Plant-Lore

Collecting the folklore and uses of plants

Local Names Search

Type the name you are searching for in the box below, and scroll down to the bottom of the page to see the result

This page lists approximately 13,670 ‘local’ or ‘folk’ names of British plants, including fungi and algae, derived from a wide range of sources, the most important of which are: ‘Verbal provincialisms’ and later dialect reports, 1876 – present (since 2011 reports on dialect and folklore) in the Report and Transactions of the Devonshire Association for the Advancement of Science. James Britten & Robert Holland, A Dictionary of English Plant-names, London [1878-] 1886, and manuscript slips intended for a supplement to this work, now in the library of the Natural History Museum, London. A.S. Macmillan, Popular Names of Flowers, Fruits, etc., Yeovil, 1922. Geoffrey Grigson, The Englishman’s Flora, London, 1987 (originally published 1955). If information is required on the other sources please consult the compiler, roy@plant-lore.com The database consists of eight fields:

  1. Local name (e.g. wild tulip).
  2. Scientific name (e.g. Fritillaria meleagris), according to Clive Stace’s New Flora of the British Isles, ed.3, 2010.
  3. Standard English name (e.g. fritillary), again following Stace, 2010.
  4. Area, most often county, from which name was recorded (e.g. Buckinghamshire (Ouzel district)). Counties have come and gone, and boundaries have been redrawn since many of the names were collected; it has not been possible to update county names, thus the database contains a number of obsolete names.
  5. Explanation, or comments, on the local name as given in the original publication or by the contributor, see field 8, (e.g. ‘Formerly abundant in a field which was known in the neighbourhood as Tulip Field’).
  6. Source, the publication in which the name is recorded (e.g. Dandy, 1942: 77); where the source is a place and date preceded by an asterisk (e.g. *Chard, Somerset, July 1999) the name has been collected as part of the ongoing Plant-Lore Archive project.
  7. Further comments on the name and its distribution, taken from other publications (e.g. ‘Also Berkshire, Northamptonshire & Warwickshire [Grigson, 1987: 402]’).
Searches may be made of fields 2-4 (local, scientific, and standard, names) When searching the first – local name – field, it might be necessary to try different versions of the name, e.g. lamb’s tail, lambs’ tail, lamb’s-tail. Where an adjective forms the first part of the name, e.g. wild tulip, the name is not hyphenated, but where the first part of the name is a noun, e.g. yew-bramble the name is hyphenated, but there are exceptions. The compiler is always pleased to receive comments and names not yet included on the database, comments and corrections, please send them to roy@plant-lore.com

Searches can be made using local, scientific or standard names