Amorphophallus titanum flower in a botanical garden

Illustrations by Liz Zonarich/Harvard Staff

Can you tell an amorphophallus from an aspergillus?

Sy Boles

Harvard Staff Writer

1 min read

Word nerds, classicists, and botanists, it’s your time to shine in etymology quiz inspired by Div School book

Can plants see? Can they pray? If trees could make music, what would it sound like?

Those questions and others are explored in “ Thinking with Plants and Fungi ,” a collection of essays from botanists, anthropologists, artists, and theologians inspired by a conference of the same name, hosted at the Harvard Divinity School’s Center for the Study of World Religions .

At the core of the book is an inquiry into how we should think about organisms that are wildly different from us. It’s an open question, but one way might be through the names we give them, whether in International Scientific Vocabulary or otherwise.

Editors Rachael Petersen , Natalia Schwien Scott , and Russell C. Powell helped us develop this quiz based on the book.

Step 1 of 8

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1. The aspergillus genus of molds traces its name to the Latin root spargere, meaning:
2. The Amorphophallus titanum flower gets its name from its large, unusually shaped flower head. But the name misses the flower’s most defining characteristic, which is what?
3. Mosses befuddled early botanists who sought to categorize the natural world. Carl Linnaeus’ “Systema Naturae” put them in the cryptogamia class, which might be translated to mean what?
4. True or false: Poricidal plants are those that harm other plants.
5. Who proposed the concept of geolinguistics?
6. Many plants’ scientific names come from Latin roots. But the Boquila trifoliolata, known as the chameleon vine thanks to its ability to mimic nearby plants, gets part of its name from what other language or family?
7. Heliotropes are plants that do what?
8. Copal, a tree resin used ceremonially in some precolonial and contemporary Mesoamerican communities, owes its name to a word meaning what?