Weird and wonderful members of the plant kingdom - the name's the thing

The ancient Greeks and Romans named and classified organisms, particularly those that were useful to them. They had names for medicinal plants and for the animals they hunted and those that they feared. This tradition was carried on in northern Europe, where the naming of plants was done by herbalists. However, this system was prone to confusion. The tomato, which became known as the love apple, or poma amoris was originally called something quite different, either poma di Mori, the apple of the Moors or poma di ori, the golden apple. Over time, the vernacular name became corrupted to poma amoris, and the tomato was presumed to be a powerful aphrodisiac, on no better basis than bad pronunciation.

Other examples are Colts'-foot (Tussilago fasfara) which is a corruption of either cough-wood or cold-wood - both of which allude to the medicinal use of the plant. When we look at the plant we see no resemblance to the foot of a horse, whereas its virtue in the cure of colds, coughs, and hoarseness been believed in as a folk medicine from before recorded history.

And the dear old gooseberry - in the Italian, Uva spina, the name shows the reference to the spiny sharp thorns it bears and the old English name, carberry, probably has the same meaning. In northern England grozar or groser, are both terms related to the other spiky plant, gorse, which means prickly. In short, gooseberry is simply a modified form of gorseberry. There was a time when goose was both written and pronounced gos, as is shown by the still current word gosling, which makes even clearer the mishearing, or misspelling that led to the gosberry (spiky plant with berries) becoming the gooseberry (goose like plant with berries!)

In the late sixteenth century, the science of scientific naming started. Plants and animals were given long, polynomial Latin names, which took over from common names in books, although local people still used the names they always had. An amazing fact for you: despite all the constellations being named by agricultural societies, not one of them was named after a plant, although thirty-six of the ancient eighty-eight were named after animals!

Stars photograph by bobhasmadskills, used under a creative commons attribution licence