Common names of a selected list of plants

Technical Bulletin 117 Revised August 1969
By Kling L. Anderson and Clenton E. Owensby
AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENT STATION Kansas State University of Agriculture and Applied Science Manhattan Floyd W. Smith, Director
Common names of plants often vary widely from place to place, even within rather limited areas. Frequently-occurring and widely-known species may have local names, or the same name may be used for several species. Common names, therefore, often fail to identify plants accurately. That makes it difficult to communicate about plants; the confusion may even discontinue attempts to convey ideas about the subject. Conversations may shift to a subject with an adequate common nomenclature.
Scientific names are essential in formal writing. When common names are to be used, as in less formal publications, scientific names must also be given either at the place where the common ones first appear in the paper, in a footnote, or in an appended list. Only scientific names identify the species for all readers. In completely informal writing for a broad area, scientific names may be omitted.
Since common names are so widely used, they should be used as uniformly as possible. The following common names are considered “standardized” for all writing in the Kansas Agricultural Experiment Station and may also be used as a guide in teaching. A single common name is given to each plant listed if it has such a name.
Genus Common Names
In preparing this list, we attempted to give a single common name to each genus and to use it in connection with common names for each of the species listed under that genus. For example, brome for the genus, Bromus , and various species such as smooth brome and hairy brome. Thus, there are two words for species names. However, common names of some species are single words and may not bear the generic name at all; for example, switchgrass, curlymesquite, catchflygrass, darnel, needleandthread, berseem, and horsebean. Some genera have more than one common name, but in that case the genus is subdivided into different types, each with its own common name. For example, most species of the genus Panicum are called panicum, but certain others are witchgrass; Melica is melic, but bulbous species of that genus are called oniongrass; and Setaria is bristlegrass, but the name millet is applied to certain ones. Some poisonous species of Astragalus are called loco, but nonpoisonous ones are milkvetch and the selenium-gathering ones, poisonvetch. In a few cases the same common name is applied to two genera, but that generally occurs only when the genera involved are closely related. They may formerly have been considered a single genus.