Book review from the archives originally published December 2008, curated by Cathy Tylka for Let's Talk Plants! December 2024.
Gods and Goddesses in the Garden: Greco-Roman Mythology and the Scientific Names of Plants by Peter Bernhardt and The Story of the Root-Children by Sibylle von Olfers
Reviewed by Caroline McCullagh.
Educated people in our society are no longer expected to be versed in classical Greek and Latin. Gods and Goddesses in the Garden almost makes you nostalgic for the days when they were. Peter Bernhardt has written an interesting book on taxonomy. That may sound like an oxymoron to some but take my word for it, Bernhardt is clearly an educated man, and he knows his Greek and Latin. He’s a professor of botany at St. Louis University. He loves the field of taxonomy. He shares his love with us in this delightful and interesting book.
The book starts with a general history of taxonomy in which he explains the system that Linnaeus inherited and expanded. We learn why so many plant genus names reference the gods and goddesses of antiquity. He then leads us through a summary of the Greek and Roman myths and the plant genus names derived from them.
Does this sound dry and boring? Not if you love words and plants. It’s fascinating to see the interrelationships between the words and the plants they represent.
Some modern scientists, enamored with technology, suggest that a code system be developed to replace the Linnaean binomial. It would perhaps be more exact, but Bernhardt argues that we would lose something valuable, useful, and beautiful and replace it with a system so complex that it could only be managed with a computer. Few people could manage to retain many plant code names in memory.
Following Bernhardt’s style of letting one thought lead to another, his book reminded me of another equally interesting, if much simpler one. I’m referring to The Story of the Root Children by Sibylle von Olfers. This wonderful children’s book was first published in Germany in 1906. It tells the story of Mother Earth – Ge or Gaia in Bernhardt’s book – who wakes her children in the spring and sends them out to populate the world with plants, flowers, and insects. Ge/Gaia is the first and oldest of the goddesses. We would call her Mother Nature. And, yes, it’s the Ge in word “geology” and in the names of as many as twenty plant genera.
I don’t go back quite to 1906, but this is one of the loved books of my childhood. I was delighted when I found a copy to give to my granddaughters (when I can bear to give it up). It’s good to read aloud and would be suitable for a boy or girl learning to read. It’s listed as being for four- to eight-year-olds. It would make a good holiday gift.
