The Snowball, today's Silk Flower Stem of the Day, raised a lot more questions than answers for me. First, what is a snowball? If you look up 'snowball' in Botanica, somewhere between smithiantha and solandra is ... not snowball. That's because snowball is just a nickname for another genus of flower called, Viburnum.

All snowballs are hydrangeas, but not all hydrangeas are snowballs

Being a curious person, I was still unsatisfied. Viburnum is the name of a genus, and does not refer to a specific flower. There are about 150 species of viburnums, so which one is the snowball? I did a quick inspection through the listed species to see what I could find, and it looked pretty similar to viburnum plicatum and viburnum macrocephalum. Viburnum plicatum is also know as the Japanese Snowball Bush, and I believe these are the ones we have. So what have I learned? If you call something a rose, or a viburnum, or any other genus or family name, it's a pretty broad term. When I read about orchids, I learned that there were over 20,000 species of orchid. However, if you say, 'I'd really like a viburnum plicatum', that might not get you very far either. Ultimately, the name doesn't matter too much ('a rose by any other name ... '). It doesn't really matter if I can't figure out exactly which species of viburnum the snowball is. You know how it looks, and if it fits in with what you're designing, and that's what matters. Chris Thanks to Botanica and Wikipedia for various facts about the viburnum or snowball. I'm not sure where Botanica is at the moment, but I bet wikipedia can be found at www.wikipedia.org.