RENEGADE GARDENER™

Helpful Plant Name and Gardening Term Website: Botany.com

Stumbled upon this site awhile back and find it a great help when trying to locate a plant when only the common name is given. I might receive an e-mail from a reader in Arkansas who has a question about his ailing perennial, “Gill Over The Ground.”

Well, not only is “GOTG” a common name, it’s a new one on me. So a quick trip to Botany.com, a click on “Perennials” from the left column and a final click on the letters “GI,” and there it is: Nepeta. OK, now we have something to go on, in terms of what ails this genus of perennials.

It’s a fabulous site for you to learn what is the true, botanical Latin name of whatever it is you have in your yard and garden. (Why is that important? See Tenet 4.) Second, the site features a fabulous botanical dictionary (click on Plant and Flower Dictionary) with definitions of virtually all botanical terms.

So the next time you’ve elevated your reading source to the proper type of tome that would describe a leaf as “floccose,” you run to Botany.com, scroll the dictionary, click on FL, and discover that the leaf is covered with tufts of soft, wooly hairs.

So I further learn that I’m not balding, really, my head is, well, semi-floccose.

Don Engebretson
The Renegade Gardener