a FOOD WORD weblog

What's the English for Feldbeifuss and Engelsüss? or, the problem with common names of plants

When I first put up my page of ancient Dacian plant names I had already got English equivalents for all but two of the plants. The remaining two had been identified by a German scholar but he had supplied only the German names, and my German dictionary gave me no help with these.

I posted a message on the subject on alphadictionary and on yourdictionary. The result was interesting. On both sites, someone kindly answered my question about these two German plant names and gave me (a) botanical Latin names and (b) English names. Thanks to M. Henri Day and to Spiff for their answers!

There was no disagreement about the botanical Latin. The two German names belong to (1) Polypodium vulgare, (2) Artemisia campestris.

From this point, I myself could have gone ahead and found equivalent English names. My two informants did the work for me, however. Henri, replying on alphadictionary, told me that (1) 'doesn't seem to possess an English common name' and (2) is twiggy mugwort. Spiff, on yourdictionary, gave me (1) polypody, (2) field sagewort. I had meanwhile looked in Oleg Polunin's /Flowers of Greece and the Balkans/ and found that Polunin calls (2) field southernwood; then I looked in W. Keble Martin's /Concise British flora in colour/ and found that Keble Martin calls (2) Breckland wormwood. Polypody is a fern, not a flowering plant, and is therefore not mentioned in these books.

So, for item (2), that's four English common names, all quite different from one another and all perfectly credible. Common names, in other words, are all too common. Which just shows how much we need unambiguous botanical names.