100 Flowers and How They Got Their Names (6 page)

A fellow voyager saw Commerson spitting blood as he worked at night, and he was seasick much of the time, complaining that his meals were “loans.” But at every stop he botanized, accompanied by his young assistant, Jean Baret, with whom he collected over three thousand new plants. On Tahiti, Baret attracted and was seized by a local chieftain who may have had a particularly discerning eye. For in the struggle that ensued, Baret was revealed to be not a young man but a young woman (see “Hydrangea”). Some accounts say that she had deceived Commerson, others that she had persuaded him to take her along in disguise because she so longed to go around the world. In some accounts her name and the name of Commerson's housekeeper in France seem to be the same.

In the struggle that ensued, Baret was revealed to be not a young man but a young woman.

Bougainvillea has a generosity of bloom that comes from southern seas. Where the climate suits it, it spreads curtains of pink, purple, and white wherever it can reach, forming welcoming banners however bare the wall it climbs, however hot and brown the earth. The color comes from its bracts, which are leaf-like organs that look like flower petals; the flower itself is yellow and quite insignificant. The colored curtains endure so long they seem like permanent backdrops to whatever scene they decorate, from Tahitian love feasts to modern terraces. They look wonderful with a girl and a cat or two sitting in front of them.

COMMON NAMES
: Butterfly bush, summer lilac.
BOTANICAL NAME
:
Buddleia
.
FAMILY
:
Loganiaceae
.

The name “buddleia” is after the Rev. Adam Buddle, a rector in Essex, England. There was a long tradition in England associating botanists and gardens with the clergy. Gilbert White, Canon H. N. Ellacombe, Charles Kingsley, and William Wilks are only a few of the better known horticultural clerics. Clergymen were often isolated in small villages, leading quiet, leisurely lives, and could satisfy their intellectual curiosity, as well as use their classical educations, with botanical research. They believed that to study plants would bring them closer to understanding God's universe, and the innocence of Eden. As Charles Kingsley, who wrote
The Water Babies
, affirmed, “All natural objects . . . all forms, colours and scents . . . are types of some spiritual truth or existence.”

In 1708, Buddle wrote an
Herbarium
of British plants, supporting the botanical systems of John Ray and Joseph de Tournefort. He was an authority on mosses, but that did not deter Linnaeus from giving
his name to a shrub,
Buddleia globosa
, which was introduced from Peru in 1774. It isn't tough enough to survive New England winters, but its globular golden flowers are very attractive and it is still found in older English gardens. The hardy buddleias, introduced later from Asia, are widely grown in Britain and North America.

The most popular buddleia,
Buddleia davidii
, was called after Père Armand David, a Jesuit missionary who explored in China (see “Astilbe”), though it was actually discovered by Père Jean André Soulié. It was sent to Kew in 1887 by Dr. Augustine Henry, an Irish customs officer in Shanghai and the assistant medical officer at Ichang. He was, in advance of his time, worried about air purity and deforestation, and described the Chinese hillsides, denuded of trees, “for all the world like a nightmare dream of telegraph poles gone mad and having a mass meeting.” When he returned home he became professor of forestry at Dublin until his death in 1930.

They attract butterflies, sometimes so successfully that the bush looks as if it were flowering with butterflies.

The buddleias with their lilac-like flowers are particularly popular these days because they attract butterflies, sometimes so successfully that the bush looks as if it were flowering with butterflies, attached by their heads, crazily drinking the sweet nectar, their petally wings fluttering from the branches. It's a wonderful sight and surely we must, like Adam Buddle, be reminded by it of the infinite mystery of the universe.

BOTANICAL NAME
:
Eschscholzia
.
FAMILY
:
Papaveraceae
.

When Spanish explorers saw the hills of California blazing with flowers they called the country the land of the “Golden West,” not because of the wealth that was later sought there, but because of the golden poppies. As we all know, the other western gold, and another member of the poppy family (see “Poppy”), have caused untold human misery. But the California poppy was called by the Spaniards “
copa de ora
,” or cup of gold, and the evils of gold or of poppies had no connection with it.

The California poppy was taken back to Russia by Adelbert Chamisso, the botanist on a voyage led by Otto von Kotzebue (who circumnavigated the globe three times). Chamisso named the poppy after a Prussian doctor on the ship whose name was Dr. Elsholz, which was Russianized to Eschscholz or Eschscholtz. Western botanists called his namesake
Eschscholzia
, or sometimes
Eschscholtzia
.

This expedition around the world, aboard the Russian ship
Rurik
, was organized in 1815, after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Chamisso was a French revolutionary refugee who had grown up in
Berlin. In 1814, just before the voyage, he published an allegory about a man who sold his shadow to the Devil in exchange for a limitless purse, and thereafter wandered endlessly searching for peace of mind. Chamisso himself was a wanderer by nature who joined the three-year expedition with all its hardships and kept a detailed journal of the trip that vividly conveyed its frustrations and joys, which included Sunday concerts at which the ship's Bengali cook played the violin.

They reached the Bering Strait, searching for the elusive Northwest Passage and anchoring at what are now the ports of Chamiss and Kotzebue. They went on to explore the Pacific islands, one of which the captain named Eschscholtz Atoll. This name was retained until 1946, when the island became well known as Bikini and acquired associations with the sadder side of human history.

The California poppy was called by the Spaniards
“copa de ora,”
or cup of gold.

The California poppies are hardy but look fragile, as fragile as the good dreams of those who wandered the earth in search of knowledge. It is the kind of poppy that does no harm and the kind of gold that evokes no greed. To plant them in our gardens is to add beauty to the world without the slightest effort. One simply sprinkles the seeds on the ground, and the reward is a carpet of gold.

BOTANICAL NAME
:
Camellia
.
FAMILY
:
Theaceae
.

The camellia is not, as it is often supposed, called after the Lady of the Camellias, a famous nineteenth-century French courtesan. She was a country girl who came to Paris to make her fortune, aided by her beauty. Her name was Madeleine du Plessis, and her beauty and her early death inspired a novel, a play, and an opera about love, social codes, and purity of heart. She inspired great art, but she was a courtesan, and in her story there is a vein of earthiness combined with the idealism of human love. She always carried a bouquet of camellias that were on twenty-five days of the month, white, and on the other five days, red. Was that because, on five days out of the month, a woman might be what the Victorians called “indisposed”?

Madeleine du Plessis was the model for Alexandre Dumas's heroine Marguerite Gauthier. The camellia was enhanced by human art too, and is the result of centuries of cultivation in China, where this
relative of the tea plant was a garden treasure long before it was ever brought to the West.

Georg Josef Kamel, for whom the flower was actually named, has not really had the benefit of the honor. His association with the flower is hardly remembered, and he probably never saw a camellia anyway. Linnaeus named the flower for him, changing the
K
in his name to a
C
to fit the Latin alphabet (which has no
K
). Kamel was a Moravian Jesuit missionary who studied the plants and animals of the Philippines. Linnaeus first called the camellia
Thea sinensis
, or “Chinese tea,” but in the second volume of his
Species Plantarum
he changed it to
Camellia japonica
. If the two volumes had not been considered the same work by botanists,
Thea
would have been its correct name and Kamel would not have been remembered at all.