(In which I take my list of West Indian plants, well, seed plants to be exact, and pull up one at random, just to see what happens:
Crossopetalum orientale must be one of the more recent West Indian plants to be baptised into the annals of science (2001). Since it’s a shrub of up to 2 metres high and grows on beaches, it’s a little hard to imagine what took so long.
The secret must lie in degrees of difference. New plants that defy our sense of familiarity are still found sometimes, in various parts of the world, but not often. Orientale fits into a tight network of similar Crossopetalums. The trick is to show that it’s different enough to convince other botanists that it deserves a name of its own. Convincing the public might be too high a bar to set: the most overwhelming distinction between orientale and its closest relatives seems to be that it has considerably fewer free ends to the veins of its leaves per mm2. I can guess what that means. Just about.
Fortunately, it’s the botanists job, not mine, to decide which Crossopetalums count as species and which don’t. They seem to be struggling with it. Just about every species in the genus, besides orientale, has been reassigned at least once. Two of them have been split into varieties, which may or may not be more different from each other than orientale is from its nearest associates. Several ex-species have been folded into one. The man who first named the genus, one Patrick Browne (d.1790), has vanished from the list of West Indian species authors altogether.
Maybe this sort of thing goes with the turf of being very nearly an archipelago plant, living on a series of species-manufacturing machines, otherwise known as islands. Twelve of the fourteen Crossopetalums are endemic to the islands, the other two are found on the closer parts of the North American continent as well. There’s a tendency to assume that’s where they started, before spreading to the islands where they diversified. But how do we know it wasn’t the other way round? Or was it?
I expect botanists can tell, but they don’t announce the ancestry of a new species when they introduce it. They stick to personalities – what it looks like, where it’s from, and that all-important detail: the location of the mummified specimen that counts as holotype. Birgit Mory’s “Notes on Crossopetalum, Myginda and Gyminda (Celastraceae) from Cuba”, in Willdenowia , Aug. 31, 2001, Bd. 31, H. 1 (Aug. 31, 2001), pp. 129-135 is the most recent plant species publication I have ever read. The more I study this science, the more arcane it seems – an extraordinary combination of the bizarre, the boring, and the beautiful.
The publication of Crossopetalum orientale comes with a nice line illustration that I suppose very few people will ever look at. It has flowers that look sculptural unless you check the scale and adjust to the idea that they are little more than tiny jewels. You can’t tell that both flowers and fruits are ‘reddish’ although you can read it in the description higher up. The whole thing lasts a mere two and a half pages, including the map. And a new species is created… or is it declared… or merely ‘authored’ as botanists put it?
Still, I was quite excited when I found that the first species I drew out of the bag in my random plant search was authored by a woman. That makes it a rarity, though my data collection processes aren’t quite to the stage where I can say exactly how rare. We all know why this is, of course – female access to the process of botanical authorship is a thing of the 20th century on. Crossopetalum orientale is also a West Indian species authored by a German, and in this it is much, much less rare. I find that to be an interesting fact that calls for historical investigation. Soon, I will at least be able to outline the dates and demographics of West Indian plant authors rather precisely.
References:
Mory, Birgit. “Notes on Crossopetalum, Myginda and Gyminda (Celastraceae) from Cuba.” Willdenowia 31, no. 1 (2001): 129-35. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3997344.