A Master Gardener friend who recently traveled to the UK brought me back a packet of seeds. Specifically, ‘Gowrie’ rutabaga seeds from a company called Mr. Fothergill’s.
Except because these are British seeds, they’re not called rutabaga, they’re called swede. The packet does include the botanical name of the plant (Brassicanapus napobrassica) so if you’d never heard of swedes and didn’t recognize the picture, you could look them up – I hope all our American packets of rutabaga seeds do the same!
This got me thinking about vegetable names that separate us by a common language, or divide us by different ones, or in general confuse us. I’ll give a few examples below, and please tell your own stories of vegetable name mix-ups in the comments.
Let’s start withswede. The etymology of this word is pretty simple: it’s a Swedish vegetable, introduced into Scotland and hence the rest of the British Isles, and named after its origin. Interestingly, the Scots call themneeps (most often served mashed), which derives from the same Latinnapus that’s part of the botanical name. Our American namerutabaga comes from a Swedish dialectical word,rotabagge, but in more standard Swedish it’s calledkålrot– kale or cabbage root. Remember, all these brassicas or cole crops are closely related, and they often have similar linguistic roots to go along with their botanical ones.
Another vegetable known by several English names iseggplant oraubergine. The latter is a French word also used in the UK, originally derived from Arabic, and has also come to mean a purple color similar to that of the most popular sorts of eggplants. But egg + plant means a plant that bears fruit looking like eggs; manySolanum melongena fruits were originally small and white (and you can still find that type if you look). Thatmelongena specific epithet comes from Latin also via Arabic; the modern Italian word for eggplant ismelanzana. This word got twisted intomela insana, which translates asmad apple. It was once rumored that eating eggplants made you crazy; is this because of nightshade family alkaloids or a bad Italian translation? In India, eggplant is calledbrinjal, which actually comes from a Portuguese word.
And then there’szucchini, known in Britain ascourgette.Zucca is Italian for squash or pumpkin, sozucchini is the diminutive – a little squash. Please note thatzucchini is the plural form of the Italian word, which may have something to do with the large numbers in which we usually harvest these vegetables.Courgette is also a diminutive, from Frenchcourge, meaning squash or vegetable marrow. Yes, and what about thosemarrows that we hear about in British gardens? Well, if you’ve ever missed harvesting a zucchini (or zucchino) at its ideal petite size, and let it grow into something resembling a fat baseball bat, you’ve grown a marrow.
I seem to spend a lot of time explaining to people thatpotatoes andsweet potatoes are not varieties of the same plant, that in fact they belong to different families and are grown very differently in the garden. The confusion of course is in the common name; if I could just refer to them asSolanum tuberosum andIpomoea batatas no one would get mixed up, right? I used to think that “sweet potato” derived from “potato” – the Spanish for potato ispatata, and it makes sense that another underground tuberous vegetable would adopt the same name. It’s a bit more complicated than that: both potatoes and sweet potatoes originate in the Americas, andpatatais apparently an invented word combining the Taino (Caribbean language)batata (sweet potato – see the botanical name) and the Quechua (Peruvian language)papa (potato). So, you can’t hybridize the plants, since they are far from the same species, but you can hybridize the words. Just make sure you don’t bury your sprouting sweet potatoes deep in a trench, or wait to plant your potatoes until May. And do eat your Ipomoea batatas leaves, but leave that Solanum tuberosum foliage alone.
Finally, since this is Grow It Eat It’s Year of thePepper, let’s talk about where our names for the genusCapsicum come from. The original pepper in English was black pepper, the spicePiper nigrum, which was imported into Europe from India and other tropical regions. South American pepper plants were given the same English name because of their spicy taste. The original word in the Nahuatl (Aztec) language was close to our modernchili (orchilli orchile – and the proper spelling is a big can of hot stuff that I am not going to open here). Sweet peppers were bred later from these original hot fruits, and given particular names based on their types and uses (as are the many kinds of hot peppers). The fruits we know asbell peppers are known in some places ascapsic*ms, which is the genus name (derived from Latin or Greek). But many other languages use words related to that Latinpiper (black pepper) – thinkpaprika, orpepperoni (flavored with capsicum fruits).
The language of the vegetable garden is complicated, confusing, and fun!
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By Erica Smith, Montgomery County Master Gardener
