The Language of Plants: Where Names, Myths & Stories Come From
Before a plant had a Latin name, it had a relationship with people. Someone noticed it. Someone tasted it. Someone watched where it grew. Someone noticed its flower. Someone noticed its root. Someone wondered what it might do. And eventually, someone gave it a name.
That name might describe a taste, a shape, a place, a use, a warning, or a story. And once a name was given, it could travel from one person to another, from one generation to the next, from the garden to the apothecary, and from an old herbal to a modern field guide.
Plant names are more than labels. Sometimes, they are little pieces of history. Sometimes, they are an entire history hiding inside a few words.
Names Are Little Pieces of History
Plant names often tell us what people noticed first.
Bittersweet nightshade is a beautiful example. The plant’s species name, dulcamara, refers to its curious taste. The Latin roots behind the name describe something that is both bitter and sweet, reflecting the experience traditionally associated with chewing parts of the plant. The taste begins bitter and is followed by a sweetness, an unusual enough characteristic to become part of the plant’s identity. (Climbers)
The name Atropa carries an entirely different kind of history.
Atropa belladonna, deadly nightshade, bears a genus name connected to Atropos, one of the three Fates of Greek mythology. Atropos was traditionally associated with the cutting of the thread of life.
The name therefore does something remarkable. It takes a botanical organism and places it inside an older human story about mortality.
And then there is the mandrake.
Few plants demonstrate the relationship between names, observation, language, and folklore quite as vividly.
A study of the historical and ethnobotanical names of Mandragora documented 292 vernacular names across 41 languages. Researchers traced those names through morphology, language, medicinal use, pharmacological effects, mythology, magic, supernatural beliefs, and historical traditions. (PMC)
Some names reflected the plant’s strange, human-shaped root. Others reflected its medicinal or narcotic reputation. Others connected it with supernatural beings, witchcraft, magic, gallows, or the rituals surrounding its legendary removal from the earth.
A plant name can therefore be a tiny piece of cultural history. Sometimes, it is an entire history hiding inside a few words.
Common Names Are Stories
Long before standardized botanical names, people needed ways to distinguish the plants growing around them. They named what they noticed.
And what they noticed was not always what a modern botanist would consider the most useful identifying characteristic.
A plant might be named for its taste, its flower, its fruit, its shape, its habitat, its medicinal use, its perceived danger, or the story surrounding it.
Think about names such as Deadly nightshade, Angel’s trumpet, Devil’s trumpet, Henbane, Thornapple, and Bittersweet.
These names aren’t scientific descriptions. They are human descriptions. Some warn, some romanticize, some describe appearance, some preserve an old use, some preserve a belief, and some preserve a story that has been repeated for so long that its original meaning can become difficult to recover.
This is one of the reasons common names can be so fascinating to an herbal historian. They don’t simply tell us what a plant is. They can tell us what someone once thought it was.
The Mandrake and the Human Form
Few plants demonstrate this better than the mandrake.
For centuries, the strange, branching root of Mandragora captured the human imagination. It could look remarkably like a small human figure.
That resemblance became part of the plant’s mythology.
The mandrake was not simply a root pulled from the ground. It became a root that looked like a person.
And once people began seeing the human form in the plant, stories gathered around that resemblance.
This is reflected in the enormous number of vernacular names researchers have documented. Among the names studied were words referring to human forms, little people, supernatural beings, narcotic effects, medicinal properties, magic, witchcraft, and other aspects of the plant’s reputation. (PMC)
The root became a kind of meeting place between botany and imagination.
The plant was real. The root was real. The resemblance was real. But what people built around that resemblance belonged to the cultural world.
And then the story became darker.
The Gallows Mandrake
One of the most enduring mandrake legends claimed that the plant could grow beneath gallows, nourished by the bodily fluids of people who had been hanged.
It sounds like the sort of story that must have existed forever.
But it has a traceable history.
The gallows-mandrake tradition was recorded by the physician and botanist Otto Brunfels in 1532. It later became widespread in European medical literature, particularly during the seventeenth century, with the tradition especially strong in German-speaking regions. (PMC)
That history matters. Not because it makes the legend true. Quite the opposite.
It allows us to see how a piece of folklore actually moves through history.
The mandrake already had an unusual appearance. Its root could resemble the human body. The plant also had a long medicinal and supernatural reputation.
Then a story connected that strange root with death, execution, and the landscape surrounding the gallows.
Once the story existed, it could travel. It could be written down, copied into books, repeated by herbalists, and retold in folklore. Eventually, it could become part of what people believed they knew about the plant.
This is how botanical lore grows. Not unlike the plants themselves. A little at a time. Layer by layer.
When a Story Enters a Book
There is something especially interesting about folklore once it enters written history.
Before that point, a story may exist primarily through memory and oral tradition. But once someone writes it down, the story acquires a new kind of permanence.
A physician records it. A botanist copies it. An herbalist repeats it. A later author encounters it in an old book and assumes that because it was written, it must have been established knowledge.
Then another author repeats it. And another.
Eventually, the age of the story can become confused with the age of the written record.
The mandrake offers a wonderful example of why that distinction matters.
A legend being recorded in 1532 does not mean the belief began in 1532. It means that we have evidence of the tradition by that point.
Historical research often requires us to ask two separate questions: When did people believe this? And when is the earliest evidence we have for that belief?
Those aren’t always the same thing.
Then Came Botanical Names
Scientific naming gave botanists another language.
Instead of relying entirely on local names, which could vary dramatically from one region to another, botanists could use standardized names to communicate about particular plants.
Atropa belladonna, Hyoscyamus niger, Mandragora officinarum, Datura stramonium, Solanum dulcamara, and Solanum nigrum.
These names allow us to ask a different question: Which plant are we actually talking about?
That question becomes especially important when studying historical texts.
An old herbal might describe a plant by a common name that has changed meaning over time. A name used in one country might refer to a different plant somewhere else. Two different plants might share a common name. And a plant that once belonged to one genus may later be classified differently.
The word may have traveled farther than the plant itself.
When Names Change, Stories Change
Taxonomy is not static.
Plants have been moved between genera. Species have been split. Closely related plants have been confused. Historical classifications have been revised. Modern botanical research continues to change our understanding of relationships between plants.
That doesn’t make historical plant knowledge useless. It makes it something that needs to be read carefully.
When we encounter an old herbal recipe, medicinal claim, or piece of folklore, we have to consider what plant the author actually meant.
Otherwise, we can accidentally attach an old story to the wrong modern species.
The plant may be innocent. The story may simply have wandered.
The Language of Folklore
Folklore works differently from scientific naming.
It isn’t trying to provide a taxonomic identification. It is trying to communicate meaning.
A plant might become associated with death because people recognized its toxicity. A flower might become associated with angels because of its shape. A root might become associated with a human because of its form. A bitter plant might receive a name that preserves its taste. A plant used for a particular condition might acquire a name connected to that use.
These names tell us something about how people experienced the landscape.
They are records of observation, imagination, belief, fear, curiosity, usefulness, and relationship.
And sometimes they preserve something that a scientific name never could.
Learning to Read Both Languages
A botanical student learns one language. A folklorist learns another. The herbal historian has to learn both.
One language asks: What species is this?
The other asks: What did this plant mean to the people who lived with it?
Neither question replaces the other. They simply tell us different things.
A botanical name can help us identify the plant. A folk name can help us understand the relationship. A historical record can tell us when a particular idea was documented. Folklore can show us how that idea traveled.
And careful research allows us to keep those things connected without confusing them.
Together, they give us a fuller picture.
Plants as Cultural Memory
A plant name can survive long after the reason for the name has been forgotten.
A folk remedy can survive after the original explanation disappears.
A story can travel farther than the plant itself.
And sometimes the story becomes so strong that it changes the way people see the living plant.
The history of the mandrake offers a beautiful example.
Researchers studying its vernacular names found that they preserved an extraordinary range of human observations and beliefs. Some referred to the plant’s morphology, others to medicinal or narcotic properties, and still others to magic, supernatural beings, witchcraft, gallows, and legendary harvesting practices. (PMC)
The plant remained rooted in the earth.
The stories traveled.
What Happens When We Listen?
This is where plant history becomes especially interesting to me. Because learning a plant isn’t necessarily finished when we know its identification, we can know its family, its genus, its species, its habitat, its morphology, its chemistry, and still have more questions.
Who named it? Why? What did people notice first? What did they use it for? What did they fear? What did they believe? Which parts of the story can we document? Which parts belong to folklore? And which parts were added much later?
These questions don’t diminish the magic of the story. They make the story more interesting because now we can follow it.
We can watch it move from language into folklore, from folklore into books, from books into popular culture, and sometimes, centuries later, into the way we still talk about the plant today.
Listen Carefully
The next time you encounter an old plant name, pause.
Ask what it means. Where did it come from? Who used it? What did they notice? Is the story documented? Or has it been repeated so many times that it simply feels true?
That pause is part of learning plants.
Because botanical knowledge is not only about identifying what grows around us, it is also about listening to the stories people have carried alongside those plants, and learning which parts belong to the plant, which belong to history, which belong to folklore, and which belong to us.
The Stories We Carry
Perhaps that is the most interesting thing about plant names.
They are rarely just names.
They are little containers of memory.
A word can preserve a taste, a shape, a warning, a medicine, a belief, a place, a person, or a story.
And sometimes, if we listen closely enough, an old plant name can lead us backward through centuries of human history.
Past the garden. Past the herbarium. Past the old books. Past the people who first wrote the stories down.
And back toward something much older and much simpler:
Someone looking at a plant.
Someone noticing something strange.
Someone wondering what it meant.
And eventually, someone saying:
“I wonder what this is.”
Continue Exploring October in the Apothecary
The stories continue from here.
Poisonous Plants, Medicine & Myth
Old plants, strange histories, medicine, mythology, folklore, and the stories humans have woven around the botanical world.
Haunted Trails & Forgotten Places
Old paths, forgotten places, local history, and the stories that linger in landscapes long after the people have gone.
More October stories will be added throughout the month.
Sources & Further Reading:
Comments