Provided by "Sharon Yiesla, Horticultural Services"
Latin names
This page explores the meanings of scientific names. Scientific names are written with botanical Latin, which different than the real Latin. Botanical Latin is a written rather than a spoken language. Some of the words are derived from Latin, but many are from other languages. A lot of the words have been “Latinized”.
Because Latin is a language that uses gender, a word may have three forms to agree with gender. So the word ‘alba’, which means white, has three forms ‘alba; (feminine), ‘albus’ (masculine) and ‘album’ (neuter).