A sculpture of Swedish botanist, zoologist and physician Carl Linnaeus stands in the Heritage Garden of the Chicago Botanic Garden, in Glencoe, Ill. Linnaeus created rules for classifying and naming plants.If you’ve been thumbing through a gardening catalog or shopping at a nursery, you’ve likely noticed two names assigned to each plant, a common name and a botanical name, the latter of which might read like a sort of pretentious, unpronounceable gibberish.
This name game was first addressed in the 1700s by Swedish botanist, zoologist and physician Carolus Linnaeus. His works “Systema Naturae” and “Fundamenta Botanica” created rules for classifying and naming plants in botanical Latin — a language he made up, and with which all gardeners should have at least some familiarity.
Linnaeus’ International Code of Botanical Nomenclature dictates that a plant name start with a capitalized genus, followed by a lower-case species, then either a variety , cultivar or hybrid name .