Rhubarb cultivars have gained the Royal Horticultural Society’s Award of Garden Merit:- "Rhubarb" originally comes from the two Greek words for rhubarb. "Rheon" from the Persian "rewend", later became the Latin word "rheum", meaning rhubarb. The other Greek word is "rha", an ancient name for the Volga River in Russian, where rhubarb was cultivated, having been introduced there from China via the Silk Road. In medieval Latin, "rheon" and "rha" became "rheum barbarum", literally "foreign rhubarb" or "strange rhubarb", and evolved later into "rheubarbarum". Most likely, the English word "rhubarb" entered the language via the French word "rhubarbe" brought over by
Latin word order "five ships were burnt" but "no fewer than five ships were burnt". The use of hyperbaton (separation of words which normally go together) is also worth observing. Thus Caesar's "hae permanserunt aquae dies complures", with "hae" separated from "aquae" and "complures" at the end of the sentence, doesn't mean "These floods remained for several days" but "This time the flood waters, unlike the previous ones, remained for several days". In the past hundred years, but especially since the advent of computerised texts, Latin word order has been extensively studied, with a view to elucidating the principles on which it is