Towards a solution to the problem plants. The apothecaries gave us the first centres of botanical enquiry and the plant breeders of today give us the new varieties which are needed to satisfy our gardening and food-production requirements. The commercial face of plant breeding, however, attaches a powerful monetary significance to the names given to new varieties. Gardeners occasionally have to resort to botanical names when they discover some cultural problem with a plant which shares the same common name with several different plants. The Guernsey lily, around which has always hung a cloud of mystery, has been offered to the public in the form of Amaryllis belladonna L. The true Guernsey lily has the name Nerine sarniensis Herb. (but was named Amaryllis sarniensis by Linnaeus). The epithet sarniensis means ‘of Sarnia’ or ‘of Guernsey’, Sarnia being the old name for Guernsey, and is an example of a misapplied geographical epithet, since the plant’s native area is S Africa. Some would regard the epithet as indicating the fact that Guernsey was the first place in which the plant was cultivated. This is historically incorrect, however, and does nothing to help the gardener who finds that the Guernsey lily that he has bought does not behave, in culture, as Nerine sarniensis is known to behave. This example is one involving a particularly contentious area as to the taxonomic problems of generic boundaries and typification but there are many others in which common and Latin garden name are used for whole assortments of garden plants, ranging from species (Nepeta mussinii and N. cataria are both catmint) to members of different genera (‘japonicas’ including Chaenomeles speciosa and Kerria japonica) to members of different families (Camellia japonica is likewise a ‘japonica’), and the diversity of ‘bluebells’ was mentioned earlier. New varieties, be they timber trees, crop plants or garden flowers, require names, and those names need to be definitive. As with the earlier confusion of botanical names (different names for the same species or the same name for different species), so there can be the same confusion of horticultural names. As will be seen, rules for cultivated plants require that new names have to be established by publication. This gives to the breeder the commercial advantage of being able to supply to the public his new variety under what, initially, amounts to his mark of copyright. In some parts of the world legislation permits exemption from the rules and recommendations otherwise used for the names of cultivated plants.
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