I thought my answer I gave above was pretty straight forward.

greene said:If our ATP database is to set a shining example for those who come after us, we should have the plant listed either one way or the other and not both.

On the contrary, the database was made specifically to give ALL information and having multiple common names is a hallmark of the database design. By including all possible common names we are giving more rather than less information.

Both spellings are correct even though one is favored by one group and another is favored by a different group.

I can understand the need of some people to just have the one accepted spelling.
When there is botanical acceptance of two difference spellings there actually is individual choice, to deny that is also making an individual choice. As long as people choose my way, I have no problem with it.
I do know that difference spellings can sometimes cause confusion, but once something has been accepted for so long, changing it also causes confusion.

A while ago I had typed a message but it got lost.

When I search the database and type in
crapemyrtle = only one item, Barbados Cherry (Malpighia glabra), one common name being 'Wild crapemyrtle (as one word).
crape myrtle = 9 pages of results with 168 items including the Barbados Cherry.
crepemyrtle = a response of 'Did you mean crepe myrtle?'
crepe myrtle = 11 pages of results with 217 items including the Daylily 'Cenla Crepe Myrtle'
Lagerstroemia = 11 pages of results with 215 items

(Note: The mailman knocked on my door to ask for some free plants so my count might be off buy one or two. Sorry. )

For the different spellings I would think there should be an equal number of results. This is what is confusing me.
Personally, I don't care which common name is preferred as we all have our own favorites, but, with the exception of one each Barbados Cherry and the Daylily, shouldn't the search result be the same? What is getting lost?

Just for entertainment, I thought I'd mention the hand-lettered sign I saw at Home Depot a while back "Crapmyrtle".

More popcorn, anyone?

I love the blog Botanical Accuracy for just this type of question, including the correct way to capitalize or italicize or not. http://www.botanicalaccuracy.c...

But I just tried their search for both crape and crepe myrtle and got nothing. :(

However, apparently there are other divisions among taxonomists as to which spelling or name is the correct one for a plant. I remember when I discovered that they actually changed the Latin binomials sometimes, deciding to reassign a plant to another Genus or rename it or whatever. I was aghast. I mean, it's hard enough for us right-brain dominant folks to even learn such details and then they want to go and change stuff on us?

kylaluaz when you said that they "changed the Latin binomials sometimes, deciding to reassign a plant to another Genus or rename it".

When this happens it would be nice if all the books, articles, links, threads, posts and forums could 'auto-correct' to the new name, but what ever was written in the past, even by experts, will be out there with the old name forever.

There is no regulation for common names like there is for scientific names, of which there is only one per plant that is correct at any given point in time. The nearest I can think of at the moment to check what is the "correct" common name in this case, FWIW, would be the cultivar registration authority for Lagerstroemia, which is the United States National Arboretum. They call it crapemyrtle, all one word:

http://www.usna.usda.gov/Resea...

Edit: ITIS (Integrated Taxonomic Information System) also goes with the one word crapemyrtle:
http://www.itis.gov/servlet/Si...

However, TROPICOS (Missouri Botanical Garden) quotes a 1995 book "Scientific and Common Names of 7,000 Vascular Plants in the United States" to justify "crape-myrtle" with a hyphen as the English common name. Either way it seems these authorities prefer the a spelling rather than e. http://www.tropicos.org/Name/1...

Sorry for not italicizing where it should be, but I'm fairly new here and would need to go and look at the code for that and might lose the post.

@greene, It sure would be nice! However, as you say, human information recording and sharing is still an imperfect art.

@sooby, Wow, they do??? One word, and crape.

Welp, that's probably what I'll use then, if I can remember to.

I am a stubborn purist, and will continue to use the spelling that reflects the genesis of the name. Besides, they don't grow here anyway!
(But don't let me get started on the spelling and pronunciation of words we've appropriated from other languages! I refuse to ever use the word "quixotic" because of the "correct" pronunciation according to the dictionary. )

@sooby, Great information! and I don't think there's any penalty for failure to italicize.

the word

Edit: sorry, I didn't know it would work with added space in there. (Rick did it so you can see.)

Took me years to learn that basic HTML stuff. Doesn't stick in my mind! Even now I know almost none of it.

@woofie, It's hard, isn't it? Some things will just never sound right.

Feel free to add all the variations of the common name to all the lagerstroemias. The database supports that and then searches for all the various spellings will find all the plants.

Thanks for the great links, everyone! Now I know that the cultivar name should NOT be italicized:

Genusname speciesname 'Cultivarname'

Now I'm sure that I've been making grade school mistakes when I capitalize Petunia and Zinnia. But I like capitalizing their names! They seem like proper names. But I guess not.


It sounds like Dave's suggestion would be a great application for the Mass Databox Proposal tool.


P.S. Dave's HTML codes are here:

http://garden.org/special/page...

and if you remove the spaces:

[ i]This is italic[ /i]

Thanks for the help with BBCode. I'm going to make sure I have that page handy, although I do know basic html whereas it is BBCode on ATP which has different enclosures and that's what I was unsure of. Html uses < > and BBCode uses [ ]. I'm kind of fussy over doing plant names properly, with italics where needed, so I should practice what I preach. It stems from getting some "red ink" on a horticulture course assignment years ago for not using italics where I should have

If you really want to go in-depth on understanding and writing plant names, Hortax (the Horticultural Taxonomy Group) has a downloadable booklet that goes into great detail:

http://www.hortax.org.uk/horta...

or a downloadable leaflet (see their left navigation bar) for the less ambitious.

@sooby, are you aware that you can add the link to those BB codes to your custom menu bar on the left? It's easy to do. Just go to your profile page, click on "change your site preferences," and scroll down to the bottom of the list. Click on "manage your custom menu bar" then "add another link;" then just paste in the link to the BB codes.

No, I was not aware. I will do that, thank you Still finding my way around ATP.

Sue, I love the square-bracket BB Codes over the angle-bracket HTML codes. The extra shifts to get the angle brackets gave me around a 30% typo rate and slowed down my typing enoguh that I wouldn't underline without a strong motivation.

The square brackets just flow effortlessly.

Thanks for the Hortax link!