The Editing of Plant Names
By Ethan Fenner
UCBG Horticulturist
Southern Africa Collection
Dicerothamnus rhinocerotis, the so-called rhinoceros bush, is definitely not the showiest plant in the Southern African collection. Its leaves are a dull gray-green, its white flowers are almost invisible, and it is prone to forming weedy thickets in cultivation and in habitat. Simon van der Stel, the first governor of the Dutch East India Company’s colony on the Cape Peninsula, provides the earliest reference to the name “Rinocerbosch” (Rhinoceros bush) in 1685. The Dutch naturalist Peter Kolbe, who worked to document life around the Cape colony in the early 1700s, wrote in his description of the Rhinoceros that “He is not fond of Feeding on Grass, chusing (sic.) rather Shrubs, Broom, and Thistles. But the Delight of his Tooth is a Shrub… the Rhinoceros-Bush.” This information made it back to Carl Linneaus the Younger, son of the famous categorizer of life, who gave the plant the Latin name Stoebe rhinocerotis, based on the now-established fact that the plant serves as the “primary source of nourishment for the Rhinoceros…”. Taxonomic revisions moved the plant out of the genus Stoebe, eventually settling on Dicerothamnus, after the name Diceros bicornis, the black rhino. And now, 300 years later, visitors to the UC Botanical Garden will read a label with one Afrikaans name, one English name, and two Latin names, all of which directly reference the Rhinoceros.
There’s only one problem: no one is really sure if Rhinoceros actually eat the Rhinoceros bush. The black rhino is a generalist feeder with a wide historical range throughout sub-Saharan Africa. More recent science has documented the black Rhino feeding on over 200 different kinds of plants, from many different botanical families… but, as far as we know, Dicerothamnus rhinocerotis isn’t on the list.
Rhinoceros bush (Dicerothamnus rhinocerotis)
Reading about this got me thinking more about plant names. The sheer number of plants on earth necessitates organization and standardization of both scientific names – the Latin binomial system, where each species name is composed of the genus (Dicerothamnus) and a species epithet (rhinocerotis), is especially good at this. Botanical nomenclature is a discipline that relies on historical precedent, authority, and credible sources, and we at the Botanical Garden put a lot of attention into making sure our names are accurate and up to date. Carl Linneaus the Younger based his information on the “rhinoceros bush” on what he thought was a reliable source, Peter Kolbe. Kolbe may have contributed to European knowledge of Africa (he “rediscovered” the giraffe, after all), but his record on Rhino facts is mixed: He believed that a salt could be extracted from the Rhinoceros skin that would increase wealth, and advocated Rhinoceros blood as a panacea for “inward sores.” Kolbe might even have based his writing of the “rhinoceros bush” on reports by Governor van der Stel, who in turn may have gotten his information from the earlier colonists, who probably saw very few Rhinoceros where they landed on the Cape Peninsula.
There are many examples of botanical “misnomers,” where a species name refers to something that is inconsistent with scientific observation. Dicerothamnus rhinocerotis is one example. So is Nerine sarniensis, whose specific epithet “sarniensis” references the island Guernsey in the English Channel, where the plant was observed growing wild – it too is native to South Africa (many thousands of miles away), and, as legend goes, naturalized itself on the island after being cast from a sinking cargo ship in the 1650s. Names like these are not kept just to confuse people, but simply because that’s how the nomenclature code works: whoever finds it first gets dibs on the name, and, assuming the name is legitimate (as in, not in use elsewhere), it is protected for the ages. So, while common names are multiple – as different languages and regions will have their own local name for a plant – the scientific name is standard and absolute.
Botany as a discipline was built hand in hand with European colonialism. For the past several hundred years, plant species were “discovered” and named without consideration of the indigenous populations who may have known them for thousands of years prior. Plant documentation was often performed through a lens of profit, and when economical plants or other natural resources were found, they were taken. This came at a great cost to the natural environment and indigenous populations. In the botanical nomenclature this has led to fairly inconsequential misnomers like “Rhinoceros bush,” but also to blatantly racist names like “K—-r lily” which is still used as a common name for the South African plant Clivia miniata (The word here derives from an Arabic term meaning “infidel”; Today it is roughly equivalent to another racist term beginning with the letter N.) It is easy enough to replace this name in common parlance with “flame lily,” “bush lily,” “Natal lily,” or even better, “umayime,” the term given to the plant by the Zulu. But what happens when a racist term gets embedded into a scientific name? Does it just have to stay there forever, a la Dicerothamnus rhinocerotis or Nerine sarniensis? We have in our collection a very handsome dwarf cycad known as Encephalartos caffer. The scientific name references “Caffraria,” or “Kaffraria,” a disused name given to the region by early colonists and derived from the same racist slur. Elsewhere are other plants with “caffer” or “cafra,” which have persisted around 150 years after “Kaffraria” was dissolved and absorbed into what is today the Eastern Cape Province of the Republic of South Africa.
There is, however, some recent good news to share. The people who determine the nomenclature rules for plants, The International Association for Plant Taxonomy met at the twentieth International Botanical Congress, held last July in Madrid. This congress, composed of botanists working around the world, meets every five years to share scientific studies and deliberate on nomenclature changes. This time around, they voted in favor of an amendment to the International Code of Nomenclature for Algae, Fungi, and Plants, specifically Article 61.6: “Epithets with the root caf[f][e]r-, such as cafra, caffra, cafrorum, and cafrum, are not permitted in the nomenclature of organisms covered by this Code. Where these epithets were used in validly published names, they are to be treated as orthographical variants that are to be replaced by epithets with the root af[e]r-, such as afra, afrorum, and afrum, respectively.” The full amendment, included below, gives a good account of the historical context of the term and how the new names will be used moving forward. Around 218 plant names (in addition to several dozen algae and fungi names) will be changed.
And so I am happy to report that botanical institutions worldwide have begun the important work of editing names that reflect an antiquated and racist world view. Our curation team is updating the names in our database – keep an eye out for new labels around the garden. Detangling several centuries worth of colonialist influence is a slow, bureaucratic process. Luckily we have a scientific method that not only allows for, but encourages, editing. Plant names are edited all the time as new genetic evidence places species into different genera, and genera into different families. Historical precedence and standardization are important in the sciences, especially in botany – but when these are at odds with observable reality and updated world view, it is time to move on to something new. Thankfully the International Botanical Congress has made an important step in the right direction, and given us an example to cite as precedent for changing racist names for plants and beyond.
(References)
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/tax.12622
http://pza.sanbi.org/encephalartos-caffer
http://pza.sanbi.org/dicerothamnus-rhinocerotis
http://www.rhinoresourcecenter.com/index.php?s=1&act=pdfviewer&id=1286405154&folder=128
https://www.plantsandculture.org/