You still say tomato

Tomato, tomato (said with long and short vowel sounds), a domesticated solanaceous fruit that by any other name would still taste as good, especially while thinking about the sugo alla puttanesca the Phactor cooked last night from fresh Amish paste tomatoes. For quite some time, botanists called the tomato, Lycopersicon esculentum, the juicy wolf peach, a name which added a bit of European skepticism about how esculent this neotropical, and newly arrived, nightshade might be. If you know anything about Old World nightshades, then you'll understand the skepticism. No one doubted that the tomato was closely related to the huge genus Solanum, the name sake of the nightshade family, and now relatively recent molecular studies have shown that the tomato species is part of the genus Solanum. Now what is usually done in these circumstances is that the specific epithet (esculentum) is transferred back to Solanum to produce a new combination, Solanum esculentum. Ta da! And for awhile that was the species name of tomato, but then someone remembered Linnaeus. Remember Linnaeus? The father of taxonomy. Well, the order in which taxonomic names are published counts with the first name published (the oldest) being judged correct, and no one is older than Linnaeus. Linnaeus was simply set as the starting date of plant names, and Linnaeus had named this plant Solanum lycopersicon. Subsequent to Linnaeus the specific epithet was raised to a generic level and a new specific epithet was added, but now that tomato is back in Solanum the whole thing reverts to Linnaeus' original species name. Image credit - diversely colored wild tomatoes from western S. America: Ana Caicedo, Univ. Mass.

A Trillium by any other name would still have 3 leaves

For reasons that cannot be fully explained, other than they were cheap, the Phactor bought a package of six "white trillium". That certainly doesn't definitively tell you what you had bought, but what with lots of shady areas, and a big area to transform into a woodland wonderland of spring ephemerals, more trilliums could not hurt. All six corms grew and here's the score: Trillium ceruum, nodding trillium, which is white - 4, Trillium sessile, toadshade - 1, Trillium erectum, red trillium & several other common names - 1. So in general this is a happy enough outcome. Nodding trillium was new to our gardens as was the toadshade, so our species diversity went up by 2. Our gardens already have Trillium grandiflora, T. recurvatum, T. erectum, and T. luteum, so in a way this was a pretty good deal, but honestly, the actual name of the plant being sold should be known, and in a manner of speaking we have an honest claim that they owe us two white trilliums because it was their sloppy handling that mixed the corms so that the order included two non-white trilliums, or cynically, white trillium was selling well and not others, so lets stretch the inventory by a third. Who knows. Any similar stories to share?