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Identifications L-R: Yellow lady's slipper (Cypripedium parviflorum); Bladder campion (Silene cucullata); Fire pink (Silene virginica); Cancer root (Conopholis americana); Needle-tip blue-eyed grass (Sisyrinchium mucronatum), Eastern ninebark (Physocarpus opulifolius), Green and gold (Chrysogonum virginianum).

Virginia Plant Names:
Latin and Greek Meanings and Derivations
An Annotated Dictionary of Botanical and Biographical Etymology
Compiled by Michael L. Charters

  • yadkinen'se: presumably referring to Yadkin County, North Carolina.
  • Young'ia: named for in the words of the author, "two famous Englishmen, one as a poet, the other as a physician,
      "to wit, Edward Young (1683-1765) and Thomas Young (1773-1829). Edward Young was an English poet, literary critic, dramatist, philosopher and theologian. He was born at Upham, near Winchester, the son of a clergyman, and was educated at Winchester College and graduated from New College, Oxford in 1702. Subsequent to that, he removed to Corpus Christi College at Oxford. In 1708 he was nominated by Archbishop Tenison to a law fellowship at All Souls College which was a constituent college of the University of Oxford. He took a degree of Bachelor of Common Law in 1714 and a Doctor of Canon
    Law degree in 1719. He began publishing poems and frequenting literary circles around 1713. He included among his acquaintances such men as Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope. His career was largely taken up with writing poems, the most famous of which was entitled “The Complaint, or Night Thoughts,” which was inspired by the successive deaths of his stepdaughter in 1736, her husband in 1740, and Young’s wife in 1741. He also wrote plays and works of literary criticism, and he decided to take holy orders when he was in his fifties. His plays received little aclaim and were rarely performed. He spent much time in seeking patronage to support him, but his efforts were only partially successful. He was offered but for some reason refused a life annuity by the Marquess of Exeter if he would act as tutor to his son. In 1731, after being given a substantial college living situation by All Souls, he met and married Lady Elisabeth Lee. His poems continued to be popular throughout the century. He died at his rectory at Welwyn in 1765 and was buried there in the parish church. Thomas Young was a British polymath and physician who made notable scientific contributions to the fields of
      vision, light, solid mechanics, energy, physiology, language, musical harmony, and Egyptology. He was born into a Quaker family in Milverton, Somerset. He had an astounding facility for languages and by the age of fourteen had learned Greek and Latin and was acquainted with French, Italian, Hebrew, German, Aramaic, Syriac, Samaritan, Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Amharic. Wikipedia relates that: “[He] began to study medicine in London at St. Bartholomew's Hospital in 1792, moved to the University of Edinburgh Medical School in 1794, and a year later went to Göttingen, Lower Saxony,
    Germany, where he obtained the degree of doctor of medicine in 1796 from the University of Göttingen. In 1797 he entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge. In the same year he inherited the estate of his grand-uncle, Richard Brocklesby, which made him financially independent, and in 1799 he established himself as a physician at 48 Welbeck Street, London. Young published many of his first academic articles anonymously to protect his reputation as a physician. In 1801, Young was appointed professor of natural philosophy (mainly physics) at the Royal Institution. In two years, he delivered 91 lectures. In 1802, he was appointed foreign secretary of the Royal Society, of which he had been elected a fellow in 1794. He resigned his professorship in 1803, fearing that its duties would interfere with his medical practice. His lectures were published in 1807 in the Course of Lectures on Natural Philosophy and contain a number of anticipations of later theories. In 1811, Young became physician to St George's Hospital, and in 1814 he served on a committee appointed to consider the dangers involved in the general introduction of gas for lighting into London. In 1816 he was secretary of a commission charged with ascertaining the precise length of the second's or seconds pendulum (the length of a pendulum whose period is exactly 2 seconds), and in 1818 he became secretary to the Board of Longitude and superintendent of the HM Nautical Almanac Office. Young was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1822. A few years before his death he became interested in life insurance, and in 1827 he was chosen one of the eight foreign associates of the French Academy of Sciences. In 1828, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences." He made significant contributions to the translation of the Rosetta Stone, was credited with establishing the wave theory of light, influenced in his experiments by those of Isaac Newton, and was praised by such giants as Sir John Herschel and Albert Einstein. Young has been described as "The Last Man Who Knew Everything." He died in London at the early age of 56. The genus Youngia was published by Alexandre Henri Gabriel de Cassini in 1831 and is called false hawksbeard.
  • Yuc'ca: from the Carib name for manihot or cassava (a genus belonging to the Euphorbia and misapplied to these liliaceous evergreen shrubs or small trees with rosettes of sword-shaped leaves). Wikipedia adds: "Early reports of the species were confused with the cassava (Manihot esculenta). Consequently, Linnaeus mistakenly derived the generic name from the Taíno word for the latter, yuca. The Aztecs living in Mexico since before the Spanish arrival, in Nahuatl, call the local yucca species (Yucca gigantea) iczotl, which gave the Spanish izote. Izote is also used for Yucca filifera." The genus Yucca was published by Carl Linnaeus in 1753 and is called yucca or adam's-needle.
  • yuccifo'lium: with leaves like Yucca.