Whether Bluebells, Bluebottles, or Harebells, It’s All in the Name

It’s nice to know that we gardeners all over the world can be equal in the struggle to incorporate these names into our personal lexicons.”

For a long time, there would come a point when I was reading a book about gardening where I would essentially “lose the plot.” Without fail, it was when the author described a plant by its botanical, or Latin, name. My eyes would glaze over the italicized interruption, and I hoped that whatever description followed would give me some clue about what plant was being discussed.

As if there wasn’t already a huge learning curve to growing and keeping plants alive, nobody mentioned there would be a whole new language to navigate the various facets of fine garden culture. From literature to nurseries, no aspect of gardening made me feel more like an amateur, a layman, or an unsophisticated dabbler than when I’d struggle to sound out the elegantly unfamiliar names of the most familiar plants. It was a feeling magnified by someone using them in casual conversation and expecting me to follow along, my ego wallowing in indignant rage. Why can’t they just use the words that I know?

Now still, whether at a nursery or trying to become immersed in a story of garden perseverance, I will more than likely find myself nose-deep in a search engine trying to decode these cryptic scripts — who are you, Aquilegia formosa, Digitalis ferruginea, Hemerocallis lilioasphodelus? Only to discover that there are perfectly good common names that could have been used instead — western columbine, foxglove, yellow daylily.

Not until recently have I come to terms with why garden writers and professionals in the plant industry use botanical names as the rule and common names sparingly. It is because a botanical name is universally attributed to one specific plant, whereas certain common names can be used to describe wildly different plants depending on where you are in the world. While many plants are commonly known by their Latin names, like fuchsia, begonia, crocus, and rhododendron, plants with a common name like “bluebell” are a great example of why botanical names are necessary.

Point to any plant that produces a blue-ish bell-shaped flower, and it’s guaranteed someone somewhere in the world is calling it a “bluebell.” It isn’t inherently a problem; the flowers are shaped like bells, and they are blue. A pretty accurate description. The issue really only arises when you want to procure and grow one of these bluebells since each plant has characteristics that significantly differ from one another.

Let’s say the bluebells you’re interested in have long, glossy leaves, tall stems, and bloom mid to late spring. You might be looking for either Spanish bluebells (Hyacinthoides hispanica) or English bluebells (Hyacinthoides non-scripta). These plants grow from bulbs, can be planted in difficult areas such as shaded woodlands, and are often considered invasive due to their prolific reproductive nature. The main differences are that H. hispanica, native to Portugal, has flowers that grow in more of a cluster at the top of the stem and do not have a fragrance. H. non-scripta is native to the United Kingdom; the flowers have a light fragrance, and the blooms dangle on one side of the stem.

Or perhaps what you’re looking for sounds a bit like H. hispanica because they bloom in spring, grow in woodlands, and have long stems adorned with clusters of flowers. However, the leaves aren’t long and glossy, but rather softer and more rounded. That description would match the appearance of Virginia bluebells (Mertensia virginica), a native of the Eastern United States, and not invasive.

You may think since most of these bluebells also have somewhat unique common names — e.g., “English” bluebell — that those would suffice in identifying exactly which bluebell you’re talking about. Maybe yes, if that was the only common name associated with the plant.

English bluebells can also be known as wild hyacinths, bluebottles, or harebells. And here we run into an intersection of common names with “harebell” also being a name used for Scottish bluebells (Campanula rotundifolia) that bloom in summer and with flowers of a billowier shape, alternating on a long, slender stem. Follow the Campanula rabbit hole from there and find that the flowers in that family are called “bellflowers” (campanula in Latin means “little bell”), many of which are blue, but other than C. rotundifolia, none are referred to as “bluebells.”

It quickly becomes apparent that one does not simply walk into a nursery asking for bluebells without having to answer a lot of follow-up questions.

Despite my initial lack of enthusiasm upon encountering botanical names, I feel extremely lucky to be living in a time when we have the internet and only two Latinized words per name to contend with. Before the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus developed the system of binomial nomenclature (the two-part names consisting of a genus and species) in 1753, plants were often referred to by five to 10, sometimes 20, word phrases. Try to find your bluebells then.

Overall, given that Latin is a dead language that no country can claim as its own, it’s nice to know that we gardeners all over the world can be equal in the struggle to incorporate these names into our personal lexicons. It’s certainly a great unifier, and we can definitely use more of those these days.