Customer Reviews

Gardener's Latin: A Lexicon

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I teach gardening classes with titles such as "Seed Catalogs are Seductive" and "Saving Seeds" and have recommended this book to my students. It is fun, and informative. Let's face it, you can't get far with gardening for fun, hobby or business if you don't learn some latin. Gardener's Latin makes it easy and explains all those things you've been wondering about. This is a fresh and enjoyable book and I think one that will be enjoyed by most gardeners. Add it to your wish list - the weeding season will soon be over and the reading season will begin.

When I got into gardening and especially with planting with native plants I started to pay a lot of attention to the latin names - but I didn't really understand what they meant. Hanging out with an older, very wise friend and his wife, we got talking about ceratin plants and they were rattling off the latin names and their meanings. It was amazing and so poetic that I wanted to learn more so I found this book. Its really been a great asset. Its set up alphabetically by latin name, and for each word, its less of a definition, more of a translation, e.g. palliflavens = pale yellow, squamosus = full of scales. Its a neat book - not as poetic in the translations as I had hoped but interesting nonetheless.

For lovers of plants, language, and beautiful books, this is a perfect book. The translation of botanical latin is helpful to anyone interested in the origin of plant names. The sketches, marginal notes and quotations, layout and size of the book make it a pleasure to use. The task of memorizing hundreds of plant names, which is my burden as a horticulture student, is enjoyable because I have this little book as my interpreter and companion. I've convinced all of my gardening friends to buy this book.

This is a cute little book with interesting asides about selected plants. As fun as it is it lacks straight forward readability. It is not the best reference book because of this problem. If you are more into the reference mode then 'Stern's Book of Plant Names' is going to make you happier. If you just want a bathroom read that offers an engaging insight into a plant that you may never have considered looking up then this is for you.

I was so eager to get this book! Finally my high school Latin might pay off! I wanted it to truly be a useful reference guide. But so far, after trying to find a dozen terms from plants in my own garden, I came up 0 for 12.

And the lookup can be annoying because the publisher made an artistic decision to leave the right edge of the book untrimmed so the pages are all a little different width. Because of this, it's not really possible to fan the pages one at a time - they flop 20 pages as a time. So to locate a term, you must turn each page.

Well, I'm a gardener and a wordsmith, and I think you must be both to really enjoy this book--and I don't recommend it to folks who like to garden but hate to worry about details. I can't picture someone who dislikes Latin, or questions why Linnaeus (they won't even know who he is) insisted on using Latin to develop his taxonomies, finding this book useful.

I've known quite a few "garden artists" who call plants by their local colloquial names, and when you carry on a conversation with them they persist in calling Digitalus "Foxgloves" when we who know Latin know that Digitalus refers to digits as in parts of hands over which gloves fit--that foxes would undoubtedly wear if they wore gloves.

I learned to forego showing off my Latin when I was asking serious questions of fabulous "old-time" gardeners. Latin terms are useful if you're trying to converse with horticulturists, gardening friends in other localities, or folks who have migrated from to your growing zone. Latin is also useful if you're looking up a name in a good garden book since all of them use Latin. "Gardener's Latin" contains a simple listing of Latin terms (135 small pages) and seems to have most of the more common terms.

If your a poet, you'll still want to use "Foxgloves", "Bouncing Bet" and "Queen Anne's Lace in your discourse.

I eally wanted something that was more helpful than basically a listing of latin plant names.

If you've always wanted the key to the botanical universe to follow Raman's Incandescene of flowers, in coalescing knowledge always careful to leave four (4) plants unmolested and untrampled (Hester Reagan), and dovetail the Harvard botanist Grey (Gray?)'s _Manual of Botany);.. then this is your ticket to heaven

As Francis Chapman Pellett quotes in _American Honey Plants_, Whether to Heaven or Gehenna; he that goes fastest, goeth alone.

Hester Reagan her picture is in _Cherokee Plants: their uses - a 400 year history_, (C)1975 by Hamel and Chiltosky, Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 75-27776