An Antillean plant of beauty, a French botanist, and a German name: naming plants in the Early Modern Atlantic world/Antillide taimeiludus, prantsuse botaanik ja saksa nimi: taimenimede andmine varauusaegses Atlandi regioonis

Abstract

INTRODUCTION According to a story entitled 'The Tree of Riches', the French botanist Charles Plumier decided that he would like to travel the world and get rich (Pellowski, 1990). In order for this to happen, a fortune teller told him, he had to find a tree with blossoms of the colour of the new moon that grows near churches and graveyards. Hence Plumier travelled to the West Indies where he was told by an old wise woman that such a tree indeed existed and that shaking its branches would bring him riches beyond imagining. As Plumier did so, the story goes, his soul was overpowered by the lovely smell and sight of the cascade of flowers, glistening like golden coins, and he realized that the real wealth in this life was beauty, not riches. Instead of searching for material riches he then went on to look for wealth in nature and discovered many plants. The genus of the tree he found came to be named Plumeria. This old tale is probably based on the facts that the French priest and botanist Charles Plumier (1646-1704) really did botanize in the West Indies and that the tree commonly known as frangipani was named after him. His personal motives, however, probably had more to do with scientific interest and duty than economic gain, although exotic plants often were of great economic value in early modern times (Schiebinger, 2004). Plumier was a monk, a member of the order of the Minims, characterized by great penance and abnegation, including abstinence from all meat. The order is called the Minims because its members regard themselves as the least (minimi) of all the religious and devote themselves to prayer, study, and scholarship (Whitmore, 1967). The genus name Plumeria was given by fellow botanists Joseph Pitton de Tournefort and Carl von Linne, who wanted to honour a colleague they highly respected. Plumier in his turn named several plants after well-known botanists. An example of this is a plant he found in St. Domingue, called Molla Ecantu (plant of beauty) by the indigenous people, which he named Fuchsia triphylla after the German botanist Leonard Fuchs (Plumier, 1703-1704). Knowledge of a plant is usually understood to include, besides knowledge of its physical characteristics, the ability to name it. The vernacular name sometimes refers to the form or the colour of the plant, sometimes to its habitat, and in some cases to the ways the plant has been used. In all these cases the name provides at least some information about the plant. These descriptive references continued when botanists began giving plants Latin names, although then only those who knew Latin understood the significance of the names. The European expansion and the transatlantic contacts created a situation where natural historians of several nationalities botanized in the colonies, each giving the plants they 'discovered' a different name. In addition, a practice of naming plants after prominent men, often botanists, developed in early modern Europe. The custom of naming plants after people was in fact already practised in ancient Greece, but Charles Plumier has been credited with reviving the classical Greek habit of naming plants after people. He was also the first European botanist to give names of European botanists to plants growing on another continent. Linne later adopted this practice. The object of this article is to discuss Charles Plumier's description, classification, and naming of plants, mainly based on his first work Description des Plantes de l'Amerique (1693). Through examining his naming of plants, I argue, it is possible to highlight the colonial and Atlantic context of Plumier's work, his network as part of the scientific elite of his country, and his professionalism resulting from years of botanical studies. Plumier's naming practice illustrates how ways of knowing plants and nature changed in the latter part of the 17th century. His naming of plants according to his own brand of polynomial nomenclature, often giving plants names after well-known botanists, can be seen as a stage in the development towards a binomial nomenclature. …