Interflora flowers

Flower botanical names

Flowers are given botanical names so that they can be clearly distinguished one from another.

The language used to catalogue flowers is Latin. This is because Latin was the language known worldwide when the first classification system was created many centuries ago. There are also a number of flowers with Greek names as the Greeks also developed a classification system which has left some influences today.

Typically, the botanical name is made by two words: the first one is a name which indicates the group or genus the flowers belongs to and is always capitalised; the second one is and adjective and describes a characteristic of that specific flower.

Did you know that?

  • Sometimes a flower can be named in honour of someone. Carl Linnaeus, father of the Taxonomy of plants, named a rather persistent weed Siefesbeckia, after the name of a critic.
  • Floreo is the latin name for flower and it often appears at the beginning or at the end of a flower botanic name: cauliflorus (flowered on the stem because caulis=stem)
  • There are over 100 species of rose within this genus and each one has its own botanical name by which it can be identified.