OK, it's the subject you love to hate… Your familiar plants have their names changed. Well, here's more - as reported in the latest issue of the The Plantsman magazine.

First thing – don’t shoot the messenger. And it's not the fault of the botanists, either, they're just doing research and applying the rules to what they find. It's all the fault of Carl Linnaeus. It was the great man who came up with the system that connects the name of every plant with its classification, with its relationship with other plants. And the result is that when science advances and we reach a new understanding of how plants relate to each other, sometimes the names have to change. That's all there is to it.

Now, I'm not going to go into all the background of the latest modest changes – I'm just going to tell you what they are.

First, that lovely honey scented shrub Cytisus battandierii. We can all see that it doesn't look much like other species of Cytisus. Well, now it's been decided that it's so very different that it deserves a genus all of its own. It's now Argyrocytisus battandierii (left, click to enlarge).

The black "iris", Hermodactylus tuberosus – finally it's been decided that it's really so similar to irises that it's been placed irrevocably in Iris as Iris tuberosa. Belamcanda has moved into Iris as well.

And finally Schizostylis, invaluable late summer and fall flowering perennials for Britain and warmer zones in  the US. They've been moved into Hesperantha, so Schizostylis coccinea is now Hesperantha coccinea (right, click to enlarge).

Well, that wasn't so very bad was it? Or was it?