naming of plants

penstemon penstemon@Q.com
Fri, 08 Jan 2016 22:23:50 PST
As for plurals, it seems that is one of those things that varies from one plant scholar to the next. I had been given a critique concerning the writing on my blog that I should just write, for example, Scillas (italicized, of course) rather than the lower case. Peculiar that there are so many different options on this matter.

Lower case is correct. (I was tempted to add “period”, but that sounded excessively aggressive.) “I walked out into the garden, and, behold, a hundred scillas were in flower.” Use of a capital is restricted to reference to “the genus Scilla”. It isn’t an example of being a “plant scholar”, but rather correct English usage. 
The plural of scilla is scillas. 
If you wrote a book using “Scilla” when referring to anything other than “the genus Scilla” I would edit that to lower case in every instance. 
Bob Nold
Denver, Colorado, USA 
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