Flower Stock Photos journal
What a species name is worth on a caption
Getting the botanical name right costs nothing and is noticed by exactly the audience most likely to buy from you.
Most people never read the caption. The ones who do are frequently the ones who know the subject, and the botanical audience is unusually willing to write in.
Three kinds of name
The botanical name is the Latin binomial: genus then species, italicised, genus capitalised. *Paeonia lactiflora*. It is governed by a formal code and identifies the plant unambiguously anywhere in the world.
The cultivar name follows it in single quotes, not italicised: *Paeonia lactiflora* 'Sarah Bernhardt'. A cultivar is a selected, propagated variety. The quotes are not decorative; they are part of the notation and they distinguish a cultivar from a species.
The marketing name is whatever a nursery decided to sell it as. It is often different in different countries, it is not governed by anything, and it frequently has a trademark symbol attached. It belongs in retail copy and nowhere near a botanical caption.
Mixing them is the standard error. Writing *Paeonia* 'Sarah Bernhardt' in italics inside the quotes, or capitalising the species epithet, or presenting a marketing name as a species, all signal to a knowledgeable reader that nobody checked.
When it matters
For a background texture on a slide, it does not matter at all and a caption is probably noise.
It matters when the audience is horticultural, when the image supports an identification claim, in educational and reference contexts, and in any editorial setting where a picture desk has a style guide.
It matters commercially in one specific case: when a brand's whole proposition is expertise. A tea company that names the wrong botanical on its packaging has undermined the only thing it was trying to communicate.
What this catalogue records
Where a plant's identification was documented at source, the botanical name is on the image page and in the file metadata. Where it was not, the field is absent rather than guessed.
That absence is deliberate and it is worth understanding. An invented Latin binomial is worse than no name, because it looks authoritative and it propagates: your caption becomes someone else's source. If an image page carries no species, treat that as information rather than as an oversight, and either write a caption that does not claim one or write to us with the asset id and ask.
If you find an error
Tell us. Botanical corrections are acted on and they are genuinely useful, because a wrong name in a catalogue ends up in other people's print.