Today I happened upon this nice document: a list of the names of about 1000 plants and trees in Latin, English and often Greek, alphabetical by Latin name. I can’t speak to its accuracy, but it looks useful. (I hope I’m not the only one who struggles to no end with plant names!)
(The original, titled “Indice-Piante”, I found on Scribd. No author is listed, nor can I see a way of contacting the uploader to ask about the source of the document.)
Well done and thanks!
I suspect from entries such as “Arbor Judae - Judas his tree” (for Judas’ tree) that the index is of some age.
Everyone struggles with plant names, and the specific names for living things generally. The Greeks and Romans didn’t exactly have taxonomy pinned down, and in many cases we’ll never know what species in today’s binomial system of classification they were referring to when they used a particular one-word name. Some of the English vernacular names given in that index need to be taken with a very big pinch of salt.
Point noted, thanks. I’ve been suspecting that’s the case, from the contradictory translations I sometimes find, but I wasn’t sure whether these were because of the words themselves or errors in dictionaries.