A few years ago, my husband and I spent some time in Western Europe and stayed in the home of a local amateur botanist. On one of our many treks through the countryside, she pointed to a lovely little flowering plant with spotted leaves and called it lungwort. Being from the mountains of Western Oregon, I had a “Wait, what?!” moment. Lungwort in my part of the world is a lichen that grows in the canopy of old growth forests. Pulmonaria officinalis is the lungwort I met in Europe, and Lobaria oregana is the lungwort I grew up with—two dramatically different botanicals that share the same common name.
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