What's in a Name?
Angie Michaelis
Sydney Wildflower Nursery West
William Dampier, the best known buccaneer in Australia's history, twice circumnavigated the world, was shipwrecked in the Indian Ocean and described Australia's aborigines as "the miserablest people in the world". He also collected botanical specimens on his travels, and one of our memorials to him is a group of small Australian plants with brilliant blue flowers known as Dampiera.
A number of Australian plant names reflect our history. The Europeans who explored Australia have often earned themselves a name in botany, though not necessarily a well known one. Have you ever seen a Sturtia or a Leichhardtia in a home garden? Tasmannia perhaps, or Flindersia - the Crow's Ash, Flindersia australis, is a rainforest tree named for Matthew Flinders. Flinders himself had a naming role in the history of our continent - he was one of those who advocated "Australia" for the island he had been the first to sail around.
Plant one of the native irises, the Patersonias, and you will be commemorating the founder of Launceston, Lt-Col William Patterson. A commander of the NSW Corps, he returned from Van Diemen's Land to take over command of New South Wales after the Rum Rebellion. as an administrator, he was an excellent botanist, and dedicated a book to Sir Joseph Banks.
You might think that botanists who identified new genera, or groups of plants, would rush to put their names to them. But they seem to be a modest lot, and instead wait to be remembered by other botanists. So the Grevillea was not named by Charles Francis Greville, a founder of the London Horticultural Society, vice-president of the Royal Society and cultivator of rare plants, but in his honour, and in the year of his death, 1809.
To use a contemporary example, the botanist Alex George has studied many Western Australian species and named some of the Banksias; in 1976 he had his turn when a Californian whom he had assisted named a new genus Alexgeorgia.
The botanists do keep many of the best plants to name after their own kind. The father of Australian botany, Sir Joseph Banks, is not only honoured by the magnificent Banksia, but its relative, the Dryandra was once named Josephia after him. The banksia rose (not a native) is named after his wife Dorothea.
Bank's French counterpart was probably Jean-Baptiste Louis-Claude-Theodore Leschenault de la Tour, who spent three years as a botanist to a scientific expedition which began in 1800. Such a grand name should belong to a grand plant, but in fact it is a group of sun-loving rockery plants that bears his name. A mixup in botanical nomenclature has Lechenaultia spelt without an "s", but no doubt he would still be glad to be remembered by the gorgeous blue-flowered Lechenaultia biloba, or by Lechenaultia formosa, with its red, orange, pink and bi-coloured forms.
Sometimes botanists do more than just study plants. Allan Cunningham explored the country north of Sydney right up to the Darling Downs and Moreton Bay. He was the last in a line of botanists to collect for Banks. Early in his career he found a little woody herb in the Blue Mountains, which 20 years later was named Alania in his honour. Again, someone got the spelling wrong! Cunningham went on to become Superintendent of Sydney's Royal Botanic Gardens. A dispute with the NSW administration, which wanted to grow cabbages in the Gardens, led to his resignation, but today, in spite of this, he is buried there.
The most decorated citizen Australia has ever known is the botanist and explorer Ferdinand von Mueller, who was given every title from German Baron to English knight and Fellow of the Royal Society. Von Mueller's achievements range from the naming of 2000 species to the export of eucalypt seed which led to the worldwide planting of our gum trees. Yet he also suffered major disappointments in his career, including being removed from the directorship of Melbourne's Botanical Gardens, and not being able to write the definitive book on Australian plants.
This mixture of success and failure is reflected in the choice of his botanical namesakes. There are 3 genera named after him... Austromuellera, Muellerina and Sirmuellera ...but none is exactly a household word. However, a search of species names will turn up many ending in muelleri or muellerana, including Boronia muelleri, best known in gardens as the cultivar "Sunset Serenade".
Politicians have a way of getting their names on memorials, and the Duke of Buckingham, Secretary for the Colonies in the 1860's, is remembered in Buckinghamia, the Ivory Curl Flower. This Queensland species is a handsome small tree with beautiful creamy-coloured flowers. An earlier Duke of Buckingham has at least as impressive monument in the residence he sold to Britain's Royal family, Buckingham Palace.
Another aristocratic British family commemorated by an Australian wildflower is the Churchills of Blenheim Palace. George Spencer-Churchill, a distant relative of the late Princess of Wales, was once Marquis of Blandford, and the Christmas Bells, the various Blandfordia species, are a tribute to his interest in botany, borne out in the beautiful gardens of Blenheim.
The city of Darwin is named for the naturalist Charles Darwin, whose voyage in the Beagle brought him to Australia in 1836. But Charles' grandfather Erasmus, a physician, poet, botanist and early exponent of evolution, is remembered in the Darwinia, a genus of Australian plants found mostly in Western Australia. Some, like Darwinia meboldii, are noted for their beautiful bell-shaped flowers; others like Darwinia homoranthoides for the natural sculpture of their foliage.
Many commemorative names never become part of the ordinary gardeners' language. You may prefer to talk of Cootamundra Wattle rather than Acacia baileyana even if I tell you that four generations of Baileys were government botanists in different parts of Australia. But as you grapple with the botanical names that are unavoidable for native plant enthusiasts, it may help to know that the Bauera is named after a family of botanical artists called Bauer, the Backhousia after a Quaker missionary called Backhouse, and the Macadamia after John Macadam, a Victorian chemist who became Post Master General.
And there are many more to discover!
From "Calgaroo", the newsletter of the Parramatta and Hills Group of the Australian Plants Society, October 1990.
Australian Plants online - 2007
Association of Societies for Growing Australian Plants
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