It's all in the name with blooms

I have fried egg flowers out in the garden at the moment - the names are so obvious that everybody who sees them knows exactly what they are.

The problem is that if I had a visitor who did not speak English they would have no idea what I was talking about.

The answer to this problem lies in Latin names. When I was in Japan some time ago, even though I do not speak a word of Japanese, let alone understand their writing, I was able to have quite a conversation about the plants that were growing in a Japanese nurseryman's garden.

Latin names can be very daunting and can even have the effect of putting people off the study of plants.

This is a great pity, as there is such a lot of pleasure to be had in getting to know the many shapes, habits and personalities of plants, and of course, one cannot get to know a plant, any more than a person, without knowing their name.

It was a Swedish gentleman called Mr Linnaeus, who lived from 1707 to 1778, who devised the system for naming plants that we now use. In fact, he aimed to name everything in the living world, 'from buffaloes to buttercups', so set himself quite a task.

Like all good systems it was very simple, he divided everything into families - or genus - and gave each one a surname, or generic name. Then he gave each member of the family a given, or Christian name, which he called the species.

The generic name always starts with a capital letter and the specific name with a small letter.

The names he chose were usually in Latin, as this was a universal root to many of our European languages and in the past most educated people had studied it to a certain degree, so most would know, for instance that alba meant white and rubra meant red.

Usually the names describe something about the subject, so in human terms we may have the family Baker, who bakes bread for a living, consisting of Sandy Baker, with sandy hair, Bella Baker, the pretty one, and Baby Baker.

In plant terms we may have the Rose family, known as Rosa alba, a white rose, Rosa rubrifolia, a rose with red foliage and Rosa multiflora, a rose with many flowers.

The good thing is that the more names one gets to know, the easier it becomes, as many of the names are the same in different families.

To get back to my egg flowers, the fried egg - Romnya coulteri - is named to commemorate an Irish astonomer called Romney Robinson, coulter means commemorate.

It is absolutely gorgeous, a type of poppy, so the flowers are a simple poppy shape with a great boss of yellow stamens in the centre.

The foliage is an attractive grey, so even when it is not in flower it makes a foil for other flowers.

It is not very common, as it is difficult to propagate, having very deep roots, but once established it spreads into a good clump.

The poached egg - Limnanthes douglasi - is another plant that I grow in the summer.

It is an annual plant, so it is very easy to grow from seed. Limne means marsh and anthos flower, so this is a marsh flower, originally collected in America by the intrepid plant collector and explorer called Douglas.

During the winter it has bright green leaves, then at the first sign of spring the yellow flowers make a cheerful carpet.

Eventually, probably around July, a thunder storm will reduce it to a sodden mass. At this stage tidy gardeners will collect it up and remove the brown remains but this is a mistake.

To keep your poached eggs forever just rake it into a heap where you wish it to be and within three weeks or so it will all germinate again.