Pretty flowers with clunky Latin names
I am writing a fantasy novel set in the Middle East. For multiple reasons related to both plot and atmosphere, I'm using flowers and flowering trees a lot in both descriptions and dialogue. Trouble is, many plants that are very common in the Middle East don't have common names in English - only clunky Latin names. For example:
They rested under the branches of a Vachellia tortilis during the hot hours of the day, and only continued on their way when the sun hung low over the West horizon.
Or
He walked from between the trees out into a clearing covered with Sternbergias in full bloom.
Or
They're as impossible to kill as a Faidherbia albida.
The Latin names evoke nothing at all, and break the flow of the narration.
If I limit myself only to plants with common English names, I am left with only a small subset of the flora I see around me. Is there a way I can make use of the full range of Middle-Eastern plants (or at least of enough of them that I don't get stuck seeking for something that would be in flower in a given habitat in a given season, and please please please have an English common name), without the text creaking, clunking, and crashing into a wall of disinterest?
3 answers
The average western reader would not know the difference if you told them that your heroes rested in the shade of a rhubarb tree or tied their horse to a gigantic parsley.
Even western works that talk about people walking through a grove of ash or poplar only evoke a vague sense of woodsiness in the average city dweller. I think some have a vague sense that certain tree names belong to certain locales so if you say cottonwood they see the West and if you say mangrove they see the jungle, but they would not actually recognize these trees if they fell out of them.
If you want the reader to actually have some idea of what your trees look like, therefore, you need to describe them. If you just want them to have some vague sense of locale-specific woodsiness (which is probably the best you can hope for with most readers) then use whatever name seems to have the most romantic associations with the area you are writing about.
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Most plants have some commonly used names as humans don't really want to use weird latin descriptions in their everyday conversations. A quick look on Wikipedia for Vachellia tortilis for example yields (emphasis mine):
Vachellia tortilis, widely known as Acacia tortilis but attributed by APG III to the Vachellia genus, is the umbrella thorn acacia
If you want to make this even more descriptive you could choose to have the people in your story call the flower by another name so that it's easier to imagine them:
thorny umbrella-shaped acacia
would be perfectly fine to describe that flower. Looking at your other examples we can come up with some somewhat meaningful names. Sternbergia would become "Golden Goblet" as the description of the plant says
These plants produce golden-yellow goblet-shaped flowers borne on stalks some way above the ground that open during the autumn or early winter.
It's even easier for Faidherbia as the description explicitly says:
Common names for it include apple-ring acacia (their circular, indehiscent seed pods resemble apple rings),[2] ana tree, balanzan tree and winter thorn.
Depending on how you want to portray the tree you could use "Winter Thorn" as a harsh description or "Apple-Ring Acacia" as a more poetic name.
People already took care of your problem - you just have to search for descriptions of your plants, for example by looking through their Wikipedia articles.
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+1 Secespitus.
However, I never use any name I don't think my reader would understand, especially not a name derived from the discoverer or a person being honored; those real-life people do not exist in my fantasy!
I will make up names. Even for my experts that do know the formal names, and I introduce them as such, with a description. I disagree that LOTR reads better with formal names than it reads with descriptions, to me the descriptions aid the imagination of the reader better than any formal name possibly could. You say that yourself, that the formal names feel flat. That's because they don't evoke any image for anybody except a trained botanist.
The job of the writer, IMO, to aid the imagination of the reader, so they see what is in the writer's mind.
The etymology of the words can help: Acacia may derive from a word for thorny and first referred to a thorny Egyptian tree; thus something like thorny tree would be fine, it is how it was literally identified by early people. Most names were like that.
Thus I introduce a fantasy formal name, and use it with a description. True formal names do nothing, if you trace them to their origin they are nearly always descriptive names.
Another solution is to provide some formality by way of teaching or introduction. Describe the flower or plant from the POV of a person that has not seen it before or doesn't know its formal name or calls it be a colloquial and descriptive name, in dialogue a character can prove her expertise by using the formal name.
I see little point in doing that unless the plot requires an expert botanist at some point to use plant resources to get out of a bind or solve some problem. In that case, a few random instances of showing this knowledge are all that is necessary for the reader to believe in the expertise.
The point isn't to educate the reader, it is to entertain them, and dumping information on them that is not descriptive, or character building, or emotionally influential on a character, and has no influence on the plot, is (IMO) poor writing. Nobody cares if the information has no consequences.
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