Scientific Names and Common Names

Why Plants Have More Than One Kind of Name

Plants live in human language as well as in biological classifications. A gardener may know a plant by a familiar common name, a herbarium label by a Latin scientific name, and an older book by a scientific synonym no longer accepted in a modern treatment.

Scientific and common names are both useful, but they solve different problems. Scientific names aim to identify taxa precisely across languages and regions. Common names make plants easier to recognize and discuss within ordinary language and cultural traditions.

One “Hemlock,” Two Very Different Plants

The limits of common names become obvious when one word points to unrelated plants. Poison hemlock, Conium maculatum, is an herbaceous member of Apiaceae. Eastern hemlock, Tsuga canadensis, is a coniferous tree in Pinaceae. Both names are well established, but the shared word “hemlock” does not mean the plants are close relatives.

Scientific names remove that ambiguity. Conium maculatum and Tsuga canadensis immediately place the plants in different genera and, through classification, in very different branches of the plant tree. Plants of the World Online currently accepts both names in those respective treatments (Plants of the World Online, accessed 17 August 2026).

How Scientific Plant Names Work

A species name normally combines a genus name with a specific epithet. In Ginkgo biloba L., Ginkgo is the genus, biloba is the specific epithet, and L. is the abbreviated authorship. The genus and species words are italicized; the authorship is not.

Family names, such as Ginkgoaceae, are not italicized. Tree TSAR likewise keeps rank abbreviations such as ssp., var., and f. in roman type while italicizing the taxon names themselves.

Scientific nomenclature supplies a formal system for names, types, priority, and publication. It does not settle every question about how broad a species or genus should be. That distinction belongs to Taxonomy and Nomenclature.

Why Scientific Names Change

Scientific names can change for several different reasons. A lineage may be moved to another genus after phylogenetic research. An older legitimate name may have priority. Two supposed species may be treated as one, or one broad species may be divided. Reexamination of type material can also show that a familiar name has been misapplied.

Those causes should not be collapsed into the vague statement that botanists simply “changed the name.” A nomenclatural correction and a new hypothesis about evolutionary relationships are different events, even when both result in a different label on a plant.

What Happened to Sansevieria?

The familiar snake plants provide a useful example. Molecular analyses found traditional Sansevieria nested within Dracaena, so retaining both genera would leave Dracaena paraphyletic. Takawira-Nyenya et al. (2018) documented this relationship using plastid and nuclear sequence data. Current Plants of the World Online treatment accepts Dracaena trifasciata (Prain) Mabb. and treats Sansevieria trifasciata Prain as a synonym.

The common name “snake plant” remains perfectly usable. Common names are not required to reorganize themselves every time a scientific genus changes.

Synonyms Are Not Mistakes to Be Erased

A historical scientific name can remain important long after another name becomes accepted. It may occur in old floras, herbarium labels, legal records, horticultural catalogues, scientific papers, or conservation databases.

Tree TSAR therefore preserves formal synonyms and makes them searchable. A synonym is not automatically a “wrong name”; it is a name that a particular taxonomic treatment does not use as the accepted identity. The nomenclatural history can still be valid and informative.

Common Names Work Differently

Common names are not governed by the botanical Code. They can arise independently in many languages and regions, and several names can coexist for the same species. The same word can also be applied to unrelated plants.

Tree TSAR chooses a representative display name where that improves accessibility, but it does not claim to create an official worldwide vernacular nomenclature. Alternative established names can remain useful in search or narrative discussion.

How Tree TSAR Chooses Common Names

The preferred name is normally the one that best balances established usage, representativeness, distinctiveness, linguistic grounding, botanical information, and usability. A familiar, unambiguous name does not need to be replaced merely for uniformity. Where no satisfactory genus-wide name exists, Tree TSAR may adopt a well-documented regional term or assign a descriptive name whose editorial origin is made clear.

A separate page, How Tree TSAR Chooses Common Names, explains this process in detail.

What Does a Hyphen Mean?

Tree TSAR sometimes uses a hyphen to signal that the final element of a compound common name refers to a group to which the plant does not actually belong. Water-elm, for example, can indicate an elm-like or historically elm-associated plant outside the genus Ulmus.

This is a Tree TSAR editorial convention, not a universal law of English common-name spelling. The hyphen is used when it adds taxonomic information rather than simply for decoration.

Which Name Should I Use?

For ordinary conversation, horticulture, and public communication, a clear common name is often the most natural choice. When precision matters, the scientific name removes ambiguity. Using both together is frequently ideal: common name (scientific name).

The most important point is not to treat one naming system as a defective version of the other. Scientific and vernacular names carry different kinds of information, and good botanical communication uses each where it works best.

Explore Further

Taxonomy and Nomenclature - Types, priority, authorship, legitimacy, accepted names, and provisional Tree TSAR treatment.
How Tree TSAR Chooses Common Names - The deeper editorial framework for representative vernacular names.
Synonyms, Hybrids, and Search - How historical scientific names and alternate search terms lead to accepted pages.
What Is a Species? - Why the biological entity being named is itself a scientific question.

References and Further Reading

Plants of the World Online (n.d.) Conium maculatum L.; Tsuga canadensis (L.) Carrière; Dracaena trifasciata (Prain) Mabb.; Sansevieria trifasciata Prain. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Accessed 17 August 2026. https://powo.science.kew.org/

Takawira-Nyenya R, Mucina L, Cardinal-McTeague WM, Thiele KR (2018) Sansevieria (Asparagaceae, Nolinoideae) is a herbaceous clade within Dracaena: Inference from non-coding plastid and nuclear DNA sequence data. Phytotaxa 376(6): 254-276. https://doi.org/10.11646/phytotaxa.376.6.2