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Forum → UK Species Inventory / Dictionary → Thymus polytrichus
Thymus polytrichus common name is listed as "Wild Garden" - is this correct (albeit oxymoronic)? There appear to be a couple of sources on the web that list it as such, but these could all have come from one error - some list it as "Wild Garden Thyme".
Surely this should be changed to read "Wild Garden Thyme" !
Steve
Charlie,
I've already raised this here http://forums.nbn.org.uk/viewtopic.php?pid=7136, I agree the name is just silly!
Charlie,
I've already raised this here http://forums.nbn.org.uk/viewtopic.php?pid=7136, I agree the name is just silly!
2009-11-10 16:26:36
Think I got to it first :D
So you did :P I didn't notice how old your original post was!
Charlie, you are right it is oxymoronic and Steve, it is my feeling that you are wrong, it should not be changed to Wild Garden Thyme, and not just for the very simple reason that it is an oxymoron.
I am a field botanist, not an horticulturalist, but I am also a native english speaker and the term Wild Garden Thyme suggests a plant of cultivated origin which has naturalised in the wild. Surely this is not the case for Thymus polytrichus which is listed by BSBI as native. I have not checked, but I would be very surprised if Garden Thyme were not at the very least a cultivar of Thymus polytrichus, or possibly a hybrid between two or more wild thyme species, one or more of which may not be native. The truth of the matter must surely be that there are dozens of distinct variants of Garden Thyme, mostly of obscure wild origin.
Bumping this one back up. The latest dictionary upgrades were touted as fixing this sort of problem, but now my databse reports Thymus polytrichus with the common name Thymus polytrichus, which is even worse than the previous situation to my mind.
Can we just settle on Wild Thyme as the accepted common name?
Hi Rob
I can confirm that the NameServer currently has "Garden Thyme" and "Wild Garden" (which I agree sounds incomplete) along with a plethora of other common names and these all point to "Thymus polytrichus A. Kern. ex Borbás". In the UK Species Dictionary we don't have a concept of an accepted common name and all common names are the same rank as a synonym. It could be that our version was corrected after the current Recorder taxon data was taken and, due to the lag between issuing updates and those updates filtering though to users, you are using a slightly older snapshot than I am. Or it might be due to a quirk in Recorder - not sure.
If the Recorder team (or anyone else) would like me to check anything else then do ask :)
Chris R.
Forum → UK Species Inventory / Dictionary → Thymus polytrichus
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