Essays

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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What is a transcognited orchid?

According to the Google search engine, this blog’s title contains the first and only use of the word ‘transcognited’. In our information-overloaded world, it feels like a small achievement to have made something up that nobody else has made up previously. It’s an empty one though, unless the innovation has a meaning, preferably a useful

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