Coming to Terms with Plant Names

This presentation on the naming of plants is the third in a Webinar Series sponsored through Florida Wildflower Foundation, delivered on 19 February 2025. Goals include explaining how we have come to the present “binomial” standard for plant (as well as fungi, algae, and animal) names. Thus we explore binomials (the combination of a Genus and a Specific Epithet), which are governed by international rules. Among other goals, I hope the discussion clarifies ways to analyze plant names, the reasons a name might change as we learn more about plants, and how binomial nomenclature can be useful. A final purpose might be to explain the differences between these formal “scientific” names and common (colloquial) names.

Using names and giving names are core to human communication. Once applied, a name, either borrowed or newly constructed, takes on meaning as a stand-in for the knowledge each of us associates with an idea or object, as well as the key to access more information. People say a name is a “handle” because it allows you to grasp what’s known. Typically, this means what’s stored in your own gray matter and that of people you can reach, as well as what’s available in literature and, anymore, on the web. A good name is the lifeline to knowledge.

But good names may not come easy. Plant names remind me of the first poem in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats by T. S. Elliot. Finding the right name can be a difficult, seemingly inscrutable process, but in the end, singular.

Choosing the right name is vital. We lean on Confucius, whose aphorisms cover the importance of names.

I experienced this at The Huntington, where (over a period of 25 years) we envisioned, designed, constructed, and launched the country’s largest and most culturally-engaged Chinese Garden. Early in the process, the founding Curator, June Li, led an important group discussion during which we studied historical Chinese literature, examined plants as cultural symbols, and considered a proper name for the new enterprise. This exercise was core cheng ming, the proper selection and use of names. Our process, after discussing many ancient parables and philosophies, yielded the name Liu Fang Yuan – the Garden of Flowing Fragrance. The meaning was seated deeply in lore, a fragrance being equivalent to the impact a person has on other people and the surrounding world. A good person wafts of delightful fragrance, noble accomplishment, while the stench of misery trails the dishonorable. Chinese garden plants were beloved historically for their sweet fragrances, which led us to emphasize fragrant plants in the landscape, as subtle reminders of the Garden’s name and its meaning.

With names holding profound significance, you shouldn’t be surprised that even the most ancient Chinese literature is laden with plant names and allusions. Well before a systematic approach to naming of plants emerged in Western culture, Chinese herbals documented wide knowledge of their flora through names, description, and poetic reference. Oral tradition reaches back several thousand years, with Shennong Bencaojing, dating to the first Century BCE constituting one of the earlier written records that lists and describes the plants of Shénnóng (神農), the “Divine Farmer” (who was thought to have lived about 2800 BCE). The slide below is from a beautifully-illustrated herbal you can view on-line in the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/02092922.cn/mode/1up). Composed by Wang Jie, the text for Materia Medica of the Lüchanyan Mountains dates to 1220 CE. The plate documents two common Chinese names, Yang Shi (the pharmaceutical term for this plant, translating as “cluster fruit”) and Qiáng Wei (the common name, translating as “wall rose”), for the plant known botanically as Rosa multiflora (yes, even Chinese botanists use Latin botanical names).

In 1596, Li Shizhen produced a spectacular Compendium of Materia Medica (Bencao Gangmu) that included over 1,000 plants. His wood block illustrations were widely reproduced. The color print below (from a scroll at Hunt Institute) depicts Tumeric.

There is, actually, early reference to the importance of names in Western culture also. Right there in the 2nd Chapter of Genesis, Adam was directed to name every living creature (just animals it seems, not plants). I’m partial to Blake’s portrayal of the process.

Before any directive might have come forth to name plants, however, Satan intervened and the gig was up. Adam and Eve were forced from Eden, and there was no mandate to name plants. Some botanists, working through countless descriptions and synonymies might agree that plant names, at that early point, became the work of the Devil.

Core to the earliest “documented” writings concerning plants in the West would be two works attributed to Theophrastus. Of course, nothing original survives, and even what we do have has passed through countless hand-scribed versions, filtered through translations from early Greek to Arabic and back to Latin, Greek, and finally the many common European languages. With two manuscripts to his credit – Enquiry into Plants (Historia Plantarum) and On the Causes of Plants – early scholars revered him as the “father” of botany.

I separated these two slides because the images above, from an elegant edition of Historia Plantarum (1644) and a fresco (at the University of Athens) portray Theophrastus as a distinguished figure in classical settings and garb, while his portrayal in Schedel’s Liber Chronicarum (1493, see below) adopts a folkloric look particular to woodblock prints.

Theophrastus had currency in Ancient Greece, but his importance vanished for more than a millennium, only to be restored during the period of the great incunables when manuscript works were sought, translated, and printed. But the somewhat later Greek physician Dioscorides fared better, authoring a text considered so important as to retain currency for 1500 years following its creation around 60 CE. It’s impossible to know much about the origins of his Materia Medica. There’s not a scrap of any document original to the time of Dioscorides, but what has been transmitted are names, brief descriptions, and medicinal uses of several hundred plants important in ancient Mediterranean life. That information passed to us through generations of scribed versions in Greek, Latin, Arabic and back to medieval Latin and Romance languages. While so many other classical texts were lost, Dioscorides reigned through intellectually dark ages as an authority, not simply in the Mediterranean, but well into northern Europe and westward to the British Isles. Though his plant names and cures migrated tenaciously, the original plants didn’t always make the trip. Rather, identifications and qualities were transferred through tradition, sometimes to plants that weren’t native to Greece. One can hardly imagine otherwise. The earliest manuscript versions of Materia Medica were text only, and descriptions in the text are scant. Tradition alone led to fanciful depictions in the occasional sumptuous edition, lovely illustrations but of limited botanical value.

With printing having been devised and having prospered in Germany for about 3/4 of a century, we find emergence of scholars ready to tackle and profit from the shortages and shortcomings of Materia Medica. Otto Brunfels, Leonhart Fuchs, and Hieronymus Bock are three principle practitioners and authors who headline the evolution of printed herbals, all basing their books on translations and elaborations of Dioscorides, but in critical instances enriched with illustrations drawn from contempory personal experience. This is the beginning point of modern botanical scholarship, descriptive works tied to names of plants and their potential for medicinal treatments. As you see in the slide below, the number of plants discussed had not grown; workers kept to the ancient doctrine ascribed to Dioscorides Materia Medica.

Barely a half-century later, however, we encounter Caesalpino’s Plantis libri XVI, a single volume comprising 16 sections that is considered the first botanical textbook. You can view a beautiful copy held by the Smithsonian’s Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology at: https://library.si.edu/digital-library/book/deplantislibrixv00cesa

With its introductory Index Locupletissimus Plantarum Nominum (“A very rich index of plant names”) spanning twenty-eight pages, De Plantis steps outside classical boundaries, opening an entirely new discussion involving over 1500 kinds of plants. It was the Renaissance, leading into the early days of the Scientific Revolution, and Caesalpino was afterall, Florentine.

Renaissance in Northern Europe would spread to England, where the Elizabethan Era was characterized by literature and philosophy. It was the age of Benjamin Jonson, William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, Francis Bacon, and printed English. The King James Bible was first published in 1611, and the First Folio of Shakespeare’s works appeared in 1623. Bridging discoveries in science to a period called the Enlightenment, we encounter Francis Bacon’s 1620 Novum Organum, challenging scholars to experiment and study data, leading (just a generation later) to the philosophies of John Locke, for whom data and experience were part of understanding and advancement, and to discoveries of Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, and of course Isaac Newton. Empiricism (experience-based study and experimentation), which had been scorned as the hobby horse of tinkerers and rural practitioners by scholars of the Middle Ages, was in style and became the basis of scientific and technological knowledge.

Knowledge of plants was exploding. Voyages during the Age of Discovery had cracked curtains open to a world of natural history and plant diversity previously unimagined to Europeans. Fascinating and useful exotic plants and plant products from South America and South Africa, even the Far East (the Portuguese began trade with Japan in 1543 and the Spanish established a base in Manila by 1573) flooded markets and gardens, filling cabinets of curiosity. The influx spawned an explosion of plant awareness and need for countless new names. Celebrated in the herbals and histories of Clusius, Monardes, and others, the plethora of named plants, beautiful and useful, needed indexing and summarizing. Brothers Johann and Caspar Bauhin, both noted physicians (and sons of a French protestant physician living in Basel) assumed this task.

Logging of data, however, can be tedious. It takes a certain kind of accounting mentality to gather and consolidate countless independent observations. That was the task tackled by Caspar in his most significant work (printed the year before his death), Pinax… (1623), a concordance of names that had been published over the past century referencing 6,000 different plants. As mentioned earlier, in the English-speaking world this was the same year the great First Folio of Shakespearean work was published, and only three years had elapsed since Bacon’s call for scientific focus on observation and data in Novum Organum. Centers of Discovery and Culture had shifted to Northern and Western Europe

Along with Johann’s (posthumus & incomplete) history of all that was currently known about plants, the Bauhins had summarized the state of botany at the early 17th Century, creating a foundation for future advances in the naming and knowledge of plants.

Their work would underpin a fresh approach by France’s royal botanist, Tournefort, as to how we name and categorize plants, as well as a thorough and tediously compiled accounting by Englishman John Ray in his Historia.

The following slide shows the title as translated to English…

As with his contemporaries, Ray kept in touch with people of like interests, quickly incorporating their own discoveries. In his Supplement (the third volume of Historia Plantarum), Ray notes communication with avaricious plantsman James Petiver concerning a fringed orchid from the Americas he described as Orchis Marilandica, grandis & procera…..

The following slide shows an English translation of the description published by Ray (courtesy of Google translate).

The description and cataloging of Tournefort, Ray, and many other luminaries (most notably the illustrative works of Leonard Plukenet and Charles Plumier) would become grist for Linnaeus, who wiped the slate clean and established a solid plan for how we name plants in his 1753 compilation, Species Plantarum, a mid-career, newly-organized summary of his knowledge of plants. So where did these names come from?

You have to examine the full span of Linnaeus’s publications to understand his approach to plant names, which included paying homage to his botanical predecessors. Most of the names Linnaeus adopted were the everyday Latin terms used for those plants in the trove of publications he knew so very well (Linnaeus certainly had a photographic memory). Some are the ancient name of a plant, like robur and quercus, which were common names for oaks in Latin. These would have been transcribed from Theophrastus, Dioscorides, and extant classical works on agriculture. Among those, many were borrow words with their origins in Latin or Greek, such as orchis, a Greek word for testicles that was associated with a group of plants producing paired tuberous roots. As the need for names grew, so did the cadre of generic terms that helped to group similar plants. New words for categories of plants, new genera, were advanced, often names honoring patrons and other botanists. Of the thousands of generic names that had been published, Linnaeus adopted those that fit his program and standards (he had published a complete philosophy concerning the proper terms that one should accept as generic names). Amused by the cleft apex of a tropical Legume, Linnaeus accepted Plumier’s use of Bauhinia for the plant as fitting commemoration of the brothers Bauhin. He also perpetuated Plumier’s genus Clusia and Tournefort’s Plumeria, while forming many of his own, including Monarda. Traditionally well-known plants kept their generic names: Lavandula, Orchis, Quercus, etc.

But of course there was great need to compose new terms at the level of species also. Linnaeus’s innovation in Species Plantarum, the consistent adoption of a trivial name, a specific epithet, for each kind of plant cataloged, meant he had to settle on some term for each of several thousand plants. Many were usually descriptive. For well-documented plants, these would have been a logical descriptor. When you see the epithet “vulgaris“, you should read “common,” the most commonly known kind. When Linnaeus applied the term “officinalis” he’s cluing us into the fact that is the plant in a genus considered commercially important, of medicinal value, while “sativa” indicates a plant was typically cultivated. Botanists, however, were combing the world for new plants, the more culturally-important of which might have arrived with transliterations of colloquial names from their places of origin (ex. cacao from the Nahuatl cacaua). Most, however, had no history of medicinal or commercial value, and in typical human fashion were named by comparison to some known standard (some people called tomatoes “love apples”, and the French still call potatoes pommes de terre, i.e. “apples of the earth”)

We just discussed a plant botanists such John Ray and Linnaeus knew as a kind of Orchis, for which Linnaeus selected the epithet “ciliaris” because the labellum is incredibly fringed compared to that of other Orchis he knew. We classify this orchid now as Platanthera, a genus Richard erected (that’s one term botanists use for establishing a new genus) over six decades later, based on the flattened structure of the anther chambers – thus “platys“, Greek for flattened, or broad, and “anthera” combined.

In the following slide and caption you see how a treatment like Ray’s Orchis morphed into Linnaeus’s Orchis ciliaris. Entry #2 cites four “polysyllabics” (Ray’s is the fourth one), conveniently designating the term ciliaris in the margin of the page, to aid in memory. Previous authors had sometimes kept plant names to a generic term and a single qualifying word, similar to Linnaeus’s binomials, but that wasn’t standard. Before 1753, botanists (Linnaeus included) often appended an entire descriptor to the generic term, especially if it the plant was new to them. We call these descriptors “polysyllabic” names because they usually are longer than binomials, such that Ray’s Orchis marilandica, grandis & procera, floricus luteis, calcari longissimo: lobulo fimbriato was both how the plant was named and described. In fact, it almost seemed more erudite to pile on the adjectives. That long-winded era ended fairly abruptly in 1753. Linnaeus’s simple binomial, a genus and its single specific epithet prevailed, both for plants and for animals (yes, Linnaeus covered animals also).

Linnaeus’s influence in overall classification of plants (how plants are systematically arranged), an important allure of his methods because it made delimiting and grouping genera straightforward, passed quickly however, as botanists working out of French gardens (Adanson and the Jussieus) re-imagined the ways genera should be defined and organized. They and everyone else adopted binomials, but systematic botany was at the infancy of its modern period, clearly anticipating shifts toward evolutionary thought (a movement notably announced by Lamarck as early as 1800, and then solidified by Darwin’s work seven decades later) which meant grouping plants based on what are considered their natural affinities. Antoine Laurent de Jussieu called his groupings “Orders”, all of which are equivalent to today’s Families; his 1789 publication, Genera Plantarum, serves as the beginning point for plant family names, just as Linnaeus’s 1753 Species Plantarum is the basis for binomials.

Linnaeus and Jussieu established their user-friendly systems for naming and classifying plants just in time, or perhaps their work helped spur the explosion of interest in natural history that would characterize the following decades. Taxonomy flourished through the 19th century. Brilliant and enthusiastic people, undistracted by television and social media, turned their capacities and energies to botany. By the second half of the century De Candolle had followed the path of Linnaeus, attempting to generate a world flora, anticipating two significant encyclopedic works, the Bentham and Hooker Genera Plantarum and Pflanzenfamilien by Engler and Prantl.

Massive as they were, neither of those efforts neared reality as a world flora. In fact, we are still far short of a complete encyclopedic assessment of Earth’s naturally-occurring plants. However, given resources available digitally, two programs, Kew’s Plants of the World OnLine (POWO) and the collaborative World Flora OnLine (WFO) bring us closer to that end. Both are freely available for your exploration.

The WFO site confidently tallies 377,701 known species, though I wouldn’t take that one to the bank. There are too many irregularities in what may be considered a species, as well as unknowns – people continue to identify new species. Moreover, at some point the reduction in biodiversity will demand adjustment, with estimates suggesting a considerable epoch of extinction has begun. The WFO site also tells us their database includes 1,613,577 names, which may include considerable infraspecific taxa (subspecies and varieties), but basically confirms three times as many names have been published as are necessary.

This means there’s been a lot of duplication of names, now showing up as synonyms. You might ask why that’s the case, and I can conjure a few reasons. The first is simple lack of availability of published works. Today we have the internet, which means any information published has the chance to be widespread. Of course that doesn’t mean information is readily or freely available; much of what is published electronically is captive, costly to access due to paywalls. Prior to digital publication of new species names was accepted, rules required valid publication in printed media of a certain character. But that included regional journals and quasi-ephemeral media of limited circulation. Access was not guaranteed, and costly. Moreover, prior to telephone and telegraph, information transfer was slow. It’s easy enough to understand how the same plant might have been described by authors unaware someone else had come to similar conclusions.

And standards were different; there were many opinions as to the correct way to name plants. In the early decades after Linnaeus, cantankerous botanists like Constantine Rafinesque published entirely new names for plants just because they didn’t meet personal standards of word choice, or sometimes, it seems, he was annoyed by the author. The concept of priority existed as a sport, but there was no authority to regulate behavior.

Retroactive provisions of international rules also generate duplication, forcing renaming when two epithets collide. This is especially common when a species is reclassified to a different genus in which another plant has been assigned the same epithet. When you review the history of Pattalias palustre a few frames ahead, you’ll see that the specific basionym with priority for this plant is “angustifolium,” but that term isn’t available in Pattalias because it had been used in a combination by an earlier author. Thus the new combination, P. palustre, is required.

And there is simple disagreement as to the delineation of species. Some botanists are “lumpers” (preferring a broad interpretation of species limits) and others are “splitters,” (people who tightly distinguish populational differences.) The most familiar extreme example of splitting comes with Dandelions, which are noted for “apomixis” – the ability to generate clonal seed and thus establish clonal populations. Taxonomists obsessed with Taraxacum have adopted the position that each clonal population is, on a biological basis, a “microspecies” which merits its own specific epithet. The result has been publication of over 2,000 microspecies by botanists lovingly labeled “taraxacologists.”

Modern molecular taxonomy methods and cladistic analysis have altered the playing field and demand fresh assessment wherever employed. Genera are under constant review, which means researchers will determine some are polyphyletic (comprising plants that are of two separate branchlets on the tree of life) and should recognized as different, or in other cases species in a segregate genus should really be tucked into another because they are of the same branchlet. So despite the fact that most plant species may have been given names, their relationships are yet to be resolved. That means I am the bearer of grim news; taxonomists are far from the day when name changes are infrequent.

Curiously, though we speak of cladistics as having powerful influence in the ways we define genera and species, the second quotation from Bartlett (1940) in the previous slide sounds awfully modern.

So let’s talk about Florida, and how plants native to this state have been named, particularly the wildflowers. If you have access to Flora of Florida, you’ll find an extensive history of botanical exploration in Volume 1. It’s useful to understand, however, that most of our native plants were named from types collected in other states, particularly in the Coastal Plain of Virginia and the Carolinas. Exploration of Florida, though punctuated by significant early visits, was delayed. England had no control over the state until 1763, and Spanish interest focused on more tropical holdings, with Havana as a major hub. The first “American” plants making a splash in Europe were either those collected by explorers in Mexico and South America, or by Colonists and French explorers in North America. That meant more significant exploration of the Florida flora would await settlement and the work of American botanists, highlighted by Alvan Chapman and a bit later, the indomitable John Kunkel Small. The tale is told through downloading and examining data freely available in the ISB Atlas of Florida Plants, https://florida.plantatlas.usf.edu.

The ISB listing catalogs 2,777 native flowering plant taxa, which includes some hybrids and sub-specific entries. Of those published taxa, a large number were named by 1824, just as Florida became a US territory, and well before statehood in 1845; the vast majority have names dating back more than a century. Not suprising since the bulk of our flora is shared with ecosystems in Eastern North America or Central America and the Caribbean Islands. The fact that Florida is an extreme location in those floras also suggests you should find variation particular to our habitats, which is supported by realization the state shelters over 240 endemic Angiosperms.

Chapman lived in Apalachicola the majority of his life, cultivating his interest in botany and a wide network of correspondence. His plant specimens were widely disseminated, often through a long association with John Torrey and Asa Gray. He collected widely but brought considerable attention to the Panhandle flora, which yielded many new species described by Chapman as well as his associates (notably Torrey and Gray).

John Torrey, American born, followed a path familiar for traditional botanists, having been trained formerly as a physician. Curiously, however, at an earlier age he met and was tutored by famed educator and naturalist Amos Eaton, who had landed in the New York prison (on charges of forgery) where Torrey’s father was employed. That training inspired the young physician to a life of plant study and professorship. Among his proteges and assistants was the young Asa Gray, also a trained physician. The two formed a life-long partnership during which Gray became associated with Harvard, where he helped build a strong program in botany. Among the many important works of Torrey and of Gray, their combined Flora of North America was one of the most well-known. For these reasons I’ve included Torrey in the “Harvard” team, though he worked out of institutions in New York (most prominently Columbia University). That circle also include Sereno Watson, who assumed curation of the Harvard Herbarium in 1872 and George Engelmann, a correspondent and collaborator for over four decades, and Isaac Sprague, illustrator for many of Gray’s works over three decades.

With Asa Gray having died in 1888 and Sereno Watson’s passing in 1892, Harvard was still a botanical stronghold, boasting Charles Sprague Sargent who managed Arnold Arboretum. But in New York, following in John Torrey’s footsteps, the energetic and botanically-dedicated Brittons (Nathaniel Lord Britton and Elizabeth Knight Britton) led an effort to establish New York Botanical Garden. The garden materialized quickly, with N. L. Britton appointed Director. He quickly assembled an active team of dedicated botanists with expansive goals, a team showing a liberal approach to species definitions. Yes, they were “splitters”, at least as compared to Gray and his associates. Britton must have been as capable an administrator and mentor as he was as a researcher. His flow of work seemed unstymied as he managed to employ, support, or mentor almost every dedicated botanist who showed up at his doorstep. Crucial to the story of Florida’s plants was his acquisition of George Valentine Nash and the indefatigable John Kunkel Small. I’m certain all was not wine and roses, but the New York team coalesced as a center of systematic study.

Small was particularly dedicated to investigating Florida’s plants, authoring over 100 taxa in our flora. His doctoral project was the overwhelming Flora of the Southeastern United States, published in 1903. The list of new taxa and combinations included in that flora formed a 21-page appendix to the 1325-page treatment (not including the Appendix and Index).

The slide below shows people responsible for original descriptions of many Florida natives. Numbers include hybrids and sub-specific categories, as well as examples of names that were published jointly. Some authors functioned individually, while others (John Torrey, Asa Gray) worked in various cooperative relationships. I combined numbers for Wildenow and Muhlenberg, who worked cooperatively. Wildenow, living in Europe and editor of later versions of Linnaeus’s Species Plantarum, inevitably oversaw publication of Muhlenberg’s species. Linnaeus shows so strongly because he’s given credit for the many names that appeared in his first edition of Species Plantarum (1753). If you check the author citations of POWO, you’ll see Kew has ascribed credit to the original author Linnaeus cited; if it was clear Linnaeus was responsible for the specific epithet published, POWO assigns him credit.

Who are these People? A few notes to humanize the authors. In parentheses you’ll find the standard abbreviation for each authors. (Note: in author abbreviations there are no spaces inserted between plant authors or their initials.)

• William Aiton (Aiton)- Scottish horticulturist and botanist who trained with Phillip Miller, worked at Chelsea Physic Garden, and then became the first director of the Royal BG, Kew where he authored Hortus Kewensis, the first catalog of plants in cultivation at the Gardens.
• Alphonse Pyramus de Candolle (DC) – Swiss botanist (first in a succession of four generations) best known for his Prodromus, de Candolle coined the term “taxonomy” and was among early promotors of evolutionary thought, with his concept of “nature’s war.” (1778-1841)
• Alvan W. Chapman – Florida resident, physician and botanist who collected and described many native plants named as new species, as well as wrote a flora of the Southern states. (1809-1899)
• Stephen Elliott (Elliott) – Elliott, a native South Carolina plantation owner (Yale educated) was culturally, intellectually, financially, and politically active throughout his life. With botany as a serious leisure pursuit, Elliott collected, wrote, and lectured widely. A close correspondent of Muhlenberg, Elliott validated many of “nomen nudums” in Muhlenberg’s publications. Elliott published a series of installments eventually collected as A Sketch of the Botany of South-Carolina and Georgia (vols 1 & 2). (1777-1830)
• Johann F. Gmelin (J.F.Gmel.) – Native to Tübingen, Germany (where he spent his career), Gmelin was a colleague and correspondent of Linnaeus, who continued Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae…, editing the 13th edition. (1748-1804)
• Asa Gray (A.Gray) – New York native who spent the bulk of his illustrious career leading botanical studies at Harvard, considered the most celebrated 19th century American botanist. Known for many works, most prominently his 1847 Manual of Botany…. (Gray’s Manual, for which he issued 5 editions), still in print today. Gray was a contemporary and correspondent with Chapman. He and John Torrey published many species based on Chapman collections. (1810-1888)
• August Grisebach (Griesb.) – German (Prussian) botanist, professor at Göttingen, who oversaw the botanical gardens, specializing in studies of Gentianaceae and Malpiphiaceae. His studies of Charles Wright’s collection from Cuba yielded many new species descriptions, as did his 1864 Flora of the British West Indian Islands. His contributions to the Florida flora, logically, are tropical representatives. (1814-1879)
• Nikolaus J. F. von Jacquin (Jacq.) – Born in the Netherlands, Jacquin spent his professional career in Vienna, having travelled and collected extensively in Latin America. (1727-1817) Among the earliest to study this flora, he issued his discoveries in 1760 (the year Swartz was born), which means Jacquin described and authored many plants common to the Caribbean.
• Carl S. Kunth (Kunth) – German botanist inspired and mentored by Alexander von Humboldt, serving as Humboldt’s assistant in Paris for several years. From those studies, in which he examined the plant specimens Humboldt and Bonpland collected in their explorations of South America, Kunth decribed and published new plants in his 7-volume Nova genera et species plantarum quas in peregrinatione ad plagam aequinoctialem orbis novi collegerunt Bonpland et Humboldt. (1788-1850)
• Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (Lam.) – A colorful and accomplished French naturalist who founded Paris’s Museum of Natural History and published widely in botanical and zoological fields. A close contemporary and associate of A.P. de Jussieu, Lamarck oversaw the Royal Botanic Garden, changing its name to Jardin des Plantes at the height of the French Revolution. Lamarck published many plant species in his Encyclopédie méthodique. Botanique. He is best-known today as the early proponent of inheritance of acquired characteristics, i.e. Lamarckism. (1744-1829)
• Philip Miller (Mill.) – An English (Scottish descent) important horticulturist and botanist, Miller oversaw (read “ruled”) Chelsea Physic Garden for fifty years. An active correspondent and productive author, Miller was known for The Gardener’s Dictionary…, an extensive catalog of plant names and gardening information published in English (in 8 editions during Miller’s life, from 1731 to 1768; later adapted by D. Don). Miller kept to polynomials until his 8th and final edition, which adopted Linnaean binomials. This is regarded a conservative stubbornness, but the dictionary is massive and it was certainly a huge effort to make the conversion.
• Gotthilf H. E. Muhlenberg (Muhl.) – Born in Pennsylvania, Muhlenberg received his college education in Germany and a Doctorate in Divinity at Princeton. He retired from his post as President of Franklin College in 1779, dedicating the remaining 36 years of his life to plant study, publishing many species through association with Willdenow, as well as his 1813 Catalogus Plantarum Americae Septentrionalis and his 1817 Descriptio Uberior Graminum et Plantarum Calamariarum Americae Septentrionalis Indiginarum et Cicurum (A Comprehensive Description of the Grasses and Reeds of North America, Indigenous and Cultivated) (1753-1815)
• Thomas Nuttall (Nutt.) – English botanist who collected and studied plants and animals in the US from 1808 to 1841, retiring then to England as the inheritor of a great estate. His early travels in the US were extensive and productive. Returning the England briefly, he was able to study his collections before travelling again to the US in 1815. By 1818 Nuttall had published The Genera of North American Plants, a critically-important flora. That was followed by his 1821 diary of travels through the Arkansas Territory, and a decade later his Manual of Ornithology of the United States and Canada. Following a brief stint curating the botanical gardens then at Harvard University, Nuttall returned to his expeditions, to the Western US, which found him in San Diego where, walking on the beach he encountered a previous student, Richard Henry Dana who had arrived as a ship crewman. Nuttall (the Professor) assisted Dana in securing transfer to another ship, the Alert. Joining in the voyage and carrying his specimens of flora and fauna, Nuttall made the return voyage to Boston – a twist in the tale documented by Dana in Two Years Before the Mast. (1786-1859)
• Frederick T. Pursh (Pursh) – (1774-1820) German botanist who worked at Dresden’s Royal Botanic Garden before immigrating to the US around 1799. Working first for William Hamilton, and then for Benjamin Smith Barton (who intended to write a North American flora), Pursh explored various areas of Eastern North America as well as the West Indies. At the end of his US tenure, Pursh was among the first to study specimens from the Lewis and Clark Expedition. In 1811, Pursh moved to London where he published  Flora americae septentrionalis… (1814). We are told much of this work was based on publications by Muhlenberg. By 1816, Pursh had returned to North America, settling in Canada where his collections, work, and life fell into disarray.
• Constantine S. Rafinesque (Raf.) – Among the most productive and notorious of naturalists, Rafinesque is described as an eccentric and contentious polymath. Born in Constantinople and self-educated in France, Rafinesque was collecting plants by age 12 and had learned Latin and Greek two years later. At 19 he moved to the US, where he collected many plant specimens. Returning to Europe he became a successful trader which allowed him to retire to natural history studies by age 25. Returning to the US around 1815, Rafinesque travelled, taught, collected, studied, published, and quarreled for the remainder of his life. He published over 6700 plant names. (1783-1840)
• Olof P. Swartz (Sw.) – Swedish botanist who collected extensively in the New World, principally in Jamaica and Hispaniola. Wrote the earliest flora of that region (Flora Indiae Occidentalis 1797-1806), which means he authored many plants also native to Florida. (1760-1818)
• Carl L. Willdenow (Willd.) – German botanist (and mentor to von Humboldt), Willdenow directed Berlin’s botanical gardens. Willdenow edited the final version of Linnaeus’s Species Plantarum, which was issued in four volumes. (1765-1812)

Behind the curtains, we have to explore the rules that govern how plant names are created. To be recognized, a plant name must be effectively and validly published, which means the name would be admissible as part of botanical terminology according to internationally-set rules. But those are simply the rules of the road. Making the trip is a full experience. In the steps below, I liken identifying or naming a plant to solving a crime. There are rules…, there’s evidence. Expertise is brought to bear, witnesses are interrogated, resources are studied, defendents are identified, convictions are cast, and reports made. Only then can you say its a RAP.

The frame below shows the cover of the current Code of Nomenclature. In the table to the right, you see past renditions, beginning with the first code in 1867. But there were other systems people followed, and only with the Cambridge Code (1935) did the entire community of botanists, from all countries, agree on a single set of rules. Congresses are convened every five years or so to review rules and discuss potential changes. The printed (and effective date) of updated rules appears one to a few years following the Congress.

The Code of Nomenclature devolves from Principles, which are fairly simple and straightforward. This Code is independent of nomenclatural codes for animals and prokaryotes. Names are based on types. Any taxon can be represented by only one correct name, which is treated as Latin and selected based on priority of valid and effective publication. Rule changes are retroactive unless otherwise stated.

In the following three slides, I’ve cherry-picked the pertinent Articles (statements of rules) that govern the naming of plants. The rules are, though rife with jargon, reasonably clear.

Down the Rabbit Hole….

…to skip the following rather long exposé, head straight to some examples of wildflower authorship.

In the following several slides and notes, I examine an example of one plant with a convoluted nomenclatural and taxonomic history. This written discussion is greatly expanded as compared to the synopsis given during the Webinar presentation. But it allows the reader to study in detail the complexities inherent in determining the proper name for a plant – its “singular” name. We focus on a plant many of you will know. It’s not showy, though certainly intriguing. The slight and twiny vine insinuates its way among salty marsh reeds. generating small clusters of flowers, varying from olive green to a fleshy purple. Because we began comparing the naming of a plant to the investigation of a crime, I cast the subject as a Defendant. Let’s move to identification and a report.

Below you see the crime scene, the hideout for our subject.

Here we see the fruits of its labors.

With a short list of characteristics, identification is simplifiedwhen we can go straight to a family – in this case, the Apocynaceae (historically, the Asclepiadaceae before the two families were conjoined). Life is quite different if you have to use a key to plant families before getting close to a suspect.

That’s a family we expect to show the combinations of milky sap with opposite leaves. The flowers resemble those of Asclepias, and with the fruit we clinch our case. This is certainly in the Apocynaceae. But the genus and species….

Weakley’s key (Flora of the Southeastern United States) to Apocynaceae offers a dichotomy to trailing vines, followed by a choice of leaf base shape, cordate or not. The non-cordate leaf base takes us to a choice of linear as contrasted with ovate leaves; ours are clearly linear. Blessedly, there’s only one more dichotomy: sessile versus petiolate leaves. These are absolutely sessile, which means identification takes us to Pattalias palustre. Below, from an article by Mark Fishbein in Phytologia (2017), is the RAP sheet on this plant, with the common names Swallow-wort, or Gulf Coast Swallow-wort.

Searching beyond that RAP sheet for information on Swallow-worts, we find this is a shady lot. New York has a report out on a Swallow-wort that’s invasive, but they identify that plant as Vincetoxicum rossicum, with a scientific alias of Cynanchum rossicum. So is one Swallow-wort the same as another? Studying our RAP sheet on this New York thug and the Gulf Coast guy we see a connection. It’s a coalition. But they are not the same. Common names are too common; they aren’t unique to a certain kind of plant.

That common name was a bad lead. Returning to the Fishbein RAP sheet, we see a lot of shifting relationships. Our plant was first described as a Cynanchum by Christiaan Persoon, a curious fellow, sort of a polymath who immigrated from his native South Africa to Germany for schooling and medical training, and from there to Paris. Persoon was a fiend for plants and fungi, always spending his money on those studies. Most of his important efforts went to the fungi (he described 2269 species), but around 1805 he dabbled in plants and managed to write the important Synopsis Plantarum, covering 20,000 plants, many of which were species newly described. That’s the first record of this plant, though publication of that taxon was ignored – for decades.

Persoon’s description of the plants was certainly not obvious to the ill-fated Frederick Pursh. It was Pursh who authored the second description of our plant as Ceropegia palustris. A German botanist, Pursh was in his mid-twenties when he immigrated to the US in 1899. Finding work at William Hamilton’s famous garden (the Woodlands) outside Philadelphia, he soon moved to a position with Benjamin Smith Barton, supporting Barton’s never-completed Flora of North America project. After a period of collecting plants in the US, Pursh left the US for London, where he wrote Flora Americae Septentrionalis (1814). That book included his description of the Ceropegia, the second time this plant had been named.

The widespread availability of Pursh’s Flora meant his description became the standard “basionym” for future new combinations. Pursh soon returned to North America, to Canada to further his botanical studies. But collections and notes he accumulated were destroyed in a fire, and Pursh himself had lapsed into alcoholism and associated ill health, dying in destitution. His Flora is an important contribution to the study of American plants, but was heavily criticized by Rafinesque.

Following the death of his long-time cohort John Torrey in 1873, Harvard’s Asa Gray seems to have been determined to complete aspects of the Flora of North America he and Torrey had authored earlier (1838-1843). This new treatment, his Synoptical Flora began with the second volume (1878), which included plants the earlier flora had not monographed (see his preface, below).

In this treatment, Gray reclassified Pursh’s plant to the African genus Vincetoxicum (the same as the New York invasive plant), following the lead of his close associate George Bentham.

And then we have Amos Heller:

The next person in our RAP sheet is Schlechter, a notorious splitter. Rudolf Schlechter, working in Berlin, specialized in orchids (authoring over 1,000 new species), but orchid people have a fondness for Asclepiads, which also form pollen in highly contrived units called pollinia. In 1899 Schlechter published his thorough monograph of the Asclepiads in the first volume of Ignatz Urban’s flora of the West Indies (Symbolae Antillanae …) Schlechter combined several species concepts into Robert Browne’s genus Metastelma.

Below, we see the RAP sheet Schlechter assembled, telling us he had a complete handle on the history of this plant. Note Schlechter includes Persoon’s Cynanchum, as well as Elliott’s Lyonia maritima in his synonymy.

The specimens Schlechter and Urban studied were destroyed during Allied Bombing of Berlin in World War II. Loss of Schlechter’s types and marginalia, significant evidence, left a profound impact on the ability of subsequent botanists to interpret the names and concepts these botanists had published, a particularly significant blow to the world of Orchid taxonomy.

Fishbein’s RAP sheet documents Small’s recognition of the plant in Elliott’s genus Lyonia, a combination published in his Flora of Miami (the area he calls the Everglade Keys)

But let’s look at what Small was up to…. The year 1913 was amazing for him. In this single year, he issued a deferred project on the Flora of Lancaster County, the Flora of Miami, and the 2nd edition of his Flora of the Southeastern United States. But he leaves us with questions. The preface date for Flora of Miami is 26 April, while the date for the 2nd edition of his Flora of the Southeastern US is 23 April. So on Wednesday (23 April) he treated our plant as Seutera, and on Saturday (26 April) he published the new combination that terms the plant Lyonia. Certainly Small was influenced by having read through Schlechter’s treatment of the Antilles, but there’s no sense to this. And it also reminds us that RAP sheets are selective – the detective assembling the data can choose to ignore information not considered useful, but also leaving out critical aspects of the entire picture. In this case, we are unaware of Small’s ambivalence because the only matter of taxonomic importance is that he generated the combination with Lyonia.

The story doesn’t end in 2008. In 2005, Fishbein and Stevens had made the combination of Persoon’s species with Seutera, recognizing priority of that epithet.

The following explanation (Fishbein, 2017) helps us understand a sequence of issues. In 2005, Fishbein & Stevens, recognizing priority of Persoon’s epithet angustifolium, decided to create a combination classifying the plant in Seutera. As you see from the paragraph below, Seutera was a superfluous and illegitimate name, which Reveal and Gandhi attempted to conserve. Their efforts having failed, the genus cannot be used – either in this situation or ever. A genus must be unique, and if that word was ever published, it’s off limits. Fishbein and Stevens also did not believe the plant belongs in Funastrum, and thus Fishbein has resurrected Pattalias, a genus established by Harvard’s Sereno Watson.

The final slide focusing on the Fishbein RAP sheet addresses three names based on a Cuban plant described by Wright (and published in Grisebach’s 1866 Catalogus plantarum cubensium exhibens collectionem Wrightianam). Wright’s description of Aphistelma salinarum very clearly indicates the type, which is Wright’s collection, number 2958. His material is widely distributed, thus Fishbein and others have almost certainly studied specimens. Various authors have concluded Wright’s specimen is conspecific to the type for Pattalias palustre, which places this suite of names in synonymy. There is hope for resurrection, however. Should a future botanist examine the group closely and determine the Cuban material to be a separate species, then Wright’s specimen and name would be back in play.

The case of Pattalias now ended, we can return to checking authorship of some native plants. The following frame shows some plants that retain their “basionyms” – which is to say the name we use today is the same as was given (both genus and species) by the original author.

A lot has happened over the past 3 centuries regarding how many kinds of plants botanists imagined might populate the Earth and thus how many genera would be realistic in a classification scheme. Many plants were described that are now better accommodated in a segregate genus. Even in the lifetime of an author, new information might have come to bear that required fresh assessment. Note the authorship of Spigelia marilandica. Linnaeus himself reclassified his original description, which had placed the plant in Lonicera. In recent years, American taxonomists (synantherologists) have concluded plants native to North America we historically considered as genus Aster should mostly be classified in Symphyotrichum, a story slightly elaborated in the following slides for the native daisy commemorating A. W. Chapman.

The 1838 Flora of North America stands as the most well-known collaborative work between John Torrey and Asa Gray.

In the second volume (1841), Torrey and Gray published Aster chapmanii, a new species based on herbarium material from A. W. Chapman. It’s easy to think of the two Northeastern botanists as senior scholars by the time their Flora was published, but Torrey was 45 and Asa Gray was 31. Chapman was young also. In order for Torrey and Gray to have published the new species in 1841, Chapman (who moved to Quincy in 1835, at age 26) would have collected and dispatched pressed and dried specimens by the time he turned 30. At some point, Chapman relocated to Marianna, settling finally in Apalachicola by 1847, where he shifted from plant collector to taxonomist. Chapman never told us how he became interested in botany, or learned to make herbarium specimens, but he knew enough to connect with Torrey and Gray, and send them a wealth of collections. He studied their works, as well as the writings of other botanists sufficiently to become quite expert. Chapman’s own botanical work, Flora of the Southern United States... (which he considered a complement to Gray’s 1848 Manual of the Botany of the Northern United States) was published in 1860, as Chapman was turning 51.

In the 19th century, it was not so common for botanists to designate a single specimen as the “holotype” for the species. One task for monographers, then, is to select among specimens that are the most likely candidates and designate a lectotype as the unique specimen to which the name and description are tied.

It isn’t unusual for botanists to work up descriptions that become part of someone else’s overall composition. You’ll know this is the case when the term in or ex is inserted. This clues you in to the fact that the name and significant aspects of the description were provided by one author, but the effectively published in the work of another. Helianthus floridanus was published by Chapman, but based on identification, naming, and descriptive details provided by Gray. You could elect to cite Gray as the sole author, but that would leave out useful information.

Recently, the plant many of us have known as Calamintha coccinea has been recognized in the genus Clinopodium, thus restoring the combination made by Kuntze in 1891. Note the change in ending, which is based on agreement in Latin and is considered orthographic. The basionym tells us the species name and description were determined by Nuttall as Cunila coccinea in Hooker’s delightful Exotic Flora (1825). In the slide below, you can see levels of disagreement as to the “disposition” of this plant. If you happened to know it by any of those names, that isn’t a problem. You can always check POWO, or a good flora, to learn the name that’s currently accepted.

Below you see (from POWO) the synonymies related to Bartonia verna. Michaux is credited with first discovery and description, naming the plant Centaurella verna. Persoon reinterpreted Michaux’s plant as Centaurium vernum, and Sprengel transferred the plant to Andrewsia. In the category of “heterotypic synonyms” you are looking at names considered to be conspecific with Bartonia verna, but based on different type specimens. We see Pursh and Rafinesque both published two new species now considered synonymous to B. verna.

In the end, Rafinesque made the decision to transfer Michaux’s species to the genus Bartonia, a transfer effected in the curious re-issue of Flora Virginica, published by Benjamin Smith Barton in 1812 (the title page is dated 1811). Recall Barton had the goal to publish a flora of North America, which never materialized. Along the way he decided to re-issue the notorius Flora Virginica. The original was a publication Gronovius issued (in parts between 1739 and 1743) based on specimens and notes he received from John Clayton. A correspondent of Linnaeus, the work was clearly collaborative between the two men, but it also preceded Species Plantarum, so the plant names are polysyllabic, not binomials. A whiff of scandal surrounds Flora Virginica because Gronovius moved ahead with publication without Clayton’s consent or input. Barton’s update was meant to keep the text in circulation, honor both Clayton and Gronovius, adopt the current binomial system of nomenclature, and enrich the content with new information. The entry for Bartonia verna reflects input from Rafinesque.

Below is a photo of a lovely Rhexia I’ve encountered in two populations near one another in Apalachicola National Forest. The plant and flower are totally distinct from Rhexia mariana, and don’t easily fit the characteristics of R. parviflora, though given the opportunity to examine herbarium specimens, I might believe otherwise. My question to you is: if this plant were determined to represent an undescribed species, what name might you select? How would you determine that name would make a valid entry?

The presentation dealt hardly at all with common names. In the slide below, I explain the reason I avoid them. To me, they don’t bring much to the conversation, and can be misleading. But I do understand they are like comfort food, savory, readily available, and satisfying. But, like comfort food, everyone has their own version, and interpretation. That’s not a recipe for standardization.

MEANING

Botanists, when they are being thoughtful and careful, will attempt to select names that also have meaning, referencing some particular aspect or character of note. Sometime, text will explicitly explain the significance of word choice, but there’s a sly tendency on the part of some botanists to leave any significance a bit cryptic. At other times, some obscure term is utilized to avoid the possibility of name duplication. The meaning behind some names mentioned in this discussion are given in the following list. Check out the etymology section in Flora North America on-line: http://floranorthamerica.org/Property:Etymology

Link to the Page: https://botanyincontext.com/coming-to-terms-with-plant-names/