The articled deals with one of the most important directions of development of the Russian agricultural terminology - changes in contents of word marks related to agrarian subjects, which in the period of establishment of agronomy as a science (XVIII-XIX centuries) were associated with the following processes: appearance of semantic neologisms of verbal units of the agricultural sphere, narrowing the semantic structure of the studied lexemes, gaining some special agricultural meaning in the national language, etc. The semantic transformations in the agricultural vocabulary of the Russian language during the establishment of agriculture took place under the influence of some extralinguistic factors.

There are described the theoretical issues of functioning of the nomenclature units of the Russian language. Based on the vocabulary from various thematic groups of the agricultural sphere there are analyzed the peculiarities of nomens formation which denote the realities of plant growing in various periods of the history of Russia and the Russian language: the period of formation of the Russian centralized state (late XIII - early XVI centuries), XVIII, XIX centuries, Soviet and modern periods. There is emphasized the close connection of the nomenclature denotations and agricultural terms.

There is described the significance of the agricultural vocabulary for the theme of Motherland in the creative work by S. Yesenin. There are analyzed the language means including figurative and expressive ones, which prove the close connection of the inner state of mind of S. Yesenin with the Motherland, which essential part are the realities of the village, peasant, agricultural world that has taken the main place in the lives of Russian people from time immemorial.