Talk:Fetterbush

What species does fetterbush refer to?[edit]

In Richard E. Bir (1992). Growing and Propagating showy native woody plants. ISBN 0-8078-4366-0., fetterbush is given as one common name for Leucothoe fontanesiana, and mountain fetterbush is given as one common name for Pieris floribunda. In [1], Lyonia lucida is given a common name of fetterbush lyonia (which usually would mean it is a lyonia, not a fetterbush), and the other uses of fetterbush refer to Pieris. I didn't really research the matter much beyond that. If fetterbush really means Pieris, we should just make it a redirect (an occasional or erroneous usage otherwise wouldn't change this picture). If the use of fetterbush to mean something besides Pieris is more common, then fetterbush should either be a short article or a Wikipedia:Disambiguation page (with the difference between those being primarily a matter of style). Kingdon 22:03, 15 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Uh, the above is not enough to list those three species as possible meanings of "fetterbush" - for one thing "mountain fetterbush", "fetterbush", and "fetterbush lyonia" are three different words and for another thing those references are exceedingly thin. Browsing through another source or two (no more authoritative than these ones) just confuses the matter and mentions additional possible species. What we really need is a monograph on the genuses involved, a good field guide(s) (as they probably pay more attention to common names than the scientific literature), some dictionaries, or the like. Better to have a stub than an inaccurate disambiguation page. Kingdon 16:24, 5 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I prefer the disambig, since there's really not much else to say about "fetterbush" that shouldn't be on the individual species pages. And it doesn't really matter if the three terms are indeed different. I've run across many disambig pages that have entries that contain part of the disambig word, but not all. In fact, that's part of the purpose of a dab page. Even though "mountain fetterbush" is not "fetterbush", one could see how a wiki user might get to this page and wonder which species it is under that common name. Beyond that, I don't believe we have any precedent for a stub page describing a common name that isn't economically or culturally significant (WP:NC (flora)). Indeed we do need some other references, but the PLANTS database is pretty stable (they choose one common name among many to represent the species, I believe), and the other refs seem to be OK. In my opinion, if it's been called it once in print, it needs an entry on the dab page. I don't see how it could be an inaccurate dab page given the references above. --Rkitko ^(talk) 23:00, 12 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Agree that a disambiguation is the right style. My reluctance was more about whether we were disambiguating to the wrong things. I'm more or less satisfied on that point (not that we've come up with the perfect list, but that these ones are OK). I've edited the page to make it a disambiguation - note the word "including" because I'm quite confident that these three are not the only species. (I happened to be on a nature hike last weekend where they showed us a Lyonia and called it fetterbush - not exactly something we can cite but it was a bit reassuring that it isn't too far off the mark to list Lyonia here). Kingdon 01:27, 13 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Interesting. Thanks for doing that. Perhaps tomorrow I'll create some stubs for those species and poke around for some sources for the common name. I'll do a search on JSTOR or Proquest to find academic articles that use that common name. We could also search botanicus.org or a similar site for historical references. In fact, I just did a quick search on botanicus and come up with the following:

"...evergreen fetterbushes (Pieris nitida and Leucothoe axillaris)..." (Plant life of Alabama section of Contributions from the US National Herbarium v6 1901)
In 1903, John Kunkel Small indicated in the Flora of the Southeastern United States that "fetterbush" is a common name for all plants he described in the genus Pieris.
Another publication noted Pieris floribunda as "Mountain Fetter-bush" but called it "Mountain-fetterbush" in the index...
A 2002 Novon article calls Lyonia lucida "fetterbush"

Anyway, I'll do a more in-depth search tomorrow. Cheers, --Rkitko ^(talk) 02:45, 13 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for offering to research this. My mostly uninformed guess is that anything in Pieris, Lyonia, or Leucothoe could be called fetterbush. At least, I seem to keep finding the name applied to new species, but so far just in those three genera. Kingdon 13:56, 13 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]