Plants Beyond Latin: Un-Memorize the Names

Colonial plant taxonomy is even more problematic because it asserts ownership through naming and claiming, disregards plants’ native lands and cultural and ecological relationships, and appropriates Indigenous botanical knowledge without acknowledging or crediting the peoples from whom it comes. While some plant names assert colonial ownership by honoring men who claimed to “discover” them, others carry derogatory connotations, including racial slurs, misogynistic or gendered language, and associations with enslavement. Together, these names reveal how colonial plant taxonomy can encode power and harm.

In landscape architecture education, the Linnaean system has become the foundation of plant learning in many U.S. institutions. Emphasizing classification through naming has reduced plant knowledge in design disciplines to memorized lists, obscuring the relationships that sustain them. Students are often asked to memorize hyper-Latinized names, paired with botanical English names, both of which are colonial, without examining their native origins or understanding plants as an interconnected global ecological system. This approach also hinders students from recognizing the far larger design potential that can emerge from understanding plants. Such pedagogies fragment ecological understanding by reducing plants to memorized lists, obscuring historical, cultural, spiritual, and ecological diversity, and limiting diverse student perspectives. They also fail to prepare future designers for sensible global practice. Furthermore, the outcome of these courses often offers a poor, limited lens within confined boundaries, often state boundaries, which are themselves colonial territorial divisions. These limitations raise critical questions concerning how design practices may be reconfigured through the decolonization of plant learning, and the role of landscape architects, architects, and designers in either reinforcing or contesting these taxonomic structures as they are embedded within design practice.

Plants Beyond Latin offers a radical departure from conventional landscape architecture pedagogy, which remains rooted in colonial taxonomies and confined regional frameworks. The course emerged from an urgency to question how designers learn about plants and to rethink decolonizing plant learning in design practice. By moving beyond frameworks rooted in colonial science, it creates space for new knowledge through relationships. It challenges students to think critically about colonial taxonomy and to rediscover names that carry meaning through history, narrative, and culture. It foregrounds Indigenous plant knowledge, science, and the voices of people who have long understood these species, named them, and sustained them. Indigenous botanist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, offers an authentic lens on plants in her book, “Braiding Sweetgrass.” She writes, “In some Native languages, the term for plants translates to ‘those who take care of us.’” This perspective positions plants as beings that sustain communities, carry cultural memory, and shape the places we inhabit.

Plants Beyond Latin centers plants as agents within indigenous historical, cultural, and ecological systems and relationships. This helps future designers understand how plants sustain communities, support other species, and shape landscapes across generations and scales. This knowledge is essential to designing with plants in ways that respect these relationships and support ecological health. It also considers climate change impacts on plants and their role in climate adaptation, mitigation, and ecological resilience.

The course asks students to develop a research-based archive through their collective work. This collective effort in knowledge production rethinks how plants are known, identified, represented, and remembered, while engaging students in analyzing and critiquing plants’ colonial taxonomy. The Plants Beyond Latin archive, established through research portals, invites diverse ways of knowing, seeing, and relating. It foregrounds critical questions about how designers may reconfigure their practices through the decolonization of plant learning. The archive consists of a selection of plants native to China, Cambodia, Sudan, Mexico, Nigeria, Lebanon, India, and the U.S. The portals emphasize native plant names, their meanings, roles, historical and cultural significance, and relationships and uses. By inviting students to research plants that are familiar, meaningful, or culturally significant to them, the course enables students to exercise agency in their learning, cultivate a sense of belonging in the classroom, and develop knowledge that can inform their future careers, design research, and professional practice.

Chengyuan Xie, an MLA student, explores the Tabaldi tree, the ancient Sudanese name for the baobab (Adansonia digitata), named after the French naturalist and botanist Michel Adanson, who briefly encountered the tree in Senegal. Xie’s profile shifts attention from the tree’s Latin name to its striking form and its place in everyday life, including its ecological role and cultural significance. By examining these relationships, the student situates the Tabaldi trees within an interconnected system of ecological processes and community.

Quinn Adam, MArch/MLA student, examined the Wiigwaasaatig plant. It is an Anishinaabe name for paper birch (Betula papyrifera). Linnaeus used the genus name Betula for birch trees, while the botanical epithet papyrifera and the common name, paper birch, emphasize the bark’s paper-like qualities. Adam’s research expands this understanding through Anishinaabe cultural relationships, exploring the bark’s use for vessels, wigwam roofs, canoes, and scrolls recording sacred ceremonies, alongside the tree’s gifts of food, tea, and medicine. These relationships represent Wiigwaasaatig as more than a tree with paper-like bark: it is part of an interconnected ecological and cultural system, understood and sustained through Indigenous knowledge passed down over millennia.

Undergraduate student Rebekah Shin examines Matali, a plant native to Mexico commonly known as “wandering dude.” Her profile questions its older common name, “wandering Jew,” which comes from an antisemitic story about a Jewish man condemned to wander forever. In her narrative, “Mother Matali,” Shin explores the plant’s relationships with traditional midwifery, childbirth, and women’s care, describing preparations traditionally used for uterine ailments and during labor and postpartum recovery. By foregrounding Matali and the knowledge passed through generations, her work shifts attention from discriminatory naming to the plant’s connections to place, care, and cultural meaning.

Learn more at the Plants Beyond Latin archive.