This Week's Mystery Plant

Botanists have plenty of heroes. One of our best known, of course, is Charles Linnaeus, the "Father of Plant Taxonomy," who lived and worked in Sweden. His most memorable publication is probably a masterpiece called "Species Plantarum," which was published in 1753, and which attempted to list every known plant species in the world, along with a brief description. Many plant species received their scientific names in this publication, and this week's Mystery Plant is one of them. Linnaeus received a dried, pressed specimen of this plant, sent to him from Virginia, and it is upon this specimen (now at the Linnaean Herbarium, in London) that the plant's name is based.

It is a coastal plain species, but is never very common anywhere. It occurs from eastern Virginia south to the Florida panhandle, and then west to Texas (just barely). It is most likely to be found in deep, swampy forests, usually situated on slightly higher ground therein, such as bluffs or ravines. Here in South Carolina, the plants are perhaps associated with limestone soils in such habitats. It often forms a tall, spreading shrub, the young twigs and lower leaf surfaces quite silky. There is a very similar species in our Southern mountains, and eight or nine additional close relatives in Japan, Korea, and China.

When it is flowering, these plants will knock your socks off. Nearly all of the flowers on a single plant will open about the same time, producing quite a show. Each flower, about 3" across, somewhat resembles a cultivated Camellia (to which it is related), with five large, ivory-white petals and twenty or more red-purple stamens. Following the blooms, silky capsules are produced containing a number of hard, shiny seeds.

For all of its extravagance while blooming, the plants are almost invisible before and after the flowers. The shiny green leaves are not particularly noteworthy, so the plants generally blend in with neighboring shrubs and trees. This particular species is something of a challenge to grow in the garden; its Asian counterparts, though, are accessible to gardeners, and make fine ornamental shrubs.

Now back to Linnaeus and this plant's name. Linnaeus named its genus after John Stuart, a Scot, the third Earl of Bute, who served for a time as Britain's' Prime Minister, and who was an enterprising amateur botanist, even helping design the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. Problem was, Linnaeus got Stewart's name very wrong, and the genus name we now use is, in effect, a big botanical typo. (But it's still the name we use.) (Photo by Colette Degarady.)

Photo by Colette Degarady