Identify Plants With Eco-Friendly Garden Sign Markers

Each April, we celebrate National Lawn and Garden Month, a call to garden lovers all over the country to venture outside and enjoy the rebirth of spring.

“National Garden Month is an opportunity to learn more about USDA’s People’s Garden Initiative begun in 2009,” U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said recently. “Today, 2,116 People’s Gardens thrive on public and private lands across the United States and its territories and in 12 foreign countries. These People’s Gardens serve as models for uniting individuals, groups and neighborhoods in a common effort to benefit communities, promote food security, utilize sustainable practices, help mitigate pollinator habitat loss, and address environmental issues.”

Secretary Vilsack goes on to point out that, in addition to being beautiful, gardens provide a positive setting for pollinators, such as bats, bees, birds, butterflies, beetles and other animals that play a role in keeping fruits, nuts and vegetables in our diets, contributing substantially to the economy as a result. Quite a service to humanity, wouldn’t you say?

Managers and volunteers at public spaces such as parks, reserves, arboretums and botanical gardens are especially aware of the impact natural environments have on our lives -from encouraging good health and wellbeing to balancing the flora and fauna. Oftentimes, they are inspired to include plant identification as part of flower collections, specimen gardens and forest trails through the select use of garden sign markers, so visitors can learn more.

PlaqueMaker Can Help

Whether for public parks or home gardens, our 4″x 2″ and 6″x 4″ custom bamboo wood garden sign markers are a sustainable, eco-friendly choice for use as outdoor dedication plaques and memorials. Each size is also large enough to include binomial nomenclature plant identification. The sign markers come mounted on a 10″ stake that can be upgraded to 20 inches. Words and artwork can be engraved or printed in vivid, full color that’s UV-resistant. What’s more, quantity discounts are available.

Plant Identification – Implementing Binomial Nomenclature

Back in 1753, Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus devises a scientific system for naming plants that eventually is adopted the world over. Known as binomial nomenclature, it uses a series of identifiers written in scientific form to determine a unique name for virtually all of the plants (and animals) known to man. Binomial nomenclature takes the confusion out of the layman’s common naming, where the same plants can share the same common names. It’s also the system used in public gardens to not only name plants, it provides other types of information about the plant as well. Today, botanists and other plant namers use the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi and plants (ICN), an internationally agreed-upon codes of rules for naming plants.

The binomial naming system uses two words to name a particular species and traditionally uses Latin, classical Greek, other languages, names of people and places, and anagrams:

The first word

● Describes a plant is the generic name (genus) and the group of plants it’s naming

●Must be capitalized when naming a species

The second word

● Explains the plant’s specific epithet or species

● Must be lower case

● Does not have to describe the plant; it offers additional information such as the name of the person who discovers the plant, etc.

In the genus specific epithet, both words

● Must be emphasized (i.e., italic, underlined) like this: Trachycarpus fortunei

Additional words

● Describe the cultivar of the main species (third word), a strain bred by people to have a specific trait and is not found in the wild

● Cultivar name is surrounded in single quotes is preceded by the abbreviation cv. and not italicized: deremensiscv. ‘Warneckii’

● Describe the variety, the location or trait, which are different among the plant population

● Abbreviated as “var.” in lower case and emphasized: Opuntia galapageia var. ‘profusa’

The character x:

● Such as Citrus x citrofortunella mitis, denotes a hybridized plant