We blithely talk about plants having Latin names, but that really is only part of the story.

For a start, much of Latin nomenclature is actually Greek in origin, and there is a whole raft of plants named simply after people connected with plants since Linnaeus’s system of binomial nomenclature began in 1753. Some of those people have been explorers or plant hunters, some their sponsors, some botanists who never set foot abroad. Some have been named for famous gardeners or their friends or family, and some, modestly, for oneself.

You have to be pretty special to get a whole genus named after you, as the plant hunter John Tradescant did in Tradescantia. Getting a species name, as Père Delavay did in Osmanthus delavayi, is more common. These days, all kinds of friends and celebrities make it into the lists — a rose catalogue can read like Hello! magazine.

Here, we begin our series on how plants acquired their names with Semele androgyna (it rhymes with semolina, but cut short). It is a glamorously shiny, spiny, sprawling shrub related to asparagus. Its flowers are either male of female, hence the name androgyna (which is pure Greek in origin) and the females bear a red berry.

Odd then that the nymph Semele, after which it was named, was far from perennial. Such were her charms — glossy certainly, but no spines — that Zeus lusted after her with the kind of anyone-or-anything determination that only Zeus enjoyed. After their union Semele became with-god and in due season gave birth to Dionysus, after which, because she had looked on Zeus, she perished in a flash of lightning. That’s what you get for messing with gods; no more red berries for her.

Botanists have made further use of poor old Semele’s name by coining the word semelparous to refer to a plant that flowers once and then dies, such as most annual flowers or the great American agave.

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