I want to start with a story about buying a plant, a Dracenia, in, probably, February 1977. I remember it was about six months after Sam Berland and I had started bas Homes, and it was shortly after I got my first paycheck after six months of financial fasting. I wanted to buy something, almost anything, to break the fast. We were at a plant show at the Cow Palace, and a guy was selling really nice houseplants, including a large Dracena for something like fifty bucks (a lot of money for a plant in those days).
As an aside, I was in the South Bay Cactus and Succulent Society at the time, and referring to a plant without its proper Latin name was considered déclassé. Looking at a cylindrical cactus with a pattern of spines on the tubercles, one should say, “Nice Mammillaria” or “Nice Mammillaria rhodantha,” or “Is that a Mammillaria rhodantha?” not “Nice pinchusin cactus.” End aside.
The problem was that this plant’s tag had only one name, “Dracaena”, which is the Genus of the plant, and I wanted to know what species of Dracaena I was buying. I asked the guy what species of Dracaena the plant was, and he laughed, saying, “I know, if it doesn’t have a name, it doesn’t really exist…(long pause)…stricta?” He changed the tag to read “Dracaena stricta,” and I happily bought a plant that now had a full name tag, even though I knew stricta might not even be its real name.
If you want to blame or praise somebody for this foolishness, Carl Linnaeus is your guy. He is the founder of the modern system for naming and classifying plants and animals. He was a Swedish botanist, born in 1707, just in time to take part in what is now called The Age of Reason. It was a time of almost constant war, yet Europe’s population grew by almost 50%.
As an aside, the huge population explosion was primarily – not solely, but primarily – because of Solanum tuberosum (potatoes). Before the potato was imported from “The New World”, Northern European farmers relied on grains, such as rye and wheat, which were unreliable food sources and not very nutritious for the amount of cultivated land needed to grow them. The potato changed the “food economy” of the continent in a couple of ways. In addition to being easier to grow than grain, especially in poor, wet soils, potatoes have higher caloric density and better nutritional value – much better when combined with milk (or butter) – particularly in vitamin C, potassium, and vitamin B. End aside.
Linnaeus was a physician, zoologist, and, apparently, an admirer of women’s breasts who standardized and popularized the two-part naming system – genus and species – such as Homo sapiens or Dracaena stricta. Before Linnaeus, plants often had long, descriptive Latin names that were difficult to remember or descriptive names in the local language.
I say “admirer of women’s breasts” because Linnaeus named us Mammalia from the Latin word mamma, meaning “breast,” which implies that the defining feature of mammals is that the females have breasts rather than, say, live birth or hair. By defining the entire class of animals by the act of suckling young, Linnaeus reinforced his premise that breastfeeding was the fundamental difference between other animals, like frogs, and us. He also named a genus of cactus, Mammalarias, because its spines are on the ends of the nipple-like tubercles on the plant, and he promoted breastfeeding as a patriotic duty in an influential pamphlet titled Nutrix Noverca.
The reason is that we – and by we, I mean Cactus and Succulent Society members and, for lack of a better description, the “soft science” press – typically use only two names, like Homo sapiens, Dracaena stricta, or Yucca brevifolia – the “scientific name” for Joshua trees, because it is assumed that we know the larger groups that they are a part of. It would be very unusual to say Primates Simiiformes Homo sapiens.
But for plants, it’s a different story. I’ve been interested in plants for about 50 years, and I thought I had a pretty good handle on what plants were in what group. I knew that a Joshua Tree was a Yucca brevifolia, and was in the Agave group, or, if you are a lumper, which I am, the larger Lily family. But while looking for details on the trees, I found that they were reclassified in 2009 as members of the asparagus family. I am still sort of shocked.
As an aside, while this reclassification is not a particularly big deal, it reminded me that I am old enough to have seen two major shifts in our understanding of our physical world. The first was at the end of a college geology course in – probably – the spring of 1960, after being taught that as the Earth cooled from its molten beginnings, the crust crumpled into mountain ranges, much like the skin of a drying apple, the professor offhandedly mentioned that there were some nuts out there that thought the continents were floating around and banging into each other and that was the cause of mountain ranges. I only found out that the nuts were right years later, when I went on a reading binge about human evolution. By then, Plate Tectonics was so accepted that it was only mentioned obliquely as a given.
I didn’t miss the second shift, however, when the world went from thinking dinosaurs were cold-blooded and stupid to smart, warm-blooded animals – but, no breasts – that are the ancestors of birds. This second shift is almost entirely credited to Robert Bakker, and I read his book, The Dinosaur Heresies, and became an early convert to the theory that dinosaurs were warm-blooded. End Aside.
Meanwhile, back with the aparagi, here are a couple of pictures of asparagus from our garden and more than a couple from the National Park.
