Every day, as we write labels for the boxes where we sow our freshly gathered seed, we do homage to dead white men, from Johann Georg Gmelin and Sir Hans Sloane, to Joseph Banks, George Bentham, Robert Brown, Alan Cunningham, so on and so forth. In the case of generic names existing before Australia was opened up, there was little choice to be exercised in the matter. Gmelina and Sloanea were both named by Linnaeus, but many newer names, Macadamia, Hicksbeachia, Baloghia, Davidsonia, for example, besides being cacophonous, commemorate otherwise totally forgettable individuals while telling you nothing whatsoever about the plants themselves.
Botanical names old and new are certainly hard on the ear. What is worse, they are also disputed. Under the Linnaean system plants with certain attributes in common, principally those of the plants’ reproductive processes, were grouped as belonging to the same genus and then distinguished within the genus by specific characters, which supplied the species name or ‘specific epithet’. With plant hunters working all over the world there was bound to be some duplication. In September 2010 the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew and the Missouri Botanical Garden announced their collaboration in compiling ‘The Plant List’, a single worldwide inventory for all plant species, including ferns and their allies and algae. In the course of drawing up their inventory they had junked 477,601 names as synonyms, listed another 263,925 names as unresolved, and accepted only 298,900 names. Ironically this work has been undertaken at a time when the number of plant taxonomists is declining even faster than the number of species.
Botanists, like other academic scientists, cannot be got to agree. The Plant List itself is disputed, because it deals solely with recorded data, simply combining multiple data sets and assessing the degree of duplication and overlap. The procedure to be followed by naturalists recording new species is first to find, observe and collect a specimen, which in the case of a plant species should include leaves, flowers and fruit if possible. The specimen must then be keyed out using first of all a field guide, and then one of several authoritative indexes of plant names. The first specimen of a new genus will be called the ‘type’ of that genus; as it cannot be a member of a genus unless it is also a species, it will also be the type of the species. Such specimens must then be preserved in a collection or collections where subsequent discoveries and identifications can be compared with them. The objection to the Plant List is that it has been compiled without examination of the specimens to see if they are distinct or not. The result is a list that has to hedge its bets by giving each plant identification a confidence rating. As techniques of genetic identification are being perfected, it is only a matter of time before the Linnaean binomials are supported by barcodes, and then perhaps the disagreements will cease. Until then we workers in the forest have to remember all the names, disputed and accepted.
Botanists haven’t been on earth very long – the word ‘botany’ crept into English rather self-consciously at the end of the seventeenth century – and it seems that they mightn’t be around much longer. These days people who study plants are more likely to call themselves plant geneticists or plant biologists or phytochemists. The individual specialties are among those grouped under the slightly disparaging name ‘life sciences’, an inferior replacement for the older umbrella name ‘natural history’. The life sciences are the girly version of the hard sciences, and their inferior status is reflected in their career structure. A double first in a life science at Oxbridge is good enough to get you a badly paid dead-end job as a laboratory assistant. These days you are more likely to find that people who are interested in vegetation will seek a qualification in ecology or environmental studies or phytobiology. Among the courses they will take as undergraduates there won’t be a single one labelled botany, alone or in combination. Chairs of botany are beginning to disappear from our universities. The schools of botany at Oxford and Cambridge now call themselves departments of plant sciences and divide their discipline into specific areas of research, biochemistry, including cell and molecular biology, plant metabolism, comparative developmental genetics and evolution, ecology and systematics, epidemiology, virology, and so forth. The era of the plant-hunter is well and truly over.
Historically, botany has been the preserve of enthusiasts and amateurs, too many of them keen to make a name for themselves by finding something new and wonderful. As the Enlightenment spread through continental Europe, ladies and gentlemen busied themselves collecting and describing plant specimens that they dried in presses between sheets of thick blotting paper. Some filled sketchbooks with plant portraits in watercolour. As they were likely to be butterfly collectors, birdwatchers and anglers as well, they were more likely to call themselves naturalists than botanists. In Britain the process was accelerated by the enforced retirement of the Jacobite gentry to the country after the Bloodless Revolution of 1688; excluded from court and parliament, they devoted their energies to annotating the countryside. Such people accumulated collections of all kinds of natural curiosities, and fitted out rooms in their country houses with display cabinets to keep them in, as well as recording their ramblings in diaries and notebooks. Humbler countryfolk knew the local vegetation, and gave names to most of the common species of plants they saw growing around them, but there was no consistency in their practice. Things were called roses or daisies or lilies that weren’t roses or daisies or lilies at all. The same species had different names in different districts, and often names of distinct species were interchangeable.
Early scientific nomenclature was hardly more reliable and much more unwieldy. Caspar Bauhin, professor of anatomy and botany at Basel, had arrived at a version of a binomial system in Pinax Theatri Botanici (1596), but it was diagnostic simply; Bauhin had no thought of an underlying system. His book would be one of the many sources used by Linnaeus. As was Eléments de Botanique ou Méthode pour reconnaître les Plantes by Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, first published in 1694, with a Latin version in 1700, and a further revised Latin version in 1719. Many of the genera now credited to Linnaeus were actually named earlier by Bauhin and Tournefort. Linnaeus outlined his system of scientific nomenclature in his Systema Naturae in 1735, and developed it further in Genera Plantarum in 1737, but not all European naturalists were persuaded of its rightness.
It was Tournefort who began the practice of naming new genera and new species after his colleagues, as an expression of his gratitude for their supplying him with specimens and detailed descriptions. All subsequent botanists including Linnaeus have followed suit. As a consequence the Cave Creek rainforest is haunted by the ghosts of a vanished tribe of European naturalists. The White Beech that gives this book its name belongs to a genus Linnaeus called Gmelina, in honour of Johann Georg Gmelin, professor of chemistry and natural history at the University of St Petersburg, principal author of Flora Sibirica (1747–69). The type of the genus Gmelina was a night-flowering Asian shrub, given the species name asiatica. It was better known to the Ayurvedic practitioners, who used a decoction of the root bark as an anti-inflammatory, as ‘biddari’ or ‘badhara’. It is as ‘Badhara Bush’ that Gmelina asiatica has become known as a weed in Central Queensland; otherwise it and its near relatives are commonly known as ‘Bushbeech’, for no reason that I can intuit.
Linnaeus and his academic colleagues came by their botanical training in university faculties of medicine. Plant recognition was an essential prerequisite for a career that was then understood to consist principally in the administration of remedies derived from plants. Linnaeus held the chair of medicine and botany originally established at the University of Uppsala in 1693. In France the post of Botaniste du Roi grew out of the directorship of the Jardin Royal des Plantes Médicinales. At the University of Glasgow botany was combined with anatomy from 1718 to 1818, when a separate chair of botany was founded. When the first chairs of pharmacology were established in Europe, the study of botany formed part of the course of study. Pharmacognosy required a close and accurate observation and classification of the plant species that provided most of the materials of the pharmacopoeia, so we are not surprised to find that many of the first professional botanists originally qualified in pharmacology.
The first person to collect any Australian plant species was an amateur, the freebooter William Dampier. In 1688 when his ship Cygnet was beached on the north-west coast of Australia near King Sound, Dampier passed the time while it was being repaired making notes on the native flora and fauna. On a second voyage, in the Roebuck, he came ashore at Shark Bay and travelled north-east as far as La Grange Bay, all the while collecting specimens and making records, which were illustrated with sketches by his clerk James Brand. Back in England in 1701, though in serious trouble for the loss of the Roebuck, Dampier remembered to send his materials to Thomas Woodward of the Royal Society. Woodward sent them on to John Ray, pioneer naturalist and author of the Historia Generalis Plantarum (1686–1704), and his collaborator Leonard Plukenet, Royal Professor of Botany. The meticulously pressed specimens of the plants Dampier collected on the north-west coast of Australia in August–September 1699 may still be seen today in the Sherardian Herbarium in Oxford, with William Sherard’s speculative Latin labels attached.
It was only when Robert Brown was working his way through Dampier’s specimens in 1810 that they were given systematic names. When Brown recognised one specimen as being from a new, unnamed genus he had no hesitation in naming it after its original collector, Dampiera. Dampier’s specimen, being the first to be collected, is therefore to be considered the type for the whole genus, which turned out to consist of more than fifty species distributed all over Australia. The Dampiera Dampier collected was one of the more spectacular, with violet-blue flowers borne on silver-white foliage, in Latin incana, ‘hoary’. The genus is at present undergoing revision, but it will never acquire a more readily accepted common or scientific name. There could be no vaster, more durable or more engaging memorial available to anyone than to have a whole tribe of beautiful living things named after him.
The most important figure in Australian botany is another highly endowed amateur, Joseph Banks. Banks became interested in botany when he was a small boy. As a student in 1764, when he found that there was no teaching of botany at Oxford, he paid for a series of lectures to be delivered by Cambridge botanist Israel Lyons. He then continued his studies in botany at the Chelsea Physic Garden and the British Museum, where he met Daniel Solander who put him in touch with his own teacher, Linnaeus. In 1766 Banks travelled to Newfoundland and Labrador, and published an account of the plants and animals he found there. When he heard of the planning of an expedition to the South Seas to observe the transit of Venus, desperate to be appointed naturalist on the voyage, he stepped in with a donation of £10,000 towards the cost of the expedition. When the Endeavour set out from England in 1768 Banks was aboard, along with a retinue of illustrators and scientists, including Solander. Banks’s purpose was to collect specimens of the flora of the remotest parts of the earth, for his own collection and for the royal collection at Kew. He succeeded admirably, bringing back specimens of about 110 new genera and 1,300 new species.
Some of the Cave Creek flora were first collected by Banks’s cohort in 1770, some at Botany Bay and some on the Endeavour River, but the specimens were not studied in time to provide the types. The Black Bean, for example, was originally collected on the Endeavour River in 1770, but not identified until 1830, when Hooker described the specimens collected later by Cunningham and Frazer, by which time the name had already been used by Robert Mudie in two books, The Picture of Australia and Vegetable Substances, both of 1828 (Mabberley, 1992).
Every naturalist botanising in the New World had to send all his specimens back to the big European collections for identification; of these by far the most important was, and is, Kew. The introduction to the ‘Australian Virtual Herbarium’ on the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew website gives a pretty fair assessment:
Australia has a vascular flora of about 20,000 species. Of these, 8,125 had been described by the completion of Bentham’s Flora Australiensis (1863–1878), written at Kew, and of this group, comprising more than a third of the current total taxa, most have Type material of some kind at Kew. These include collections by R. Brown, J. Banks & D. Solander, J. D. Hooker, A. & R. Cunningham, R. C. Gunn, J. Milligan, C. Stuart, G. Caley, F. Mueller, J. Drummond, J. McGillivray, T. Mitchell, A. F. Oldfield, G. Maxwell, L. Leichhardt, B. Bynoe, C. Fraser, H. Beckler, H. H. Behr, W. Baxter, J. Dallachy and many more. Taxa described later are also represented to a lesser extent in Kew. For many taxa there are multiple Type specimens in Kew (holotypes, isotypes, syntypes and lectotypes), and many associated historical collections (e.g. non-type specimens cited by Bentham, 1863–1878), vital for interpretation of early botanical works.
Thus the old world, in the name of scientific method, extended and intensified its control over the new. After his first foray Banks concentrated on building up a network of scientific contacts all over Europe, and employed troops of botanists whom he sent hither and yon to every part of the known world, to continue amassing specimens for his own herbarium and the royal collections at Kew, and any other establishments that might have materials to offer in exchange. In 1778 he was elected President of the Royal Society, a position he would hold till his death; he would eventually take over the botanic garden at Kew, set up the herbarium there, and organise, finance and direct the scientific exploration of Australia from the other side of the world. Banks is commemorated at Cave Creek by the specific name of our violet, Viola banksii, and Solander by our crowsfoot, Geranium solanderi. In 1782 in the Supplementum Plantarum (15:26) the younger Linnaeus named an important genus (seventy-seven species at the present count) Banksia for Banks, who had been created baronet in 1781. Australia was by then so much Banks’s domain that when a name for the continent was being sought Linnaeus suggested ‘Banksia’ for that too. Happily the suggestion was not heeded.
After the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788 the amateurs John White, surgeon-general (ADB), and Richard Johnson, colonial chaplain (ADB), took up the work of sending Australian plant material to Banks. In 1791 Banks arranged to pay the Superintendent of Convicts David Burton an annual stipend for collecting seeds and plant material. Unfortunately Burton accidentally shot himself the next year (ADB). In 1798 Banks sent out George Caley (ADB). As Caley had no formal qualifications Banks himself paid his salary of fifteen shillings a week; Caley collected for both Banks and Kew, and was allowed to sell extra specimens to nurserymen.
Banks was also responsible for the presence in Australia of one of my heroes, Robert Brown (ADB). Brown had come to botany through the school of medicine at Edinburgh University where he enrolled in 1791 only to drop out in 1793, possibly for lack of money, and maybe for lack of attention to his studies as well. He had perhaps spent too much time botanising in the Highlands, sometimes with the nurseryman George Don. In 1794 he joined the army, serving in Ireland as a surgeon’s mate, which took up so little time that he was able to concentrate on his botanical researches. At this stage he was fascinated by cryptogams and pioneered the use of the microscope in examining minute plant parts. The genera of many of our rainforest mosses and ferns were first identified by Brown, who contributed (unacknowledged) to James Dickson’s Fasciculi plantarum cryptogamicarum britanniae in 1796. In 1800 Banks offered to appoint the twenty-seven-year-old Brown naturalist to Matthew Flinders’s circumnavigation of Australia, and provided him with the services of the botanical artist Ferdinand Bauer. Brown prepared for the trip by studying the collections already made by Banks and Solander. HMS Investigator sailed in July 1801; when it called at Port Jackson for the second time in June 1803, signalling the completion of the circumnavigation of the continent, Brown and Bauer decided to stay and continue collecting in New South Wales. In three and a half years in Australia Brown collected 3,400 species, more than half of them previously unknown. Though many of his specimens were lost aboard a ship that was wrecked on the return journey, he was able in 1810 to publish a preparatory Australian flora, Prodromus Florae Novae Hollandiae et Insulae Van Diemen. When Leichhardt set off on his first botanising rambles he carried a copy in his saddlebag. Allan Cunningham too carried a copy.
Brown’s was not the first attempt at a provisional Australian flora. The naturalist on the expedition of d’Entrecastaux to Oceania (1791–3), Jacques de Labillardière, who collected specimens in south-west Australia and Tasmania, had brought out his Novae Hollandiae Plantarum Specimen in instalments between 1804 and 1807. Sir Joseph Banks, whom he had met on a visit to England in 1783, intervened when the British confiscated Labillardière’s scientific collections as spoils of war and arranged for their restitution, unmindful that the royal collection would be poorer for lack of them. Labillardière got his reward in 1793 when Sir James Edward Smith named a genus of Australian plants Billardiera (Smith, 1:1).
Labillardière has been criticised for making unacknowledged use of specimens from the collection of the amateur naturalist Charles Louis l’Héritier de Brutelle, who is principally famous, at least among Australians, for naming the genus Eucalyptus. L’Héritier published the name in his Sertum Anglicum, an account of his botanising among the British collections in the 1780s. The species on which he founded the genus Eucalyptus was Eucalyptus obliqua, originally collected by William Anderson, physician on board HMS Resolution, on Cook’s second expedition when it visited Tasmania in 1774. Anderson had called his sample ‘Aromadendron’, the smelly tree. L’Héritier renamed it after the pretty (eu) cap (calyptera) made of fused petals that encloses the anthers of the gum-blossom in bud. Anderson was assisted by David Nelson, a gardener from Kew, who was employed, paid, equipped and trained by Banks. Other species of eucalypt had been collected earlier by Banks and Solander, but when L’Héritier was working at the British Museum in 1786–7 they had not yet been named. And so it was that a man who never glimpsed the great south land, never saw a eucalypt in the wild, succeeded in naming the genus of the ‘most important and dominant trees of the Australian flora’. He also named the Kangaroo Paw Anigozanthos and a species of tree fern Dicksonia after James Dickson.
Though he was not the first botanist to describe Australian flora, Brown has a pretty good claim to being the best. His grasp of plant anatomy was unparalleled, partly because of his innovative use of microscopic examination. He was also unusually self-effacing. When a rival botanist supplied a good name for a new genus Brown made no bones about accepting it. To study the whole list of plant names authorised by Brown is to realise that for the most part he bucked the trend of using plant names to oblige his colleagues and superiors. He preferred to name his plants for themselves; he gave the Bolwarra the scientific name Eupomatia, ‘eu’ meaning ‘pleasing’ and ‘pomatia’ referring to the pixie cap of the flowerbud. The type he called E. laurina, meaning like a laurel, referring to its leaves. Forty years later, when Victorian government botanist Ferdinand Mueller was sent the Small Bolwarra collected by Charles Moore, he typically named it for George Bennett, E. bennettii. Bennett, an Englishman who travelled extensively before settling in Australia in 1836, when he went into medical practice in Sydney, was a founding member of the Australian Museum, the Acclimatisation Society and the Zoological Society (ADB).
Brown was obliged to name another large proteaceous genus Grevillea in memory of the algologist Charles Francis Greville, one of the founders of the Royal Horticultural Society, because the name had already been published by Joseph Knight. How this came about is a tale of the kind of skulduggery that is not expected of scholars and gentlemen. Knight worked as head gardener for a gentleman botanist called George Hibberd, who had fallen for the new fad of growing proteaceous plants. In 1809 Knight published On the Cultivation of the Plants belonging to the natural order of Protëeae which, as well as providing ten pages or so of instructions for the successful growing of Proteaceae, included a revised taxonomy for the group. This taxonomy had been copied down by Robert Salisbury from a lecture given by Robert Brown to the Linnaean Society, and published by Knight before the text of Brown’s lecture could be published in the Transactions of the Linnaean Society. For this piece of piracy Salisbury was ostracised by the botanical fraternity, but nothing could alter the fact that Knight had published before Brown, and so we read that the genus Grevillea is ‘R. Br. ex Knight’, even though Knight had been unable to name or describe the type specimen which was in fact Brown’s Grevillea gibbosa, the Bushman’s Clothes-peg (Brown, 1810b, 375). Within the genus Grevillea Brown remembered Banks, Bauer, Baxter, Caley, Cunningham and Dryander. He also named a monotypic genus Bellendena after Sir John Bellenden Ker.
As a man without liberal education who had no Latin, Brown’s colleague George Caley, who was otherwise an expert botanist, was never permitted to publish under his own name. Though he was a rather morose individual who often made life difficult for Brown, Brown made sure he was not forgotten by naming a small genus of flying duck orchids after him, Caleana. Brown named four more species for Caley as well, a Grevillea, a Banksia, a Persoonia and an Anadenia. To another Grevillea and another Banksia Brown gave the specific epithet goodii, in honour of the gardener on the Investigator, Peter Good, whose job it was to tend any live plants being taken back to England, and make sure that the collected seed remained viable. Good had died of dysentery shortly after the Investigator docked in Port Jackson in 1803; the plants to which Brown gave his name are his only memorial (Brown, 1810b, 1:174)
Brown collected the plant we now call Brunonia, but he did not name it after himself. Sir James Edward Smith, lecturer in botany at Guy’s Hospital, who had acquired all Linnaeus’s collections after his death in 1778, chose the name but, because Brown published it in his Prodromus in 1810, before Smith’s paper was published in the Transactions of the Linnaean Society, he is credited as the author (Smith, 1811, 366). The name Brownia has never been used so there was no need to latinise it as Brunonia. In 1863 Ferdinand Mueller attempted to confer Brown’s name on the Australian Flintwood, which Brown had originally collected on the Hunter River (Fragmenta, 3:17, 11). Mueller had originally identified his specimen as a Phoberos as described by Loureiro, and named it Phoberos brownii; by 1863 he reclassified it as a Scolopia, but he was not able to retain his original species name brownii because of an odd circumstance. In June 1854 German botanist Johann Friedrich Klotzsch had come upon a specimen of the same species in the herbarium of the Berlin Botanical Garden marked ‘patria ignota’. Klotzsch described it, named it Adenogyrus braunii for his friend and colleague Alexander Carl Friedrich Braun, and the name was published the same year (Fischer and Meyer). The genus name was not good but there was no way of removing the specific epithet, so Scolopia braunii it is and ever will be. Botanists who treat braunii as if it were a variant spelling of brownii (and they include the great Floyd) are simply wrong. Scolopia braunii is a wonderful slow-growing tree with glossy lozenge-shaped leaves and scented flowers; it is a real shame that it was not named for the best botanist of them all. At one stage the Queensland Kauri was being referred to as ‘Agathis brownii’, but that name too was without authority (Mabberley, 2002). That still leaves more than 150 plant species with the specific name brownii, nearly all of them named by younger generations of botanists who are all aware of how much we owe to Robert Brown. One of the earliest plants named for Brown is Banksia brownii, which was collected by William Baxter at King George’s Sound in 1829; it is now facing imminent extinction in its native habitat in south-west Western Australia.
Brown is the original collector of many Cave Creek natives. Some he was able to name with purely descriptive names in the peculiar mixture of Latin and Greek that is called botanical Latin: the genera Asplenium and Cryptocarya, Aneilema biflorum, A. acuminatum, Adiantum formosum, Alpinia caerulea, Alyxia ruscifolia, Gymnostachys anceps. There was nothing Brown could do to stop the Cave Creek Commelina commemorating Jan and Caspar Commelijn, because Linnaeus had already named the genus in 1753, but typically he chose a descriptive epithet, cyanea – blue. Our Koda belongs to a genus named in 1756 Ehretia for the great botanical artist Georg Dionysius Ehret, and again Brown applied a descriptive epithet, acuminata. Brown listed Olea paniculata, an important member of our plant community, which had been tentatively named ‘Ligustrum arboreum’ by the botanists on the Endeavour. He also named Clerodendrum floribundum and Callicarpa pedunculata. Brown also identified Pseuderanthemum variabile, tentatively labelled ‘Iusticia umbratilis’. And so on, to the end of the alphabet.
Though Alan Cunningham and Charles Frazer accomplished much less than Brown, at Cave Creek their names crop up every day, Frazer’s being usually and apparently incorrectly spelt as ‘Fraser’ (ADB). Cunningham was a gardener’s son, who found work in 1810 as a cataloguer of Banks’s collections at Kew. When the post of travelling plant collector was advertised in 1814, Banks encouraged Cunningham to apply and he was duly appointed. After travelling in South America, he arrived in Port Jackson in 1816, the same year that Frazer arrived in New South Wales as a soldier. Within a year Frazer had been appointed Superintendent of the Botanic Gardens and first Colonial Botanist. Both men joined John Oxley’s expeditions to north-eastern New South Wales in 1818, and in 1828 they accompanied Captain Patrick Logan’s expedition from Brisbane south to Mount Barney in the McPherson Range, which was named by Cunningham after Major Duncan McPherson, an officer in the 39th regiment. Bentham credits Frazer as the original collector of more than 230 New South Wales species. Our most spectacular rosewood is Dysoxylum fraserianum and the sandpaper fig, Ficus fraseri, is one of the most important trees for our fruit-eating birds.
Cunningham’s memory haunts the treescape; the Hoop Pine, Araucaria cunninghamii, the Bangalow Palm, Archontophoenix cunninghamiana, the local Casuarina, Allocasuarina cunninghamiana, the Native Tamarind, Diploglottis cunninghamii, the Brown Beech, Pennantia cunninghamii, are all named for him. Lately Cunningham has been losing some of his titles; Diploglottis cunninghamii is now to be called D. australis, Clerodendron cunninghamii C. longiflorum var. glabrum, Cryptocarya cunninghamii C. macdonaldii, but then Kreysigia multiflora was renamed Tripladenia cunninghamii, so what Cunningham lost on the roundabouts he made up on a swing. In 1831 Cunningham went back to England, to join the other botanists working on the 200 boxes of Australian specimens he had sent to the Kew herbarium. He published little, and it would probably be unfair to suggest that it was he who called some of the most frequently encountered species in the McPherson Range after himself. One thing he did do was to ensure that a ‘majestic bluff’ encountered on Oxley’s earlier expedition was named after George Caley.
Even more important than Robert Brown in arriving at an authoritative account of the Australian flora is another gentleman amateur, George Bentham (DNB). Bentham was virtually self-educated; he became interested in botany when his father moved his household to France in 1816, eventually settling near Montpellier. He diverted himself by applying the logical principles developed by his uncle Jeremy Bentham to anything that interested him. He was impressed by the analytical tables for plant identification that he found in Augustin Pyramus de Candolle’s Flore française and began to apply them to his own botanising. On a visit to London in 1823 he made his first contact with British botanists. In 1831 his father died, and in 1832 his uncle; Bentham inherited from both. As a gentleman of independent means he could now spend all his time botanising. In 1836 he published his first work of systematic botany, Labiatarum genera et species, for which he had visited every European herbarium at least once. He then travelled to Vienna to study legumes, and produced De leguminosarum generibus commentationes, which was published in the annals of the Vienna Museum. He went on to collaborate with De Candolle on the Prodromus systematis naturalis regni vegetabilis, producing descriptions of 4,730 species.
In 1855 Bentham had all but decided to retire from botanical work when the elder Hooker and other members of the botanical establishment persuaded him to move to London and work on the preparation of the floras of the British colonies using the collections at Kew. In 1862 or so he began work on the Flora Australiensis; it was to take him fifteen years. Bentham is honoured in the naming of the Red Carabeen, Geissois benthamii and a native gardenia, Atractocarpus benthamianus. (The genus Atractocarpus has been through an extraordinary succession of names: Sukunia, Trukia, Porterandia, Sulitia, Neofranciella, Franciella and Randia; as it has been Atractocarpus only since 1999, the name might not have jelled yet.)
Though they had established a formidable presence elsewhere, German naturalists were late arrivals in Australia. In 1842 the naturalist Ludwig Leichhardt arrived in Sydney from Germany and began collecting botanical specimens in north-eastern New South Wales. In November 1843 ‘in silvis ad amnem Myall Creek Australiae orientalis subtropicae’, Leichhardt collected, amongst much else, the first recorded specimen of White Beech. In October 1844 he led an expedition from Jimbour on the Darling Downs to Port Essington near Darwin, and got there fifteen months later. On this trip he collected thousands of specimens but, as his horses and oxen perished one by one, he had no way of transporting the material back to civilisation and had to dump it. In December 1846 he set out to travel from Dalby on the Darling Downs across to the west coast, but was driven back by heavy rain, malaria and shortage of food (Bailey, J., 267–323).
Ferdinand Mueller first heard of Leichhardt when he was a pharmacology student at the University of Rostock. When he arrived in Adelaide in 1847 to take up a position as a pharmacist for the German firm of Büttner and Heuzenroeder, his real intention was to make of himself the same kind of heroic naturalist explorer as Leichhardt, who was about to set out on a second attempt to cross the continent from east to west. This time, after leaving McPherson’s sheep station at Coogoon, Leichhardt and his party vanished. Mueller, who could hardly believe that his hero would never return, was by then botanising around Adelaide, moving ever further afield, until he penetrated as far as the Flinders Ranges and Lake Torrens. From every excursion he brought back masses of specimens to be sent to every learned society in Europe. He was not content to allow European experts to identify and describe the materials he brought back from these forays, but struggled to do it himself, without the necessary resources of a large herbarium and the full phytological record. Just how foolhardy this was had been illustrated by the humiliation of the natural scientist William Swainson, who tried to sort out the genus Eucalyptus, and ended up in a morass of ‘reckless species-making’ (Maiden). Mueller knew the risks he was running, but his arrogance and recklessness were even greater than Swainson’s; fortunately for him so was his expertise. Governor La Trobe of Victoria was so impressed with the indefatigable Mueller that in 1853 he appointed him government botanist. Mueller was then at leisure to organise his herbarium; within five years it contained 45,000 specimens representing 15,000 species; ultimately Mueller would claim to have amassed between 750,000 and a million specimens. He cultivated a close relationship with Kew in the hope that he would be allowed to write the official flora of Australia, but the job fell to George Bentham, which in my view was just as well.
My sister Jane, as a good alumna of the University of Melbourne Botany Department, is an admirer of Mueller.
‘You have to appreciate his incredible achievement in penetrating so far into the inland with no support whatsoever. This is the man who explored alpine Victoria on his own, and made his way back to Melbourne with nothing but a pocketful of Bogong Moths to eat.’
‘Ambition, girl. Blind ambition.’
‘Hooker and Bentham white-anted him. They wouldn’t support him.’
‘That really isn’t fair. Bentham acknowledged Mueller as a co-author of the Flora Australiensis which, considering what a nuisance the man was, was incredibly gracious. Mueller drove them both crazy. He drives me crazy.’
‘Mueller wanted Australians to name Australian plant species, and he wanted the types to be held in Australian herbaria. He was resisting imperial control. Bentham was on the other side of the world and had never even visited Australia.’
‘Yes, but he had access to the huge collections of Kew, Paris, and elsewhere in Europe, as Mueller did not. You and I both know that Gondwanan genera are distributed all round the southern hemisphere. Mueller was like a blind man with only one foot of the elephant.’
Jane’s jaw was set. I shut up.
In his private correspondence Joseph Hooker described Mueller as ‘devoured of vanity and jealousy of Colonial notoriety’. For years Mueller had bombarded Kew with specimens, together with his own descriptions, many of which were wrong. At length, on 10 October 1857, Hooker wrote to him from Kew:
The verifying of your new genera is a work of much greater labor than you suppose; & you must not be surprized to hear that some of them are common & well-known Indian genera & even species. Thus [it is] not I assure you from want of will on my Father’s & my parts, that we do not publish more of your MSS; but from want of time &[,] on my own part at any rate who am engaged on the Tasmanian Flora & the Indian[,] much averseness to committing both yourself & myself by publishing old plants as new. (Home et al., 1, 329)
Mueller didn’t heed the advice. In December 1858 Hooker wrote again:
I have studiously abstained from publishing any of your Victorian plants, though I have a great majority of them from Cunningham, Robertson & others, because I knew you were at work on that Flora & like to have the credit of naming your plants. You again go on naming & describing Tasmanian plants though you know I am engaged on that Flora! . . . pray describe the Chatham & Tasmanian & Indian plants too if you wish – you must not expect however that when I have occasion to work at unpublished plants to which you have given mss names I am to take your names wherever the species are good only!
(In other words, Hooker worked on all Mueller’s descriptions, including those he did not credit because they were wrong.)
Hitherto I have done so & have not quoted your MSS names when I have considered them as synonymous, both because I thought that it would be unfair to point out your mistakes when there was no occasion to do so, & it would only encumber Botany with MSS synonyms to no purpose. (Home et al., 1, 434)
Despite Hooker’s common sense, Australian botany is heavily encumbered with synonyms, and not a few of them are attributed to ‘F. v. M.’ or ‘F. Muell.’.
It was only at the end of his life that George Bentham permitted himself to write as sharply to Mueller as the occasion warranted. Cockily, Mueller had sent Bentham in April 1883 a copy of his rival publication, Systematic Census of Australian Plants. Bentham replied heavily:
I have to thank you for your Systematic Census of Australian Plants received yesterday. The work is beautifully printed and shows a great deal of laborious philological research into the dates of plant names (rather than of genera) which will be appreciated by those who occupy themselves in that subject . . . but all that is not botany. With regard to that science, it grieves me to think that you should have devoted so much of your valuable time to a work which, botanically speaking, is not only absolutely useless but worse than useless.
. . . let me entreat you to give up the vain endeavour to attach the intials ‘F. v. M.’ to so many specific names, good or bad, as possible . . . (Home et al., 111, 311–12)
Mueller obtained rather more gratifying responses from the continental institutions to which he sent all kinds of Australiana. He sent Aboriginal cadavers to museums in France, Germany and Russia, live thylacines, already on the verge of extinction, to Stuttgart and Paris, and black swans anywhere and everywhere. He sent away thousands of tree ferns for the conservatories of Europe, including specimens of the King Fern, Todea barbara, weighing more than a ton apiece (Daley). In 1867 he was appointed Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George, and from Württemberg, in exchange for scientific materials plus £600 in cash for the establishment of a Ferdinand von Mueller Stiftung, he received the title of Freiherr or Baron. Such toadying was not likely to appease British chauvinism. The most bizarre of the tributes paid to Mueller must be the attempt by the maverick German botanist Otto Kuntze to rename the genus Banksia after him, Sirmuellera.
Even though he was doing so well out of exploiting the uniqueness of Australian species, Mueller had no interest in maintaining the integrity of Australian flora and fauna. As fast as he was sending Australian creatures to the other side of the world, he was importing exotics. In his report of 1858, among trees of practical value imported for the Botanic Garden, he mentions ‘the Camphor Tree’ Cinnamomum camphora, now the most serious tree weed in the rainforest. He imported quantities of European songbirds with the aim of naturalising them, including the now ubiquitous blackbird. Each year the Botanic Garden grew thousands of plants for public distribution, nearly all of them exotics. If you want to know why the sidewalks of most Australian country towns and the leafier suburbs are being torn apart by the proliferating roots of avenues of gigantic poplars, planes and beeches, why every cemetery is overhung with cypresses and pines, Mueller is your man. So enthusiastic was he in his dissemination of exotics that horticulturists accused him of ruining their trade.
‘Have you got Heritiera here?’ Jane was changing the subject.
‘I don’t think so. Why?’
‘I was reading this article about complex notophyll vine forest and it talked about Heritiera trifoliolata as a key species.’
The species name gave the game away. ‘Argyrodendron must’ve had a name change. Damn.’
The name Argyrodendron is thoroughly Greek and sweetly descriptive: ‘argyro’ – silver, ‘dendron’ – tree. The distinguishing characteristic of the Argyrodendron is that the underside of the leaf is clad in microscopic scales that are visible to the naked eye as a silver sheen. One of the Cave Creek Argyrodendrons is surnamed trifoliolatum, which is Latin for ‘three-leafleted’ and typical of the way Latin gets yoked onto the Greek. The other is surnamed actinophyllum, which is an adaptation of the Greek ‘aktis’, meaning ray, and ‘phyllon’, meaning leaf, because its leaflets radiate from the tip of the leafstalk. The revered Queensland dendrologist Bill McDonald had dubbed our subtropical rainforest type the ‘Argyrodendron Alliance’.
‘ “Heritiera Alliance” won’t sound the same,’ I moaned. ‘ “Heritiera” is no language at all, and carries no information about the thing it refers to. It makes more sense to call the damn’ things Booyongs; at least the Aboriginal name doesn’t change every five minutes.’ (Gresty records the name ‘booyong’ in his Numinbah word list (71); it is not recorded by Sharpe or any of the Yugambeh word-collectors.)
After L’Héritier de Brutelle was assassinated in 1800, his herbarium of 8,000 species was acquired by Bentham’s friend and colleague De Candolle, but it was not he who named the principally Asian genus in L’Héritier’s honour but William Aiton, director of the Royal Botanic Garden, in 1789 (Aiton, 3:546). In 1858 Mueller did not recognise his specimen as a member of an older genus but created the new name Argyrodendron for it; the type for the new name was a specimen of A. trifoliolatum collected by Walter Hill on the Brisbane and Pine Rivers (Fragmenta, 1 (1):2). In the first volume of his Flora Australiensis, published in 1863, Bentham preferred C. L. von Blume’s older (1825) name for the genus, and called it Tarrietia argyrodendron (1:230), but Mueller’s name clung on until 1959, when A. J. G. H. Kostermans included the Booyongs in the genus Heritiera. The Australian Plant Name Index still includes both names, so we shall have to treat them as synonyms after all, which is what usually happens in practice.
Amid all this botanical brouhaha the common name of the Booyongs remained the same. Mueller had no time for common names. In a lecture at the Melbourne Industrial and Technological Museum on 3 November 1870 he demanded how botanical knowledge could be:
fixed without exact phytological information, or how is the knowledge to be applied, if we are to trust to vernacular names, perplexing even within the area of a small colony, and useless as a rule, beyond it? Colonial Box trees by dozens, yet all distinct, and utterly unlike Turkey Box; colonial Myrtle without the slightest resemblance to the poet’s myrtle; colonial Oaks, analogous to those Indian trees, which as Casuarinae were distinguished so graphically by Rumpf already 200 years ago, but without any trace of similarity to real oak–– afford instances of our confused and ludricrous vernacular appellations.
He demanded a total change:
resting on the rational observations and deductions which science already has gained for us. Assuredly, with any claims to ordinary intelligence, we ought to banish such designations, not only from museum collections, but also from the dictionary of the artisan. How are these thousands of species of Ficus, all distinct in appearance, in character, and in uses–– how are they to be recognised, unless a diagnosis of each becomes carefully elaborated and recorded, headed by a specific name? (Mueller, 1872, 81)
How indeed? The genus Ficus was a bad example to have chosen, because its taxonomy is fluid to say the least. And Mueller was the wrong person to have mounted the attack on common names, given his own propensity for generating synonyms.
The Bible tells us that God created the world, and then Adam, and then bade Adam name his creation, before he created Eve. Feminists have argued persuasively that naming and classification are mechanisms of male control. Nowhere is this more evident than in the practice of botany. Once Linnaeus had published his binomial system the animal and vegetable kingdoms were up for grabs. European plants and animals were protected because the genera already had Latin names in the scientific literature. Australia lay helpless under the onslaught of scientists determined to inscribe their own names and the names of their forerunners, patrons, collaborators and friends across its length and breadth. The naturalists who came haring to Australia from all over the world knew that by collecting samples of flora and fauna, and either contriving their preservation by drying them or bottling them in spirits, or keeping them alive for dispatch to European museums, herbariums, zoological and botanical gardens, and to private collectors, they would secure for themselves both reputation and reward. Even more seductive than a title for oneself was the opportunity to name animals and plants after oneself, or the people with whom one was currying favour. No other continent has as bizarre a collection of botanical names as Australia, and no Australian vegetation is worse served when it comes to nomenclature than the rainforest.
Nobody was less likely to give up the pernicious habit of calling plants after colleagues and friends than the egregious Mueller. Mueller surnamed one of our Sloaneas ‘woollsii’ after William Woolls (1814–93), an Anglican minister and schoolmaster who collected for him. No one would jib at calling a genus Flindersia after Matthew Flinders, especially when the first example of the genus was collected by Robert Brown on his expedition, but our dominant species was named by Mueller F. schottiana for Heinrich Schott of the Austrian Botanic Gardens. An important tree for us is the unspellable Guioa, named for J. Guio, a botanical illustrator of the eighteenth century. Mueller got himself into a fearful tangle with this, identifying our Guioa, which is G. semiglauca, so-called because the underside of the leaf is bluish-white, as an Arytera and then as a Nephelium; even Bentham got it wrong, and decided it was a Cupania, and it was not until 1879 that L. A. T. Radlkofer correctly understood our tree to be a member of the genus Guioa. Our Foambarks are named Jagera, for Dr Herbert de Jager, who collected for the Dutch botanist Rumphius in Indonesia in the mid-nineteenth century.
For years we have been referring to one of our best performers as Caldcluvia paniculata. The genus is named for Scottish botanist Alexander Caldcleugh who collected the first specimens in South America in the early nineteenth century. Interestingly, Cunningham, who had botanised in New Zealand, correctly recognised the Australian tree as a member of the genus Ackama, of which the type was first collected in New Zealand, hence the version of the Maori name ‘makamaka’, but he was overruled by Mueller, who first misidentified it as a member of the genus Weinmannia (named for eighteenth-century German pharmacist J. W. Weinmann), to which inadvertently he gave two species names paniculosa and paniculata, before deciding that it was a Caldcluvia after all. Bentham accepted Cunningham and called the species, with admirable forbearance, ‘Ackama muelleri’, but Mueller’s name prevailed. Justice has finally been done, and we must get used to calling our trees Ackama paniculata.
A similar tree, the Rose Marara, like Ackama in the Cunoniaceae, has the appalling systematic name of Pseudoweinmannia lachnocarpa. The specific name is useful, for it means ‘woolly fruit’, but the generic name identifies it as a pretend Weinmannia, as if it deliberately misled people (Engler, 249). As the genus Pseudoweinmannia consists of this species only, it seems likely that it will one day be revised. Our Bosistoas have no accepted common name, so whenever we refer to them we have no choice but to do homage to the Melbourne chemist J. Bosisto, who collaborated with Mueller in the preparation of eucalyptus oil. Another of our genera carries the hideous name Baloghia, after Dr Joseph Balogh, author of a book on Transylvanian plants; this is the more galling because the Baloghia blossom has perhaps the loveliest scent of any in the forest. It’s bad enough to have to call a beautiful big tree a Grey Walnut, when it is neither grey nor a walnut, but when its scientific name is Beilschmiedia, in honour of C. T. Beilschmied, a botanist and chemist from Ohlau, it is ill-served indeed. As annoying is the name Mueller gave to the Queensland Nut, which eternises John Macadam, Secretary of the Philosophical Institute of Victoria; not content with this, Mueller named another genus Wilkiea for the vice-president of the society, Dr D. E. Wilkie. Worst of all is the ridiculously clumsy name Mueller gave the adorable Bopple Nut, which he named after the Secretary of State for New South Wales, Hicksbeachia. Such mad coinages can have no uniform pronunciation; what has grown up instead is a culture of sanctioned mispronunciation. Botanists demonstrate their membership of the inner circle by using agreed or ‘correct’ mispronunciations. ‘Sloanea’ was named by Linnaeus for Sir Hans Sloane, founder of the British Museum; people who know who he was tend to call the trees ‘Slow-nia’; people who don’t render it ‘Slow-aynia’. I pronounce the genus ‘Olearia’ ‘Oll-ee-arr-ee-ah’, my sister ‘O’Leary-ah’. Actually, the genus is not called after O’Leary but after the olive tree or Olea. People like me who have not mastered the sanctioned mispronunciations can be instantly identified as outsiders and their expertise ignored, which is fine with me.
If you look up White Beech in a botanical textbook, you will find it listed as ‘Gmelina leichhardtii (F. Muell.)’. What that means is that the plant or ‘taxon’ was first described and recognised as a separate species by Mueller, who published his description in 1862 (Fragmenta, 3:19, 58). What it doesn’t tell you is whether he got it right. He didn’t. He mistook the genus and identified the specimen, which had been collected by Leichhardt at Myall Creek in New South Wales on 20 November, 1843, as a Vitex. He sent Leichhardt’s specimen with another collected by Hermann Beckler on the Clarence River in 1859 plus his own description to Bentham. In 1870 in Volume 5 of his Flora Bentham published Mueller’s Vitex as Gmelina leichhardtii (66).
Altogether Bentham identified three Australian species of Gmelina, a genus which ‘extends over tropical Asia and the Indian Archipelago. The Australian species, though with the aspect of some Asiatic ones, appear to be all endemic.’ Bentham described the fruit of G. macrophylla as ‘closely resembling that of G. arborea’, a valuable timber tree native to wet forests from Sri Lanka through India and Burma to Southern China, and well known to European botanists. He also noted that Robert Brown had misidentified G. macrophylla as a Vitex in the Prodromus. Mueller had not only made the same mistake, he had also changed the descriptive species name, which means ‘large-leaved’, for ‘Dalrympleana’, honouring the explorer George Augustus Frederick Elphinstone Dalrymple. The next Gmelina Bentham described was G. fasciculiflora; in this case Mueller had not understood that he was looking at a distinct species and described it as a variety of his Vitex leichhardtii.
‘Why wouldn’t Mueller have known a Gmelina when he saw one?’
Jane stopped drying her hair and looked at me sternly.
‘For the same reason that Robert Brown didn’t know what he was looking at was a Gmelina. And anyway, his name is von Mueller.’
‘Von Mueller is a ridiculous name. His family name is the German for Miller, tout court, a good artisan class name, not to be cluttered up with particles of imaginary nobility.’
‘He was awarded that barony. It’s not up to you to strip him of it.’
‘I thought you said he was resisting imperial hegemony. Accepting foreign honours was against British law. He didn’t just have the barony – he had twenty knighthoods as well. I think he wore his medals in bed.’
Mueller was my bête and I was determined to paint him noire. I banged on.
‘The man was a menace. Surely he should have known better than to introduce and aggressively propagate tamarisks?’
Jane’s eyes widened. ‘Did he?’
‘He actually boasted about it.’ (In a lecture Mueller claimed that his nursery had propagated ‘from a solitary Tamarix plant, 20,000 bushes, now scattered through our colonial shrubberies . . .’)
Jane protested. ‘He thought his introductions would be useful. He hadn’t any experience of how introduced plants could behave in a place like Australia.’
‘That simply isn’t true. He knew what invasive weeds were, and how rapidly they spread.’ Mueller protested that he was not responsible for the introduction of Capeweed, ‘as it had already impressively invaded some parts of Australia as early as 1833’. (Mueller, 1872, 179; Ewart, 38) Clearly he knew how problematic plant introductions could be, but the knowledge did nothing to abate his enthusiasm for acclimatisation. Though willows, first brought to the colony in 1800 (Bladen, iv, 277), were already choking whole river systems, he thought nothing of importing more, apparently for basketmaking.
It should be ascertained how many of the 160 true species of Willows and of their numerous hybrids are available for wickerwork; and we should learn, whether any of the American, the Himalayan or the Japanese Osiers are in some respect superior to those in general use.
No one had put more energy into mapping the biodiversity of Australia, yet Mueller had no qualms about eliminating it.
Test experiments initiated from a botanic garden might teach us whether the Silk Mulberry Tree can be successfully reared in the Murray desert, to supplant the Mallee-scrub . . .
Supplant the Mallee-scrub! Such reckless arrogance is breath-taking. I don’t know what the Red Kangaroos would have to say about supplanting the Mallee-scrub, or the Paucident Planigales – if there are any left. Or the poor old Mallee Fowl.
It must not be thought that after Mueller’s orgy the fashion for naming plants after botanists slowed down. If anything it has got worse. When Wayne Goss, premier of Queensland from 1989 to 1996, gave substantial funds to the Queensland Herbarium, a part of the genus Austromyrtus was renamed Gossia in his honour; the other part was given the grotesque name Lenwebbia, in memory of pioneering rainforest ecologist Len Webb, who died in 2008.
‘They’re a blokey lot these botanists, don’t you think?’
Jane looked up from her book.
‘Not any more. Some of the most influential botanists in Australia are women – Gwen Harden, Pauline Ladiges . . .’
‘I’m thinking more then. Linnaeus preferred to send unmarried men on plant-hunting expeditions because they so often lost their lives, and he didn’t want any more widows hassling him. Solander never married. Dryander never married. Banks was supposed to have been extra keen to accompany the Endeavour expedition because he needed to get away from a woman he was expected to marry. When he got back to England he had to pay compensation for messing her about. He married later in life but the marriage was childless. Brown never married. Neither of the Cunninghams married. Frazer didn’t marry. Caley brought his black tracker Moowat’tin back to England with him only to have Banks send him straight back again.’ (Currey, xi, 140, 173–4, 191, 194)
‘Perennial bachelors,’ said Jane. ‘So?’
‘You have to wonder whether plant-hunting was a way for gay men to escape from societal pressure. I can’t help thinking of my darling Leichhardt.’
‘You think Nicholson and Leichhardt were lovers.’
‘I don’t know whether they had sex together, but it’s clear that they were as close as people can be, with or without sex. But when Nicholson decided not to go to Australia Leichhardt didn’t act like a man who was broken-hearted, so you do wonder if he was just a leech and a chancer. The thing that strikes you about Leichhardt is his optimism, his trustingness. He is incredibly lovable.’
‘Not to the men who accompanied him on his expeditions, he wasn’t. Men lost their lives because of his poor management.’
There was no denying this, so I changed the subject.
‘Mueller’s an even more interesting case. He was engaged to be married twice, in 1863 to Euphemia Henderson who painted flowers for him, and in 1865 to Rebecca Nordt, but he couldn’t bring himself to marry either of them. He waits till he’s nearly forty, and then funks it, tries again and funks it again. He kept Rebecca waiting around so long he ruined her chances of finding a man, and that at a time when women were in distinctly short supply. He ended up like Banks, having to pay her compensation. His reason for not marrying her was that she was no longer of child-bearing age! Whose fault was that? The man was a wretch.’
Part of the blokiness of botany stems from its needing to be done in Latin; girls’ schools were more likely to teach modern languages than Latin. Many women botanised, and bred and grafted horticultural varieties, but the intellectual conquest and ordering of the vegetable world cannot have held the same appeal for them as it did for men. The number of women who authored plant names is pathetically small; not only did very few women do it, they only did it once or twice, whereas men like Hooker, Bentham and Mueller authored literally hundreds of names.
When Jane asked me if any of the plant species at Cave Creek was named by a woman, all I could say was that I didn’t think so. ‘We’ve got one named for a woman but none named by a woman, as far as I know.’
The one named for a woman is Syzygium hodgkinsoniae. The Hodgkinson in question is supposed to be Miss M. Hodgkinson, a collector of plants in the Richmond River area.
‘What does the M. stand for?’ Jane asked.
‘No idea. She isn’t even on the Australian National Botanic Garden Biography database. No dates. No nothing. One of the most beautiful trees at Cave Creek to remember her by and we’ve got no idea who she was.’
Syzygium is a myrtaceous genus, with shimmering paired leaves of forest green, and flowers in terminal cymes. Though S. hodgkinsoniae is supposed to need rich alluvial soil it seems happy enough at Natural Bridge on the montane basalt. It’s rare and listed as threatened, but at CCRRS there are hundreds of them. The ghost of Miss Hodgkinson is always with us, especially when the tree is in flower and the glades are full of its seductive scent. The man who named the plant for Miss H. was none other than Ferdinand Mueller. Needless to say he got the genus wrong: he thought it was a Eugenia, as did everyone else until Lawrie Johnson sorted out the Syzygiums by phylogenetic analysis in 1962. Till then the Syzygiums were called Acicalyptus, Acmena, Acmenosperma, Anetholea, Caryophyllus, Cleistocalyx, Jambosa, Lomastelma, Pillocalyx, Waterhousea, Xenodendron – and Eugenia. Not everyone has accepted Johnson’s revision, which has resulted in an enormous and rather too various genus. So the old synonyms are usually listed along with the Johnsonian name. Mueller published his Eugenia hodgkinsoniae in the Victorian Naturalist No. 8, in July 1891, but it seems that F. M. Bailey had already published the plant in the Botany Bulletin of the Queensland Department of Agriculture, as Eugenia fitzgeraldii, citing two isotypes, one collected on the summit of the Blackall Range in March 1891, the other at the Richmond River by R. D. Fitzgerald, and in the possession of ‘F. v. M.’ (APNI). Miss Hodgkinson could have lost her tiny claim to fame there and then but, incomprehensibly, she didn’t.
Mueller named another species after a Hodgkinson. Hodgkinsonia ovatiflora is named for his boss, Clement Hodgkinson, Deputy Surveyor General and later Assistant Commissioner and Secretary of the Board of Crown Lands and Survey. Although it may look very likely that the Hodgkinson who received the honour of having a Syzygium species named after her is one of Clement’s connections, it seems rather that it is not a Miss Hodgkinson whom we seek, but Mary, wife of James Hodgkinson, the first settler at Lennox Head, near the mouth of the Richmond River. Mary lived at North Creek from 1866 until her death in 1889 at the age of sixty-five. Contrariwise it may have been one of her five daughters, none of whom however has the initial M. The holotype of a lichenised fungus Pseudocyphellaria glaucescens (Lobariaceae) was collected by a ‘Miss Hodgkinson’ on the Richmond River in 1880 (Flora of Australia, 58:1, 62).
Louisa Atkinson collected for both William Woolls and Ferdinand Mueller. Mueller named a genus of mistletoe Atkinsonia after her, as well as two Asteraceous species and a species of fern. In 1869 at the age of thirty-five she married James Snowden Calvert, a survivor of Leichhardt’s expedition of 1844–5. Mueller then named two species for her, Epacris calvertiana and Helichrysum calvertiana. Sadly, she died not long after the birth of her first child in 1872.
With Mary Strong Clemens (ADB) we find ourselves once again in the company of an amateur botanist. She was married to a chaplain in the US army; from 1905 to 1907, when her husband was serving in the Philippines, Mary made field trips to Luzon and Mindanao, collecting plants, apparently for Elmer Drew Merrill, USDA botanist in the Philippines. After her husband’s retirement from the ministry he assisted her. Between the wars the couple made collecting trips to China, Indo-China, North Borneo, Sarawak, Java and Singapore. In August 1935 they transferred their operations to New Guinea. When Mary’s husband died, five months after their arrival, she stayed on collecting in the New Guinea highlands until the Japanese invasion, when she was compulsorily repatriated to Queensland.
When Mrs Clemens arrived in Australia in December 1941 she was sixty-nine. She recommenced work at once, in a shed behind the Queensland Herbarium. At first she slept in the shed, but she was eventually persuaded to accept accommodation in a hostel. All day and as much of the night as she could, she spent pressing and labelling the plants she collected on her walk to work or on excursions by train, tram or bus. Her labels were based on identifications made by her colleagues at the Herbarium. These were not always correct but, with no formal training, she was in no position to question them. Some new species have been identified from specimens she collected, while information gained on her wanderings has increased the range of many known plants. The botanists she helped have generously remembered her in the naming of their species: the specific epithet ‘clemensiae’ is to be found on more than seventy species. However botany wouldn’t be botany if her biographer, R. F. N. Langdon of the Department of Botany at the University of Queensland, hadn’t decided to reduce her to size. His verdict is that ‘Mrs. Clemens probably lacked the capacity to determine plants. As years passed botanists became very wary of Mrs. Clemens and her plants.’ (380)