WHEN you visit your garden centre, do you know your alba from your aculeatus, your japonicus from your officinalis?

The use of Latin names for plants is common throughout the world and can reveal a lot about the plant you are buying in its infancy, such as what colour it will be, the shape of its leaves and other distinguishing features.

Nomenclature may seem like mumbo-jumbo, but once you’ve got the hang of the names, the plants become much more interesting.

Plants are named in Latin simply because the sciences date from a time when it was a universal language. The first system of plant classification was created in the 18th century by a Swedish naturalist, Carl von Linne, who called himself by a Latin name, Linnaeus.

All plants have two names, with the first describing the genus – the Latin word for family. Roses, for example, all have the first name Rosa, regardless of their colour, habit or size.

The second name denotes the species or specific class. Within a family group of plants, there will be differences in the plants. All the species in a genus have common characteristics considered close enough to form the group, but each has different characteristics to distinguish it from the others.

Sometimes there is a slight difference within a species so the plant is given an extra name to denote this. For instance, the olive tree is Olea europaea, but a variety which had larger fruits and smaller stones was named El Greco, so its full botanical name is Olea europaea El Greco.

Latin names are usually written in italics, and any extra names are sometimes put into single quotation marks at the end.

Many variety names are now in the language of the country in which the plant was raised. So, with a name like Erica arborea Albert’s Gold, the word Erica tells you that the plant is a heather (all ericas are heathers), the arborea shows it’s a tree variety (arbor is tree in Latin), while Albert’s Gold indicates the plant was named after an Albert somewhere and that it is gold in either leaf or flower.

Other additions can muddy the waters of a name. Hybrids, or crosses between different species, are given unique names that are preceded with an x – Forsythia x intermedia, for example, tells us that it is a hybrid between two species, but unfortunately it doesn’t tell us which ones.

It may all sound extremely complicated, but many names help the gardener by describing the plant and its attributes.

Names describing colour include lutea (yellow), alba (white), carnea (flesh-coloured), purpurea (purple), atropurpurea (red) and caerulea (blue). Those which tell you the plant is perfumed include aromatica, citriodora (lemon-scented), suaveolens (sweet smelling) and foetida (strong and unpleasant).

To give you an idea of shape, look for horizontalis (growing horizontally), repens (creeping and rooting as it grows), fruticosa (shrubby) and pendula (weeping), among others.

If you want to find out about foliage shape, look for words including angustifolia (narrow), dissectum (finely cut), latifolia (broad-leaved), palmatum (palmlike) and macrophylla (largeleaved).

Choose a plant with sempervirens in its title and it’s likely to be evergreen.

Other generally descriptive words include elegans (elegant), aculeatus (prickly), officinalis (medicinal) and spectabilis (spectacular).

Some words indicate the country of origin, such as japonica (Japanese), chinensis (Chinese) and novi-belgii (of New Belgium), which doesn’t necessarily give us too many clues as to how the plant is going to look. Kerria japonica and Anemone japonica, for instance, are completely different plants with only the country of origin the same.