A nagging question wracked your mind when you woke up this morning. "Why do plants have Latin names?" As always, Grumpy is here to reveal the truth and put you at ease. Some people think plants have ...

Botanical names can be a pain. They can get stuck like broccoli in the mouth of a 6-year-old who hates vegetables. All gardeners — beginners to advanced — blush and sputter when trying to pronounce ...

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... You say klem-AT-is. I say KLEM-a-tis. Some say Latin is a dead language. But in the realm of horticulture, it’s not just alive, but kicking. Taxonomy, the ...

When buying plants, the Latin names can seem complicated, mystifying, sometimes irritating and easily skipped over on the tags until you find some English. Some gardeners know all plants by their ...

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... Latin just got a bit deader. For at least 400 years, botanists across the globe have relied on Latin as their lingua franca, but the ardor has cooled.

Native possumhaw holly is Ilex decidua meaning it loses its leaves in winter (unlike most hollies). Neil Sperry Special to the Star-Telegram My column this week honors a man who spoke Latin to me when ...

“The Gardener’s Botanical: An Encyclopedia of Latin Plant Names with More than 5,000 Entries” by Ross Bayton ($29.95, Princeton University Press): This 352-page hardcover book is a botanist’s dream ...

Bauhin documents the Marian and other religious names of plants with source quotes from botanical books in Latin, Gallic (French), German etc. - giving testimony that these names were widely found in ...