(In which I take the list of West Indian plants, well, seed plants to be exact, and pull up one at random, just to see what happens)
This week’s plant is another one about which almost nobody on the internet seems to have much of anything to say. There are several touchstones of popular non-interest in a plant but a good one is if it isn’t possible to discover any common names for it. If it’s rare endemic, as this one is, fair enough. A closely related species might have a common name, or the genus might. In this case, I had to go all the way up to the family-level, to the Myrtaceae to retrieve the notion that it might be something like a myrtle.
These myrtaceae all have very pretty filamentous flowers and cool, dark leaves. You’d think they would be popular for their beauty alone but it appears not to be the case. I’ve fallen in love with them on sight (or re-sight, since the Mediterranean ones, at least, ought to be familiar to me).
The Myrcia branch is a genus of the Neotropics, and a very large number of its members are endemic to the West Indies. Myrcia pitoniana grows only in Haiti. It seems appropriate, therefore that they’re part of an historical trend of West Indian plant name authorship transferring from European botanists to New World ones and sometimes to West Indians. That’s the case with this plant, which was part of batch transfer to the Myrcia family. You can see this in its official designation, where the names of its human sponsors in the botanical nomenclature appear after its own:
Myrcia pitoniana (Urb. & Eckman) K.Campbell & Peguero.
From a German and a Swede to a Jamaican and a Dominican! In many ways, nothing could seem more natural than that West Indian endemic plants should be named and studied in the West Indies. Where else would you find them? But the fact is that plant systematists do their work not in the field but in the herbarium, sitting at desks among the dried remains of sometimes quite ancient plants. The level of detailed examination required isn’t easily compatible with being in the field. On Kew’s Plants of the World website, the Myrcia pitoniana page displays a specimen collected by Ekman, the one at the top of the post. It is held at Kew, and its label says it was once at the Botanical Museum of Stockholm. The Ekman specimens used by Urban in Germany to write the plants original description almost all perished during WWII. Some remained in the West Indies, at the Natural History Museum of Jamaica, Campbell’s institutional home, in the herbarium of the Dominican Republic’s Botanical Garden, where Peguero works, and elsewhere. If is quite likely by studying these that the decision to rename the species would have been made. Did Campbell or Peguero also trek up a hill in Haiti to collect new specimens? That, I cannot guess.
I wish I could easily refer to the paper which certifies its formal re-baptism, along with a bunch of its siblings. I would like to know in what terms botanists express their argument for name change and whether it has anything to do with the switch to an evolutionary viewpoint from a merely ordered one – or whether it is simply a matter of closer examination. But it was very obviously not intended to be read except by the tiny coterie of experts who manage that sort of thing. Certainly, historians don’t have institutional access to those kinds of journals. That’s a systemic problem with my work, but in non-pandemic times I would be able to overcome it by visiting the right kinds of libraries. As it is, I can’t even pay for this article. Theoretically, it’s possible, but the process seems not to have been road-tested. The fact that I couldn’t get it to work is probably of no noticeable concern to the publisher. Myrcia pitoniana is barely present in the written record, ‘erased’ as historians sometimes like to say of subjects never written much about in the first place, or else left to grow in unanthropographised peace.
References:
Campbell, Keron C St E, Pedro Acevedo-Rodriguez, Zenia Acosta, Tracy Commock, Ana Raquel Lima Lourenço, Brigido Peguero, Kate Samra, and Eve J Lucas. “New Combinations and New Names in Myrcia for West Indian Species Previously Included in Calyptranthes (Myrtaceae).” Phytotaxa 406, no. 3 (2019): 143-56.