plants are classified and named, and on the work of those specialist botanists (known as ‘taxonomists’) who spend their careers studying previously-unknown plants, assigning them to a class and conferring names on them.

Along the way, I achieved an (admittedly shallow) understanding of the subtleties of the science involved, but I also became (admittedly peripherally) embroiled in some of the confusions and controversies that often surround this seemingly innocent and harmless work.

To the outsider, especially if you are an outdoors person, botany appears to be a peaceful and pleasant pursuit. We imagine young men and women botanists, wearing boots and backpacks, collecting rare and striking plants in remote and beautiful bushland.

Western Australian botanist Vanessa Yoemans exploring the flora of Boyagin Rock

This is, of course, a romanticised image. In reality, field botanists are just as likely to be found macheting their way through mosquito-infested rainforests, digging their 4-Wheel drive out of a bog, doing a perish in The Great Sandy Desert or trying to light a campfire in pouring rain, after dark, at Cape Arid. Nevertheless, the romantic scenario appeals, as it combines the pleasures and beauties of the bush with the mysteries and challenges of science. I have many botanist friends, and I used always to envy their gentle and rewarding lifestyle, free from the sort of political argy-bargy that dogged my career in forestry and bushfire management.

At least, that was the case until I entered the cloistered world of botanical institutions in government departments and academia, and became familiar with some of the intense goings-on therein. To my surprise, I found that on the inside, and especially in universities, botanical science is replete with professional disputes, academic infighting, disagreements and animosities. Some internecine feuds between plant taxonomists are famous. I know two botanists who, former friends and colleagues, no longer speak to each other after falling out over a change of name for a genus of WA wildflower.

The magnificent Dryandra stuposa, a close relative of Dyandra nobilis after which the famous Dryandra Forest was named. All of the Dryandras have been renamed Banksia amidst fierce botanical controversy.

The intensity of botanical infighting was never better illustrated than by the World War that erupted over whether Australian wattles would continue to be classified as Acacia, as they had been since time immemorial, or whether they would be reclassified as a new genus with the unlovely name Racosperma. In the end this dispute had to be referred for resolution to a committee of specially appointed botanical jurists from all over the world, and then only after the pros and cons of the issue had been passionately debated at meetings, conferences, in the literature, in the bush and even on Macca on a Sunday morning on ABC radio. Ultimately the decision came down to a cliff-hanger vote at an international botanical congress. A huge sigh of relief was heard on one side of the debate (the name Acacia was retained for Australian wattles) and a grinding of teeth on the other [Endnote 1].

Botanist Dr. Bruce Maslin OAM, left, who fought to preserve the name ‘Acacia’ for Australian wattles, and succeeded.

Non-botanists mostly stay aloof from botanical controversies, and are either unaware of them, or don’t care.  Others of us find controversies in science inherently interesting. This is because of the way they pit an expert in a particular field against another expert in the same field. I have been up to my ears in such a controversy for the last 50 years, the dispute over prescribed burning for mitigating bushfires in WA forests.  After all this time, the opposing forces (firefighters on one side, academic activists on the other) continue to shell each other across No Man’s Land, and the battle has sunk into the classic stalemate where neither expert nor expert will cede an inch of ground.

Like bushfire management, botany seems to give rise to especially passionate professional feuds.  One explanation, perhaps, is that taxonomic science (determinations about the way plants are classified and named) is inexact … there is nearly always a degree of subjectivity in the final decision about whether a given plant is “in” a particular category, or “out”.  At one scale, different plants are obviously very different – a salmon gum is easily distinguished from a Red and Green kangaroo paw for example. But not all salmon gums or all kangaroo paws are identical. At the microscopic or molecular scale, there are morphological variations, and it is up to the taxonomist to decide whether or not a particular variation makes the salmon gum or kangaroo paw with these characteristics to no longer be called a salmon gum or kangaroo paw, but something else.

A magnificent salmon gum (Eucalyptus salmonophloia) at Yillimilling in Western Australia

A Red and Green Kangaroo Paw (Anigozanthos manglesii) in Kings Park, Perth WA

And, as in all walks of life, the personal factor plays a part in botanical feuds. Many taxonomists spend years, indeed they devote almost their entire working career, to studying a single type of plant. They get very close to it, utterly invested at a personal level. To this person, an alternative view from another taxonomist about “their” plant is often not accepted as credible and can be fiercely rejected.

A final factor is that taxonomy these days is often performed at the molecular level, the characteristics over which the botanists argue being invisible to the human eye, a product of ‘cutting-edge’ technology. Almost nobody, outside those who practise it, understands this approach.

 The problem with names

Classification is one thing, names are another. They are also often a source of controversy and confusion. I know of Western Australian trees, for example, which have at least eight names. There is the “accepted” scientific Latin name (although there can be two of these depending on which botanist you listen to), two or three common English names, and three or four Aboriginal language names. All can be regarded as legitimate, depending on where you are coming from, or plain wrong if you are coming from somewhere else.

[A digression: This situation is not confined to plants. I have numerous names myself: to my wife and friends I am Roger, to my sisters Roj, to my brother Rod, to my kids Dad, to my grandkids Papa (apart from grandson Will who calls me Pup), and to my great granddaughter I am Papageno … and I answer to all of them. My Canadian mate Roger Phillips and I call each other Raaaj as this is the way our professor (the famous Dr David R.M. Scott) at the forestry school in Washington used to address us when Raaaj and I were students there. My nickname at school was Uns and some of my former schoolmates still call me that. Finally, the charming young lady at the 777 Pharmacy always calls me Mr Underwood, the last person on Planet Earth to do so.]

Names are all around us. Humans, animals, plants, fish, rocks, insects, even the stars and constellations in the firmament, all have names [2]. This is taken for granted.  Everything seems to have a name (except maybe for that ‘nameless horror’ that assails us when walking down a lonely, echoing alleyway in a strange city at 2 am … but even ‘nameless horror’ is a name).  Names are important, in fact essential, enabling us to single things out from the crowd, and to communicate about things to others. Where would the horse racing caller be if the horses were not named – “and here comes the brown one, passing another brown one on the outside”. And how would we identify and communicate about plants that are safe to eat and those that are poisonous if they were not named.

There are many peculiarities and subtleties about names. Especially interesting is the process of naming - deciding on a name for something new, something discovered, or created, with no pre-existing name. When parents decide to call their baby boy “John” or “Michaelangelo” they are conferring their newborn with a label that he will wear for the rest of his life. And not always for good – we all know the stories about Mr and Mrs Christmas calling their daughter “Mary”, or about instances where people changed their name by deed poll to avoid embarrassment.

[Another digression: My father once told me a story about this when I was a little boy. I had asked him was it possible to change your name, and he said that it was. He once knew a chap, he said, called John Dogsbottom who changed his name. I was enthralled. “What to?” I asked. “Frank Dogsbottom” my father replied. I had not up to then appreciated the fact that my father had a sense of humour. The story, however, has a postscript. I was able to replicate the joke with my own son Tim when he was about 6 years old; I had been waiting for years for him to ask me the same question. Gratifyingly, the result was the same: hysterical laughter from Tim and my admiring understanding of the way an innocent can be sucked into an old, old joke].

Luckily, deciding on the name for a new-born is usually done amicably – most parents can sort it out easily enough, and the rest of the world accepts their decision. It is different in the botanical world. You would think that a botanist, exploring some remote bushland which had never before seen anyone in boots and a hi-viz jacket, and coming across a plant unknown to science, would be able to decide upon its name, to her or his heart’s content, there and then. But not so.  Conferring an “official” scientific name on a plant is seriously regulated. Botanists have drawn up an international rule book governing how it must be done [2], and all botanists are required to comply with the rules, especially if they want to publish an account of a newly classified and named plant species in a reputable journal. One of the first rules is that ‘official’ plant names must be in Latin – a language spoken almost nowhere in the world [4]. A second is that no two different plant species can have the same scientific name.

In his wonderful book Imperial Nature Jim Endersby [5] makes a powerful observation on all this. He writes:

   Names have a curious potency: to know something’s name – its correct name – is to know what it is, to have grasped something more than an arbitrary label. The power to confer names is a kind of magic. In [the Old Testament], God created the beasts of the earth and the fowls of the air, but then he “brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.”

The phrase the King James translators chose, “that was the name thereof”, resonates with a subtle sense that Adam’s names were not capricious, that he knew what the names should be. Almost as if he knew what God himself did not. Hence our sense that, despite William Shakespeare’s oft-quoted opinion, that which we call a rose would almost certainly not smell as sweet if it were called the Lesser Stinkwort – at the very least it would have been less likely to have found its way into the language of poets, philosophers and lovers.

For as long as humans have been conferring names on plants and animals, they have been guided by the elusive sense that there are right and wrong names, and so naming is not to be taken lightly ...

I found a curious echo of this recently when re-reading Bruce Chatwin’s fascinating book Songlines. As Chatwin himself [6] describes the book, it is

… an investigation into the labyrinth of invisible pathways which Australian Aboriginals call “The Footprints of the Ancestors”, while Europeans know them as “Songlines” or “Dreaming Tracks”.  The Aborigines believe that the totemic ancestor of each species created himself from the mud of his primordial waterhole. He takes a step forward, and sings his name, which is the opening line of a song. He takes a second step, which is a gloss on the first line and completes the linked couplet. He then sets off on a journey across the land, footfall after footfall, singing the world into existence [naming the]: rocks, escarpments, sand dunes, gum trees, and so on …

The songlines enabled Aborigines to navigate their way over vast distances, the songs acting like oral maps, guiding them through unfamiliar country, from one named feature in the song to the next. The names so created became the names and were memorised by the totemic descendants of the first ancestor who then could follow them to find their way over vast distances and back, and to travel safely through other people’s country.

Anthropologists will probably tell me that other cultures around the world have explanations about how “naming” commenced, and I suspect that all of the stories will share a common theme: the power conferred on a person who confers a name.

Turning back the clock

Although I knew the common names of most of the native trees growing around Perth and in nearby rural areas by the time I was about 16 (thanks to my father), I first came up against the mysteries of scientific plant naming and classification as a forestry student at the University of WA in the late 1950s. The first two years of our forestry degree covered the same subjects as a Bachelor of Science with a major in botany. Thus we did two full years of botanical subjects, including plant taxonomy, or “Systematics”, as the discipline is called these days: the study of the identification, naming and classification of plants. We were taught taxonomy by a wonderful lady botanist called Alison Baird, of whom I have written previously in these chronicles [7].

Alison Baird in the 1940s, botanist, mathematician and teacher

I didn’t know it at the time, but in being one of Miss Baird’s students, I became part of a proud tradition – three generations of Western Australian botanists, foresters, agricultural scientists, horticulturalists and geologists attended her lectures and accompanied her on field trips. We remember her with enormous affection. She was known to us all as “Jungle Jill”, a name she earned on excursions to Kings Park or Swanbourne Beach when, clad in tweeds, a woolly cardigan, stout shoes and a bonnet, she would stride through the bush, pointing to left and right, naming every plant in sight by its correct scientific name. Her knowledge of the Western Australian flora seemed to us to be encyclopaedic, and her botanical enthusiasms were so infectious they have lasted most of her students a lifetime.

 Common names

Plant and animal names are not simply a matter of science and the use of Latin in “official” names. Most plants also have common names (the so-called ‘folk taxonomy’), and these are interesting, sometimes humorous, even shocking [7], or they have historic or poetic linkages. Common names are also much more widely used and known than botanical names. Shakespeare reminded us in Hamlet in the scene where poor Ophelia drowns:

There is a willow grows aslant a brook

That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream;

There, with fantastic garlands did she come,

Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies and long purples

That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,

But our cold maids do Dead Men’s Fingers call them....

 Poor Ophelia. “… her garments, heavy with their drink, pull'd the poor wretch from her melodious lay down to a muddy death". The names of the wildflowers she had been collecting to make a garland were no longer of any consequence.

Do names matter, in the greater scheme of things? Well, not much to a drowning noblewoman or even a liberal shepherd, but to the scientist they matter a great deal. Moreover, in the modern-day fields of flora conservation, forestry, horticulture, agriculture, and the mining industry, delineating plant species and naming them correctly can have legal and commercial implications. It is also the only way to ensure precise communication at the international level about the identity, use and conservation of plant species. There are whole rafts of legislation designed to protect “rare and endangered” plant species. Many botanists earn a crust looking for these in areas scheduled for mining or urban development, while others are engaged in propagating them and preserving their seeds. Correctly naming these plants is fundamental. And finally, of course, discriminating (and then naming) species is a serious intellectual challenge in itself, one which most biologists find irresistible.

But it is not all roses. Taxonomic botanists are often the butt of complaints from foresters, horticulturalists and gardeners, because of the way plant names never seem to settle down. Just as you feel sure you can recognise a Eucalyptus ficifolia every time you see one, it is suddenly renamed Corymbia ficifolia. This is not only a source of confusion but also often of animosity. But we remind ourselves that, knowledge and understanding are evolving, almost nothing in science is “settled’ (except climate science, or course) and by its very nature, scientific research is continually providing new data and new perspectives. We also remember that the common names are often even more confusing. Numerous different Australian tree species are locally called “Red Gum” or “Blue Gum”. My botanical friend Alex George tells me that in Ireland there are at least eight different plant species with the local common name “shamrock”.

As already mentioned, taxonomic botany has become far more complex and sophisticated in modern times. The advent of the electron microscope and the use of DNA technology have made it possible to examine differences between one potential species and another at the molecular level, while computers allow almost instantaneous analysis of vast data bases about plant genetic make-up and morphology.

In my day everything was much simpler. We were taught to recognise different tree species at a glance, or if it was a stranger we examined the bark, flowers, leaves, buds and fruit, usually with the naked eye or a 10x magnification hand lens, and then if necessary we referred to an illustrated key, in order to work out its name.

All this was tricky. Plant keys in the pre-computer era were often clumsy, complicated and frustrating … one (which I hated) involved the use of knitting needles and punched cards. I always thought that a much simpler system of classification was needed. There is a lovely story about the German poet Heinrich Heine that sums this up. Heine once:

 ... found a beautiful flower on the Brocken, the highest peak in the German Harz mountains. Tourists were standing nearby in considerable numbers, and they all wanted to know the name of the flower. Heine expressed particular aversion to this demand and wrote: "It always annoys me to see that God's dear flowers have been divided into castes, just like ourselves, and according to similar external features like differing stamens. If there has to be classification, people should follow the suggestion made by Theophrastus, who wanted to classify flowers in a more spiritual manner, that is, by scent. As for me, I have my own system of natural history, according to which I classify everything as eatable or uneatable".

The Canadian humourist Stephen Leacock, in his tongue-in-cheek Manual of Education, also proposed a greatly simplified taxonomy. He divided all plants into three categories: trees, flowers and vegetables. “The true botanist”, Leacock wrote, “knows a tree as soon as he sees it. He learns to distinguish it from a vegetable by merely putting his ear to it”. 

This is not as outrageous as you might think: the famous Western Australian botanist Charles Gardner claimed he could distinguish one species of eucalyptus tree from another by the feel of the leaf, and there are trees growing in the north Queensland rainforests whose identify can only be determined by the sense of smell (Theophrastus would have approved). My forestry school contemporary Don Gilmour knew all about this. “When I was working on forest assessment in far north Queensland” Don once told me “I was able to identify some of the rarer trees only by cutting into the bark with my pocketknife and smelling the aroma of the freshly cut tissue within. I had been taught to use this technique to distinguish one rainforest tree species from another”.  Don always had a pocketknife in a leather pouch on his belt, even during lectures at Forestry School, ready at a moment’s notice to identify a passing tree species with a quick cut-and-sniff [9].

One-time rainforest dendrologist Dr Don Gilmour, pictured here in his student days before he became internationally famous for his work on forest conservation (photo by John Pratt)

Returning to taxonomic systems, I still think the most appealing I ever came across was developed by William Brown and his Outlaws in the Just William stories. They were not interested in whether a tree was an oak, a pine or an elm. They divided all trees into two sorts – those they could climb and those they could not.

I am in favour of simplified approaches, but over-simplifications will never be adopted by serious scientists, especially those whose mission in life seems to me to be to make things more complicated.

Finally, that other great challenge: remembering names

The conferring of names and the recognition of different species or individuals within a species is one thing, but remembering names and applying them correctly is another altogether.

Human memory also has its complexities, my own being a case in point.  It is a curious fact that these days, although I can instantly recognise thousands of faces, I have great difficulty in remembering the names of the humans to whom those faces are attached. This applies even to people I know well. The most perplexing thing of all is that, confronted by someone whose well-known name I simply cannot dredge to the surface, my mind throws up a veritable library of trivia about them: what school they went to, the position they played on the football team in 1964, the songs they sang as students, the number of their children, a humorous remark they made 35 years ago, the colour and make of their first car, and so on. But it refuses to produce the one thing I want, usually just as I am trying to introduce them to my wife ... their name! Eventually, I remember it, but usually this happens the next day when it pops into my mind while I am thinking about something else.

Conversely, I have a good friend, now aged in his late eighties who is having trouble remembering nearly everything. At the same time, his recall of the names of Australian trees and birds, and his ability to identify them faultlessly at a glance, is breathtaking.  How can this be? And how neatly it contrasts with the problem faced by another dear old friend who claims: “It is my accursed burden never to remember a face, but always to forget a name.”

Conventions of science, tricks of memory, variability within species (including the human species), ‘correct’ names and so on are all matters to puzzle the curious. But the thing that fascinates me most is the extent of what is still unknown, no matter in what direction you turn. It reminds me again of the need for humility in science, as in all things. 

But then, when biology gets too complex and despair sets in, I remind myself of my two favourite names for organisms. The first is the common black rat, scientific name Rattus rattus - a name which always seems to me to capture the very essence of the rattiness of rats.

A charming little Rattus rattus

The second applies to that remarkable slim and almost transparent fish with sucking lips that attaches itself to whales, sharks and sting rays and which is found in nearly all of the world’s oceans. This is the remora, scientific name Remora remora [10].

I always think these provide an example of simplicity in nomenclature, and an in-built aide memoir, to which all taxonomists should aspire.

 Endnotes

1.     The ‘Racosperm-ites’ have not yet run up the white flag and are said to be massing for another attack. The ‘Acacia-ists’ are girding their loins.

2.      Even my tractor has a name: Ivan. In fact, it has two names, because it is officially a Massey-Ferguson 22hp. Ivan superseded my previous tractor Robert, an Iseki 18 hp. My grandfather James Underwood, a pioneering farmer in the wheatbelt, had horses rather than tractors - and the horses all had names (as did the cows on the dairy farm where my wife grew up).

3.    This is The International Code of Nomenclature for Algae, Fungi, and Plants. It governs everything about the scientific naming of flora and is revised every six years after debate at an International Botanical Congress. The latest version, the Madrid code from the Congress there in 2024, runs to 300 pages.

4.    Latin was adopted as the language for scientific names centuries ago, at a time when it was regarded as having international currency. The trouble is that many modern botanical terms, or bits and pieces of a plant used in determining its classification were unknown to the ancient Romans. Thus, a new language, known as Dog Latin, has emerged, enabling modern botanists to invent Latin-like names. It is not a spoken language, and no ancient Roman would have understood it or been able to read it. As far as I know, the only place on earth where Latin is still spoken is the Vatican. In additon, many Catholic churches still use the traditional Latin mass.

5.  The reference is: Endersby, Jim (2008): Imperial Nature. Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science. University of Chicago Press.

6.    The quotation is from Chatwin’s book What am I doing here (1990), Pan Books

7.  See: https://www.forestleaves.blog/post/reflections-on-botany-an-old-school-dendrologist-sings-the-blues

8.      For example, there is a tree that grows in the Kimberley region of WA known as “Dogshit Tree”, the name deriving from the aroma exuded when the wood is burnt in a campfire. Although the name is shocking, I can vouch for the fact that it is apposite. The tree (botanical name Gyrocarpus americanus) is better known, at least in more polite circles than the ones I usually occupy, as “Stinkwood Tree”.

9.      Not everyone has a sense of smell as discriminating as Don Gilmour’s. I think if I was working on assessment in Queensland rainforests these days, confronted by a myriad of different and obscure tree species which can only be discriminated by cut-and-sniff, I would have with me one of those Beagle sniffer dogs you see at the airport, mine being trained to bark a code when he detected the distinctive aroma of one species or another.

10.   The repetition of a name (known as a ‘tautonym’) is permitted for zoologists naming animals but regrettably not for botanists naming plants. Another of the international rules imposed on botanists by botanists.