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Factcheck: “It was first described in Linnaeus’s Species Plantarum,” Pt.3

People will keep saying that some plant species or other was originally described or published in Linnaeus’s Species Plantarum of 1753. They even do it when it’s the kind of plant whose ocean-going seeds have established it on more of the planet’s warmer beaches than not, as Ipomoea pes-caprae‘s have: Even allowing for eurocentrism on […]

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Factcheck: “It was first described in Linnaeus’s Species Plantarum,” Pt.2

In a previous post, I said that hardly any plants at all were first described in Linnaeus’s Species Plantarum. Instead, almost all its entries consist of bibliographic references. There were a few exceptions and in this post, I take a closer look at one of them. Persicaria chinensis is the Chinese knotweed, a potentially rather

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Factcheck: “It was first described in Linnaeus’s Species Plantarum.”

Carl Linnaeus’s Species Plantarum of 1753 is well-known as a foundational publication in botany. It isn’t unusual to see it presented as a book in which plant species were first described or first published, as in the Wikipedia reference for Cucumis anguria shown above. In reality, very few species were originally described and published in Species Plantarum.

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Database scheming – 17 Jan 2021

There is just no way to balance reading, writing, data wrangling and miscellaneous other academic activities in a 20-hour week, but I keep lurching onward, making unbalanced progress. So, for instance, I have a database schema (above, left) that probably isn’t the one I want ultimately but it’s very easy to load the data in

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Myrcia pitoniana

(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

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Rynchospora jamaicensis

(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) I am wondering how often it will happen, in picking a random plant, that I get one about which there is little to say. Perhaps often, and that’s

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Crossopetalum orientale

(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

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