Taken from The Eclectic Gardener @ http://www.teachinggarden.org/
Written by Alan Hickman

Some people can spell and some people can remember names. I'm neither of those people. It was only the invention of computers and spell checkers which gave me some measure of control over the written word. As for remembering someone's name, it's usually forgotten within seconds of us being introduced. Often I can later recognize someone's face, but then I can't remember whether I should smile and say Hi or run and hide!
It's not that I don't care about spelling or that people are not important to me. I would love to be able to play Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D on an immense pipe organ in some great cathedral, but I never got beyond 'chopsticks'on my grandmother's out-of-tune piano. Eventually we all have to accept the fact that, when we were born, not all of the software was bundled with the hardware.
At least so far as names are concerned, all is not completely lost and, eventually, some names do stick. I still recall the buxom Miss Bumpus who was home room teacher for form 4b in the 1940s. She was known to staff and the more precocious pupils as Miss Bumpers for two outstanding reasons. There was the enormous Queen Salote of Tonga who was the talk of the town when she came to England for the Coronation in 1953. More recently, in Uganda there was the infamous Idi Amin and in Cambodia the murderous Pol Pot.
Although short term/long term memory split more or less explains why we can't remember what we had for breakfast, there must be all kinds of factors which influence what we remember in the long term. Repetition and familiarity is likely one factor; Miss B was around for several years, but there were other teachers and who knows what their names were? Queen S showed up for only a few weeks half a century ago, so familiarity is not likely the reason for her retention in my memory.
Why does a name like George Stephanopoulos - who campaigned for Bill Clinton and became Communications Director during Clinton's first tem - stay available when the rest of the administration has evaporated? Distinctiveness must play some part. In a sea of northern and cental European names in Washington, a name with Greek origins stands out.
Although repetition, familiarity and distinctiveness are certainly not the only factors which determine what we remember, they are things which can be used if we want to remember a name over the long term.
For some of the new volunteers at Peel Teaching Garden, referring to the various plants by their botanical names is an unwelcome chore and they give all the usual lame excuses including “Can't remember Latin names'and “Don't know how to pronounce them'. In fact, botanical names are not 'Latin'they are derived, like the English language, from a multitude of European and Near Eastern languages, but mostly from Greek. Many of botanical names are nothing more than the names of people with an A or an I tacked on. The genus Hosta commemorates Nicolaus and Joseph Host and Forsythia honours William Forsyth. As for memory and pronunciation: if someone can say Stephanopoulos, they can also say Stephanotis, and if they can remember hemorrhoids they can remember Hemerocallis!
It is probably easier to remember the botanical name of a plant if you never knew it by any other name. It's a bit like the Jane Doe whom you knew at school who got married and became Jane something else but you can't remember what! Because the plants in the gardens are labeled with only the botanical name, constantly seeing the name and the plant together will quickly make the name familiar and create an association between the plant and its botanical name.