This is the season when all of those gorgeously illustrated plant and seed catalogs start arriving. The pictures are beautiful, but the Latin words and the cryptic codes and terms printed on a seed packet or in a seed catalog may leave you in the dark.

It's good to know a little bit about what's going on with Latin terminology. Scientists have used this system since the mid-1700s as the most reliable way to refer to plants.

Binomial nomenclature is the system of giving each plant a scientific name consisting of two parts. The first word is the name of the genus to which the organism belongs. The generic name is capitalized, underlined, or written in italics. The second word is the specific epithet or specific term of the species is an adjective describing a member of a genus. The epithet is written in lower case letters, underlined, or italicized.Sometimes epithets are capitalized if they are named after a person.Together, the genus plus the specific epithet make up the species name. For example, common fennel is Foeniculum vulgare, not just vulgare. Epithets are derived from a description of the flower or leaf, the area where the plant was discovered, its habitat, or in honor of a person.

You may also see names after the specific epithet. A variety is a group of plants in a natural setting that has developed features on its own, and comes true from seeds. The variety usually describes the location or trait in which the variety located or describes. The varietal name is also an epithet, added after the name of the species and is preceded by the abbreviation "var.”  > Foeniculum vulgare var. Grosfruchtiger

A cultivar is a plant selected by humans for one or more unique traits and usually is propagated vegetatively in order to maintain those traits. If a new type of flower was developed by cross pollination in a breeding program, it would be a cultivar. A cultivar name follows the species name and is enclosed within single quotation marks, not underlined or italicized, and each word begins with capital letters. Cultivars generally occur as ornamentals and food crops: Malus ‘Granny Smith' is an apple cultivar. Cultivar is abbreviated as cv.