New Book! Plants You Meet Everywhere

 The new book I've been talking about has been published!

Tales of cosmopolitan plants, taken from this blog but in print!

See it on Amazon link

Kathy Keeler

More at awanderingbotanist.com

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Travel Story--Cornwall, The Far Southwest of England

Cornwall is the peninsula that runs west and south of the main part of the island of Britain, into the Atlantic. Beautiful and distinctive, here are some highlights of a recent tour I took there with the trou company Road Scholar.

The coast of Cornwall

Plant Story--Yarrow, Achillea millefolium, Ancient Healing Herb, repost

Plant Story-- Yarrow, Achillea millefolium, an Ancient Healing Herb

Reposted and slightly edited from 2014

Achillea millefolium yarrow

Yarrow, Achillea millefolium, is a familiar wildflower with an interesting and confused history. A member of the very large sunflower family, Asteraceae, it is quite closely related to wild and cultivated chamomiles.

Plant Story--Reasons to Like Primroses, Primula species, reposted

Plant Story -- Reasons to Like Primroses, Primula species

reposted and slightly edited from 2014 post. 

common primrose, Primula vulgaris

I had been trying for years to grow primroses, genus Primula. In 2013m stuck three sad little plants, rescued from the nursery’s end-of-the-season stock, into my yard and ooh, in 2014 all three are alive and flowering!

Primrose eliator, from my yard

Monophyly and Plant Name Changes

Plant names keep changing. Some changes are based on studies that show previously unknown relationships. Plants are moved to reflect that and sometimes the names change. Other times plants are found to be the same or different and the process of merging or splitting a species creates a name change. More puzzling to non-botanists are mergers and splits based on phylogeny. Let me try to explain. 

Pasque flower, Anemone pulsatilla

Plant Story--Silky-leaved Lamb's Ears, Stachys byzantina

Lamb's ears, Stachys byzantina, is a mint brought from Tuirkey, Armenia, Iran, and Azerbaijan in western Asia, to be a garden plant.

lamb's ears, Stachys byzantina

Indigenous Knowledge and Problematic Common Names

Language steadily changes. Words are added because we have new things to describe. Meanings shift. I just read Moult’s Relation, a record of the Plymouth Colony, 1620. Relation in the title is “what Moult related” but it sounds really weird to me. In it, a rope trap to catch a deer was described as “as artificially made as by any roper in England”—the writer clearly meant "skillfully" so artificial's meaning has shifted.

Hopi tea, greenthread, Thelesperma megapotamicum

Naturally, we have plant common names whose meanings or nuances have changed. Some are insulting or objected to by the people they refer to. People regularly suggest changing ones they don’t like. The American Public Garden Association (link) asked for input and in 2021 published a report on “Potentially Problematic Common Names in North American Public Gardens”. They found a long list of “potentially problematic” words, noting, that “… words may seem completely benign to one group, culture, or language while holding offensive and egregious connotations for another.” (p. 26 )