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.
This list grew from an earlier Kansas list of grasses and legumes that emphasized chiefly range and pasture plants. It is extended here to include most plant families and genera that occur in Kansas and many species that do not necessarily occur in Kansas but may be important or closely related to those listed. Obviously, not all Kansas plants could be included, and therefore many minor plants have been omitted. Species not obviously important had to be somewhat arbitrary. Perhaps certain species listed could have been omitted and others not included might have been added. The list can, therefore, grow or be altered as need for change is shown. If further information on common names is needed, the Kelsey and Dayton 1942 edition of Standardized Plant Names[3] should be consulted.
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.
The words tree, grass, bean, seed, etc. are combined with key words to make common names of many genera and species. Examples of the former are dropseed, cupgrass, tanglehead, peavine, wildindigo, coffeetree, and sensitivebriar; and of the latter, breadroot scurfpea, splitbeard bluestem, shortawn foxtail, and smoothseed wildbean. Hyphens are avoided except in a few cases where they are used to make spelling, meaning, or pronunciation more clearly understood. Some examples are s-curve threeawn, blue-eyedgrass, climbing-buckwheat, dutchmans-breeches, snow-on-the-mountain, fat-hen saltbrush, false-alyssum.
Species Common Names
The common name for an individual species is a contraction of the genus common name and, in most cases, a descriptive adjective for a particular species. An example is the common name for Bromus inermis The common name for the genus is brome and the descriptive adjective associated with the species name inermis is smooth, hence smooth brome is the common name for that species.
In many cases a satisfactory common name did not exist for a particular species, yet the species name’s English meaning described the plant well. Such plants were given common names based on the meaning of their species name. An example is Lygodesmia rostrata. It has no satisfactory common name. In this publication it is called beaked skeletonplant, based on the English meaning of rostrata and the accepted common name for the genus, skeletonplant.