Get Exclusive Access To Secret Knowledge : learn to identify plants by their botanical name

I was in a restaurant with my family. Someone got a yellow orange fruit with their dessert. It was slightly bigger than a cherry, it had a papery leaf and no stem. The consensus was that it was a gooseberry. I said it was a ground cherry. After a lot of argument we used our cell phones to look for it on the internet, we found out we were all right, sort off.

The fruit, Physalis turns out to have several common names including gooseberry and ground cherry.
Wikipedia lists 30 species of Physalis. The genus belongs to the Solanaceae family. Physalis are herbaceous, the fruit is characterized by a papery husk.

The real gooseberry is a single species Ribes uva-crispa belonging to the Grossulariaceae family. It is a woody perennial shrub with mostly hairy, green fruit.

Common names are confusing because they often refer to more than one plant making it difficult to know which plant someone is talking about. Botanical or binomial names refer to a single plant, there is no confusion which plant you are referring to. The first part of the name specifies the genus of the plant. Plants in the same genus have similar characteristics, needs and wants. Knowing the genus of a plant helps you understand lots about it. The second part of the name belongs only to that plant, it is its sole identifier.

Even though botanical names are long and difficult to pronounce they make the most sense when it comes to talking about plants. Using a plants botanical name means everyone is on the same page.
I’ve written more about botanical names over here.