We often hear of these Latin names for plants and you're either someone in my experience

who is obsessed with them and remembers all of the Latin names and really gets into it

or you're a little bit more like me where you know the plant by certainly its family

and it's characteristics but the Latin name might escape you from time to time. I have a

suspicion that our guest, Mary and Whitehead who is a supervisor of ornamental gardens

at the Blue Mountains Botanic Garden, I have a feeling, Mary, and that you really are into the

Latin names. Am I correct? I am 110 percent into the Latin names, yes.

So, for a primer and I actually don't know if you've ever talked about this on the show

before, Mary, and can you explain the architecture of a plant's name?

I can, how much time do you have? Let's go with the Kendra Garden version.

Well, as far as I know the name of a plant is harder than the naming of anything else

in the scientific world. When I studied at university, I'm pretty sure there's a couple of

hundred page paper on the rules of naming plants. But one of the things about naming plants is that

they have to be Latinised, whatever the plant is named for. And then as you mentioned before,

there's a family, a genus, and a species. So the family is obviously the greater group, the

greater family that the plant belongs to. And then the genus is almost like, imagine, you know,

the genus was your surname, your family name, and then the species is your Christian name or your

first name. So that we get more specific as you go family genus species. And then the name needs

to be Latinised. But generally a plant species name, we'll talk about one of a few things.

It will talk about the physical characteristics of the plant. It will talk about where the plant has

come from, or it will talk about who discovered the plant. So when a plant species name has the

Sloppyx incis, it means it came from that place. So anything that's Madagascar incis,

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