What's in a name?

 Hello, my readers!👋👋

This blog is about my obsession with scientific names of plants. The study of scientific naming, describing and classifying all biological organisms on the basis of the characters they share, is known as Taxonomy. I am mostly interested in Plant Taxonomy. 

Plants always amused me, they still do! I was fascinated by their growth, development. WOW! Take any plant cutting and plant them, they will grow, sow seeds in soil, it will sprout, when the develop they give out beautiful flowers and then these flowers become fruits and what do fruits have in them? Seeds! sow these seeds and the cycle is repeated. Such a beautiful process!💓

If you remember your high school biology lessons, you would be familiar with hierarchal system of classification of plants, if you don't, this is it:

Kingdom-Division-Class-Order-Family-Genus-Species.

Plants are classified based on their characters they exhibit, for example, there is a group of plant species that produce milky-white latex which has sulphurous odor, so these group of plants are classified as milk-weeds. Like this, plants are classified accordingly. 

Initially when botanists started naming plants they named them in there own tongue, so it became difficult for people around the globe to get to know about these plants. Sometimes, botanists would be talking about the same plants but since they know its name in their language it would seem like they are talking about some new species. And plants were named without a proper order, they were given a species name followed by their most prime feature, later came in Polynomial Nomenclature (multiple-name naming system). It was a mess! Can't imagine the chaos that was created because of a name! So later, Casper Bauhin, gave the idea of Binomial Nomenclature (two-name naming system), it was Carl Linnaeus who established the practice of binomial nomenclature. This brought in a system where only the genus name and the species name is written. Carl Linnaeus is known as the Father of Taxonomy. Most importantly, during Carl Linnaeus's period, One Language for all plants came into practice. So on deciding, using Latin seemed ideal and this became the universal language for naming plants scientifically. Now, binomial nomenclature is the only media that is used for naming plants and Latin is the only language that is used for naming them. There are certain rules you have to follow when you are writing scientific name of a plant, here are some basic rules:

• When, names are hand-written, you have to separately underline both generic name and specific name. 

•  When typed out, it should be in Italics. 

•  Scientist's name should be mentioned after the species name, this is mostly written in normal font.

We are done with basics of how and why plant is named. I hope you find the above information useful!😄

Now, after explaining so much let me tell you how I came to love taxonomy. I first heard this term in class 11. It was very vague, so I just left it in my 11th grade biology classroom.😐  Then in my first year degree I saw this word mentioned in a botany workshop pamphlet on the notice board. So I took up that workshop to see what really is plant taxonomy. This workshop changed my mind completely and I became a person who started liking traditional botany. There were few more students at the workshop and we all got to interact with Ganesh Babu sir, a taxonomist. He really changed my POV on taxonomy. He can not only tell you the scientific name of a particular plant but he can also tell you its vernacular name in more than 7  Indian languages. He inspired me so much that I went back and started reading about plant taxonomy, I still have so much to learn in this subject. Further, my college professors, Prof. A. K. Boppaiah, Prof. Prema Gunaseeli and Prof. U. Vijaya Kumari, helped me a lot in improving at this subject. Recently I deviated to Medicinal Plants, Oh! the joy this has brought in, is indescribable. It has made me realize that so many plants that I am growing in my garden holds important medicinal value. I am glad that I found the right sources to rightly use plants from my garden. 

Like I've mentioned in my first blog, if you don't know which plant you are growing or you are upset that the plants you are growing are just drying up and going waste and don't know how to  correctly use them to stop them from going waste, feel free to mail me at- meghaanantha17@gmail.com 

Bye, 

Sacred Lotus. 😀