I very much enjoy learning what’s behind a name and have several books – alas, not this one but it sounds great.

The process has even been reciprocal, and my Latin vocabulary is larger now than it was when I was a teenager even though I’ve never taken another Latin course since then. There are fascinating stories over here, too, and some of the early botanists in Texas were, like Kolkwitz, German. Despite the serious look of these books, the information inside is really accessible and written in understandable language. I would love to see another edition from the author, maybe with the title- "Latin for Gardeners II-3,000 more plant names explained and explored. Fascinating feature spreads retell the adventures of important plant hunters such as Sir Joseph Banks and Alexander von Humboldt, and explain how their discoveries affect the way our gardens look today.No negativity, no-one criticises what some would think is an easy question, just loads of help and encouragement delivered with a smile. Now that plant names are no longer nonsense syllables to memorize, I have no trouble remembering them. The book, beautifully illustrated with old woodcuts, explains how and why plants have been named, includes handy lists of identifying adjectives, and takes the reader down some of the stranger byways of human endeavour and eccentricity.

These are some of the questions answered in Peter Parker’s adventurous exploration of the mysteries of Botanical Latin.

The book itself – a hardback – has a lovely cover and is nicely bound… it looks pretty on your bookshelf! It's going to take some time to properly enjoy it, and it's also one that I will keep by my chair to refer to often. The book also features of number of plants and botanists with short, informative and interesting articles. I learned that a tomato Solanum lycopersicon is from the Greek lyco "wolf" and persicon "peach" so a tomato is a wolfpeach, but here the genus name Solanum was ignored. This amount includes seller specified domestic postage charges as well as applicable international postage, dispatch, and other fees.