The opposite problem to confusion
One plant with many names is the mirror image of one name with many plants, and it costs a buyer differently: instead of getting the wrong thing, you conclude there are several things to try when there is one. Hibiscus is the clearest case in this catalogue — karkade in Egypt, agua de Jamaica in Mexico, sorrel in the Caribbean, zobo in Nigeria, roselle in the trade. Five names, one calyx.
Why TeaHQ does not make a record per name
It would be easy to write separate pages for karkade and hibiscus, and it would double the catalogue with duplicates. Aliases exist on every record for exactly this: a name that means the same plant is an alias, and a name that means a different plant is a different record. Moroccan mint is spearmint prepared in a particular way, and it is the spearmint record plus a link, not a second plant.
Same material, different tradition
Japanese mugicha and Korean boricha are roasted barley prepared the same way by two cultures, and are one record here carrying both. That is a judgement rather than a rule: where the preparation genuinely diverges — Korean yulmu-cha thick and powdered, Japanese hatomugi-cha clear and brewed — the difference is described inside the record rather than split across two.
When a name is a claim
Some names carry an assertion. Snow chrysanthemum says chrysanthemum and is not one. False saffron and bastard saffron are two of safflower’s common names and both are accusations. Sweet neem is not neem. Where a name misleads, the record says so plainly instead of repeating it.
Names that record history
Yaupon’s species name, Ilex vomitoria, was assigned by a European botanist who misunderstood the ceremony he was describing, and it has libelled the plant since 1789. The English name that makrut lime leaf carried through the twentieth century is a South African slur, and careful writing now uses the Thai name. Naming is not neutral and some of it needs correcting rather than repeating.