Little Presents at the End of a Branch

Fruit crisp made with rhubarb, strawberries, and the tart haskap berry is a current favorite on our table. The haskap berry is making a big splash across Canada, because it grows in cold places like Siberia and Japan, and is doing well here in Nova Scotia as well as in the plains provinces. It seems to be a super-food, like many berries, packed with antioxidants. The genus and species name for haskap is lonicera caerulea; lonicera is the Latinized form of Lonitzer, a German botanist of the sixteenth century, and caeruleus, a, um is a Latin adjective meaning “blue.” Haskap is sometimes called “blue honeysuckle,” as lonicera is the genus name of many woody shrubs and vines in the honeysuckle family. 

I love binomial nomenclature, because even when Latin words do not exist to describe a plant or animal, classifiers make up descriptive or memorializing words. I was delighted to find a new resource online for the meanings of plant genus and species names: a botanary, a portmanteau combining “botanical” with “dictionary.”