In situ:. With some anticipation, Deb and I, along with David Roddenberry, visited the site in Apalachicola National Forest, where in summer of 2023 David had identified a sole specimen of the Climbing Fetterbush, Pieris phillyreifolia. It’s said to flower in January and February, which we hoped meant mid-January would be our opportunity to spot a few flowers on the modest wispy stems emerging from a Taxodium trunk, about 20 feet from the road and 12 feet above ground. And yes, we were gifted with flowers, just a few, and I was unprepared to capture usable photos. Returning two days later with a longer lens, but no tripod, I made several more photos that were, predictably, not brilliant. Gathering a greater arsenal of photographic equipment and locating my rubber boots, we returned to the site in early February to check on the specimen and to search for other examples. Our diligence was rewarded. Schlepping through hummocks of grass and pitcher plants, we explored swampy stands of cypress in the vicinity, locating another sole specimen a hundred yards away, and then, a bit more distant, in yet another cypress stand we struck the mother lode. In a small swamp, thankfully not so far from the forest road, we sited at least ten trees and several knees and stumps populated by the Pieris, all in wonderful bloom.
It’s a unique plant; you’ll not need a key for field identification. I was fortunate in having David to help with a first siting. But the simple knowledge that this Pieris shows itself as modest shrubby growth emerging from the bark of cypress trunks and as low, sparse shrubs growing at the edge of tannic waters on the bases of trees, knees, and stumps is all the evidence required. Vegetatively, the plant resembles Lyonia, with a very open habit and somewhat broader leaves. Fruit and flowers, borne on axillary racemes (rather than terminal inflorescences) are less congested, but charming — the inflated corollas showing as a nearly diaphanous white. The plants I’ve seen typically hold onto fruit from previous years, so if you encounter a dicot growing from the bark of a Taxodium (or a few other swamp trees) bearing dry capsules that are clearly Ericaceous, skip the key and go straight to Pieris phillyreifolia. It’s a slam dunk.
Since the sitings reported here, having formed a good search image I’ve learned this denizen of the swamps is well-distributed in our area. As long as the shrubby understory is left intact, there is reasonable likelihood you’ll find plants of the Climbing Fetterbush in the Apalachicola Flora area.
Background: Pieris, due to its resemblance to Lyonia, bears the common name Fetterbush, I don’t know who assigned this name, or when. The term “fetter” relates to a chain that might be used to bind something, or someone. Until someone writes with a better explanation, I imagine the line, or chain of inflated flowers along the stem of a Lyonia inflorescence was enough to create a link. With similarity to Lyonia, Pieris becomes guilty by association. Hence we have the Climbing Fetterbush, or the Swamp Fetterbush, or just another Fetterbush. We’ll get into the scientific name, but only after I make the point that this plant serves a useful example, reminding us there are real differences between herbarium work and field botany. Given a pressed specimen with little other information, a botanist will consult texts and other specimens, making comparisons while working through descriptions and keys to tie down the nature and identification of a plant. Indeed, with 15 genera of Ericaceae in Flora of Florida (FoF), if you attempt to key out a sample, using a good specimen (with flowers), you’ll arrive at the answer with the 10th couplet, the correct choice reading: “Weak shrub or vine, anthers appendaged on either side with two stout, reflexed spurs just above the junction with the filament.”
That would reflect the decision tree William Jackson Hooker parsed through when he first examined a dried specimen collected in 1835 by Thomas Drummond near Apalachicola, FL. Exploring connections passing through the mind of one of the world’s most accomplish plant taxonomists of the era, we have published images of Hooker’s Tab (printed illustration, plate) and Text, from which I extract his description based on specimens in his own herbarium and published in Icones Plantarum, his own private serialized journal.
As context, know that 1837 was an annus mirabilis for Great Britain and for British Natural History. It was, of course the year Victoria acceded to the crown and the year W.J. Hooker initiated his Icones (which he dedicated to George Bentham). The same year, James Bateman issued the first plates of Orchidaceae of Mexico and Guatemala, a sumptuous triumph, celebrated at the time as one of the largest books ever published. The many lavish botanical publications of the time highlighted an exotic plant craze that had taken hold at the very moment Britain moved toward global domination, with Hooker in the taxonomic vanguard, having edited Curtis’s’Botanical Magazine since 1827, as well as the first volumes of Annals of Botany. W. J. Hooker was atop British botany and would, in 1841, become the first Director of Kew, as well as father to Joseph Dalton Hooker, who succeeded him as Director at Kew in 1865.
Hooker knew his plants, but in this instance, and in most regards, he worked from dry specimens sent by collectors and from plants grown by horticulturists in “stoves” (greenhouses.) Certainly by 1836, he had received material from Drummond’s collecting trip in North America, though Drummond himself did not survive the journey, having died while collecting in Havana, Cuba. I imagine a stack of Drummond’s pressed, dried, unmounted specimens being sorted by an assistant and brought to a well-lighted work table, which must have had some kind of dissection scope or lenses. One specimen, with no information other than Apalachicola, W. Florida, no. 24, was the first and only representative of our Climbing Fetterbush Hooker ever saw. With that thought, we continue the tale of the Apalachicola plant, today identified as Pieris phillyreifolia.
In Hooker’s words, dashed out as one of hundreds of descriptions he must have written at the time: “Andromeda phyllyreifolia: Hab. Apalachicola, W. Florida. Mr. Drummond, (n. 27.) This is decidedly a new and very beautiful species which cannot be confounded with any I have ever seen. It would seem from the long rather straight branches that if forms a shrub of considerable height, flowering in great perfection in the latter end of January and beginning of February. The leaves are truly elliptical or oblong-obtuse, glossy, when dry distinctly reticulated with copious veins, the margin revolute. Racemes numerous, handsome. Bractea, at the base of the pedicels minute, subulate. Calyx cleft to the base into 5 upright lanceolate segments, half as long as the corolla, which latter appears to be greenish-white, slightly tinged with red. Filaments broad, singularly cured or folded twice below the anther. Germen ovato-globose, with 3 blunt angles and ten small glands at the base.”
There’s a lot to unpack here. First, the Panhandle was still known as West Florida, an area that attempted to give itself to Alabama more than once. Given the tribulations and demise of Drummond (Wunderlin, Hansen, & Beckner, 2000), we can date the collection to 1835 – just three years before publication in Icones. Drummond’s material must have gotten to his mentor Hooker quickly, and have been processed with dispatch. Hooker interpreted the plant as Andromeda, a well-known genus of northerly, woody Ericads published in Linnaeus’s 1753 Species Plantarum. I can’t explain why he failed to consider this a Lyonia, a genus Nuttall had published in 1818 to represent woody Ericads from warm temperate areas of the Eastern US and Asia. But Hooker knew Andromeda, and lacking descriptive data from Drummond, he appears to have envisioned this to be a large, handsome shrub, replete with flowering racemes — a lovely image, though far from reality.
The most telling evidence of Hooker’s lack of information concerning the specimen is his choice of specific epithet. Why “phillyreifolia” of all possibilities? That choice underscores the difference between herbarium and field botany. Any person familiar with the plant in situ, or given good information about the native habitat, would head straight to habit and habitat in differentiating and naming this plant, aware of numerous wonderful and descriptive epithets to christen such a unique plant. And, in fact, that did happen.
In 1913, J. K. Small, who had studied and collected Climbing Fetterbush in nature, was convinced it should be treated in a separate genus, and erected the genus Ampelothamnus, in reference to the vining woody stem that invades the bark of trees. In the wild, it’s found in swamps, growing as a low, open shrub on mounded stumps, cypress knees, and tree bases. Liana-like stems invade the bark of Taxodium, White Cedar, and sometimes even Slash Pine and other trees. Once the stem has snaked a route upward, inside the bark, the growing tip manages an abrupt 90 degree turn (Lemon & Voegli, 1962), surfacing to form short branching stems, leaves, flowers and fruit in the sunlight, with the look of some kind of vine or mistletoe. Indeed, cruising the forest in search of specimens, the odd branch of Smilax is cause for continual false alarms.
Back to Hooker’s decision on the specific epithet. With the many possibilities for a great name, someone with more data might conjure, he falls back on a subtle impression the foliage resembles the European Phillyrea. Look it up in Wikipedia. This is a genus of two species in the Olive family, close relatives of Osmanthus. True to its family, Phillyrea bears 4-petalled small white flowers and fruit developing as a drupe. Thus we have the Climbing Fetterbush, a plant, so easily identified in the field, assigned a perplexing name implying association that’s an arcane mystery for students studing native plants in the Apalachicola Flora.
Likely bufuddlement doesn’t end with the specific epithet. Conceived taxonomically as Andromeda, how is this plant now Pieris? Pieris itself was a new construct, erected by David Don (named for the Muse) in his 1834 discussion of the Ericaceae. Though Hooker had assigned the plant to Andromeda, just a year later, with a publication date of 1838, De Candolle’s treatment of Ericads in Prodromus transferred the plant to Pieris, thus the current citation is Pieris phillyreifolia (W. J. Hooker) DC. For more recent tellings, turn to Walter Judd’s 1982 monograph.
John K. Small’s latter description of the segregated genus, Ampelothamnus, has been rejected both by Carroll Wood (1961) and Judd (1979, 1982). Judd groups P. phillyreifolia in Section Phillyreoides, (established by Bentham and Hooker in Genera Plantarum, 1876) with two other species, Pieris cubensis (described in 1866 by Grisebach as a Cuban Andromeda (Pieris) related to Hooker’s species) and Pieris swinhoei, native to the Fukien Province of Southeastern China. That’s a fun disjunction.
The story doesn’t end with Hooker and De Candolle or Carroll Wood and Walter Judd; there’s a taxonomic synonym of interest, a binomial described by John Torrey and published in Alphonso Wood’s 1861 Class-Book of Botany. Torrey based his taxon on a specimen Wood collected near Quincy, FL, assigning the name Andromeda croomia. That epithet is meant to honor Hardy Bryan Croom, who (with his brother) owned plantation land around 1832 in Jackson County, along the Apalachicola River. Croom, a close associate of A. W. Chapman, was responsible for first collections of Croomia pauciflora, Taxus floridana, and Torreya taxifolia. More discoveries certainly would have followed, but he and his family perished in a shipwreck south of Cape Hatteras in 1837.
A curiosity remains for me. Aside from publishing Torrey’s binomial, in Preface to his 1861 edition, Wood doesn’t mention Croom (whose death predates the 1845 first edition of the Class-Book as well as Wood’s field work), and I haven’t yet discovered evidence Alfonso Wood describes his own collecting of the plant. In the Preface, Wood thanks collaborators around the Southeast, specifically Chapman: “Dr. A. W. Chapman of Apalachicola, Fla., presented us with many of the more rare plants of Florida, on the occasion of our recent visit to his own familiar walks.” I find no mention of Torrey.
As a side note, in completing his preface, Wood explains the absence of plants from Southern Florida: “The southern peninsula of Florida is neglected in consequence of the author’s inability to visit that region hitherto. During his extended tour southward in 1857, the Seminole war rendered the route to the Everglades unsafe, or at least undesirable.”
The tale of Pieris phillyreifolia remains incomplete. Judd’s work, published in 1982, has been around more than 4 decades. The possibilities of contemporary genome-based analysis might shed new light on the relationships between plants in Section Phillyreoides, explaining how two similar plants in geographic proximity can have as their closest relative a vicariad from China. Small’s genus may yet see revival.
CITATIONS & ANNOTATIONS
De Candolle, August Pyramo, 1838. Ordo CXIV, Ericaceae, Prodromus (Prodrumus systematis naturalis regni vegetabilis…) Pars 7, pg 580-733, see pg 599. for Pieris, accessed through Biodiversity Heritage Library, source: Missouri Botanical Garden. De Candolle considered what we group, today, as family Ericaceae, to be several ordos (he and many contemporaries used the word “Ordo” instead of Family).
Don, David, 1834. An Attempt at a New Arrangement of the Ericaceae, The Edinburgh new philosophical journal, v17: 150-160, accessed through Biodiversity Heritage Library. In this publication, D. Don describes Pieris, based on Pieris formosa. Don (1799-1841), professor of Botany at King’s College, London for the final 5 years of his life, was born in Scotland where his father was a Curator at the Royal Garden and his brother George was also a botanist. In the brief description of Pieris, Don cites three Wallich plants, Andromeda formosa, A. ovalifolia, and A. lanceolata. He also includes the etymology: “Pieris una Musarum”
Grisebach, A., 1866. Catalogus plantarum cubensium exhibens collectionem Wrightianam aliasque minores ex insula Cuba missas, Apud Gulielmum Engelmann, Lipsae (BHL, MO, https://doi.org/10.5962/bhl.title.177)
Halloran, Sean, 2018. Pieris phillyreifolia: The Opportunistic Climbing Fetterbush, Arnoldia 75(3)
Hooker, William Jackson, 1847. Andromeda phillyreifolia, Icones Plantarum, Tab CXII, Vol 2, page 122.
Judd, Walter S., 1979. Generic relationships in the Andromedeae (Ericaceae). Journal Arnold Arboretum 60: 47-503.
Judd, Walter S., 1982. A Taxonomic Revision of Pieris (Ericaceae), Journal of the Arnold Arboretum 63(2):103-144
Lemon, Paul C. and Jean M. Voegli, 1962. Anatomy and ecology of Pieris phillyreifolia (Hook.) DC., Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club 89(5): 303-311.
Nuttall, Thomas, 1818. The Genera of North American Plants, and a catalogue of the species, to the year 1817, Philadelphia. Nuttall generates important content, including many new plant descriptions. In this section of his Genera, Nuttall treats Class X Decandria, Order 1 Monogynia (plants with 10 stamens and on pistil), pages 262-284. Describing the genus Lyonia, Nuttall explains: “To commemoroate the name of the late Mr. John Lyon, an indefatigable collector of North American plants, who fell victim to a dangerous epidemic amidst those savage and romantic mountains (the Appalachians of North Carolina) which had so often been the theatre of his labours.” He’s very clear as to his basis for Lyonia: “Were not this group of species so perfectly natural and easy to distinguish from the genuine Andromedas, it might have been retained as a subgeneric section of that genus, nothwithstanding the singular structure of the capsule.” Nuttall was among the last taxonomists following Linnaeus’s classification schema, a highly artificial organizing method that generates odd bedfellows, in this instance lumping Ericaceae with Legumes, such as Cassia, Sophora, and Cercis, as well as the even more distinct Venus Flytrap (Dionaea) and Chinaberry, Melia.
Small, John K., 1913. Shrubs of Florida. Page 96. Published by the Author, New York.
Weakley, Alan S. & the Southeast Flora Team, 2023. Flora of the Southeastern United States (Website), https://fsus.ncbg.unc.edu/main.php?pg=show-taxon-detail.php&lsid=urn:lsid:ncbg.unc.edu:taxon:{0160859D-944C-4DDC-B8A0-91FA68300C77} Be sure to visit Weakley for access to keys, descriptions, and images.
Wood, Alfonso, 1861. Class-Book of Botany: Being Outlines of the Structure, Physiology, and Classification of Plants; with a flora of the United States and Canada. (2nd edition), A. S. Barnes & Burr, New York
Wood, Carroll E., Jr., 1961. Genera of Ericaceae in the Southeastern United States, Journal of the Arnold Arboretum 42(1): 10-80
Wunderlin, Richard P., Bruce E. Hansen, and John Beckner, 2000. Botanical Exploration in Florida, in Wunderlin and Hansen, Flora of Florida, Vol 1, Pteridophytes and Gymnosperms, Univ. Florida Press, Gainesville.