Gardening magazines tend to feature plants with seasonal interest in each edition. That's fair enough, I'd rather think about snowdrops in February and dahlias in August than the other way around. Now that September is almost upon us this means that there are lots of photographs and articles about asters, forcing me to face the awful truth that the botanical plant names of many of them have changed. It's not new news, the RHS announced last year that as from 2015 they would be following the new nomenclature, but as I haven't bought any asters this year, or even read up on them, it has largely passed me by until now. No longer. Picture captions are peppered with unfamiliar names for familiar looking plants, and I feel vaguely harassed, and terribly middle aged for not taking it in my stride.
The North American asters have been deemed by the molecular and genetic scientists to be more closely related to other North American members of the daisy family, like golden rod, and so they are no longer Aster but Symphyotrichum. Catchy, isn't it? Trips off the tongue. It means 'the hairs joining together', a reference to the fact that back in 1832 somebody thought that the hairs on the seeds were fused towards the base. Which is obviously the first thing anybody would notice about a plant, whether or not the hairs on its seeds were fused together. So good old bright pink Aster novae-angliae 'Andenken an Alma Potschke' is henceforth Symphyotrichum novae-angliae 'Andenken an Alma Potschke'. You can see why people just call them Michelmas daisies.
Meanwhile the lovely little white flowered, shade tolerant North American Aster divaricatus has become Eurybia divaricata. Ye gods, it has even changed sex. It is a nice little plant. I have a small patch hanging on among the weeds in the meadow, that I've recently liberated, and I must go and investigate reports that the Chatto garden has a particularly good form for sale with dark stems.
The botanists are always at it. I'd barely memorised Lonicera infundibulum var. rockii before it became Lonicera elisae and my efforts were wasted. It is an agreeable shrubby honeysuckle with bronze coloured new leaves and delicate, pendant, narrowly funnel shaped, pale apricot flowers, and I used to be very proud of my specimen, but it has never been so good since the last very wet winter. I feared it was dead, and I think most of its roots probably rotted as the bottom of the rose bank turned into a virtual spring. I'd still not discovered how I was meant to pronounce Schizostylis, should it be skits as in schizophrenia, or shits as in bears in the wood, when it became Hesperantha and I no longer had to worry about it. The owner of the plant centre was fighting a rearguard action against the renaming of Stipa arundinacea as Anemanthele lessoniana when I left, saying that customers would not be able to find it if the name changed and it moved on the sales table from S to A.
Gardeners can be a conservative lot. It took decades for Funkia, as Gertrude Jeckyll knew them, to be accepted as Hosta. On the other hand, a sure way to mark yourself as a dinosaur and no longer down with the kids when it comes to gardening is to refuse to stay up to date with plant names. I must repeat ten times daily, Symphyotrichum, Symphyotrichum, Symphiotrichum. Eurybia, Eurybia, Eurybia. Actually, Eurybia sounds quite pretty, like Eurydice, but it means 'who has a heart of flint within her'. Why anybody thought that was a helpful name for a small, pleasant North American daisy I have no idea. It makes 'the hairs joining together' sound quite sensible.
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