L-R: Erigeron divergens (Spreading fleabane), Ipomopsis arizonica (Arizona ipomopsis), Calochortus striatus (Alkali mariposa lily), Sidalcea malviflora ssp. sparsifolia (Few-leaved checkerbloom), Cneoridium dumosum (Bushrue)

California Plant Names:
Latin and Greek Meanings and Derivations
An Annotated Dictionary of Botanical and Biographical Etymology
Compiled by Michael L. Charters

  • babylon'ica: Babylonian, or having something to do with Babylon. Apparently, Linnaeus thought the weeping willow (S. babylonica) came from south-west Asia, rather than the Far East, where it was actually native. The 'willows' of the waters of Babylon are now considered to have been Populus euphratica.
  • bacca'ta: having pulpy, berry-like fruits, from the Latin bacca for a small, round fruit such as a berry.
  • Bac'charis: the etymology here is very uncertain, possibly after Bacchus, Greek god of fertility, wine, revelry and sacred drama. This was an ancient name used by Dioscorides. In Latin, bacca is a fruit or berry, which is probably where the name Bacchus came from. Umberto Quattrocchi says “Greek bakkaris, bakkaridos 'unguent made from asaron'; bakcharis, an ancient Greek name used by Dioscorides for sowbread." Asaron at least in modern terms is "a crystalline phenolic ether C 12H 16O 3 found in the oils of a number of plants especially of the genus Asarum," and in early times asaron was the Greek and/or Latin name of wild ginger (genus Asarum). Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus did not explain the derivation of this name which was published in his Species Plantarum in 1753 so it must remain for the time being unclear.
  • baccif'era: bearing or producing berries.
  • bacigalu'pi: named for Rimo Charles Bacigalupi (1901-1996), a California botanist who in 1950 became the first curator of the Jepson Herbarium at the University of California, Berkeley, retiring in 1968. Before that he had worked for the California Forest Range and Experiment Station collecting seeds throughout California for experimental plantings. He was considered an expert on the family Scrophulariaceae. The following is from a memoriam essay by Lincoln Constance and Paul Silva at the University of California: "Rimo was born in San Francisco on March 24, 1901, the first of three sons of Gisella and Prospero Bacigalupi, who were of Genovese origin. At Lowell High School, he showed a keen interest in natural history, collecting and identifying plants from different sites close to home. Among the teachers who encouraged this interest was Howard McMinn, who shortly thereafter became professor of botany at Mills College. Rimo entered Stanford University with the intention of becoming a lawyer, but took general botany as a freshman and soon changed his major from English to botany, receiving the AB degree in 1923. He remained at Stanford, where he studied Garrya (silk tassel bush) under the supervision of Professor Le Roy Abrams and was awarded the AM degree in 1925. He then taught botany and Italian at Mills College before continuing his academic training at Harvard, where he did his doctoral research under the tutelage of Professor B. L. Robinson. His thesis was a monograph on the North American species of Perezia, a genus of asters. Simultaneously, he produced a major contribution to our knowledge of Cuphea, a genus in the loosestrife family. The PhD degree was awarded in 1931. Facing a jobless market during the Great Depression, Bacigalupi returned to Stanford, where he lived with Professor Gordon Ferris, an eminent entomologist, and Roxana Stinchfield Ferris, who had a prodigious knowledge of the California flora and assisted Abrams in producing his Illustrated Flora of the Pacific States. During this two-year period, Bacigalupi prepared the treatment of the saxifrage family. In 1933 Bacigalupi was employed as botanist for the California Forest Experimental Station, US Forest Service, a position which he held until 1938. His duties included the collection of seeds for use in erosion control and for the development of the Tilden Park Botanical Garden. In 1939 he obtained a teaching credential at Berkeley, enabling him to act as a substitute teacher in San Francisco schools. Following a five-year stint with the US Army during World War II, he returned to Stanford as an instructor in biology. When Willis Linn Jepson, a distinguished Berkeley professor, died in 1946, he bequeathed his estate to the University of California for the purpose of establishing a self-contained and self-perpetuating instrument for continuing his studies of the California flora. In fulfillment of this bequest, the Jepson Herbarium and Library was established and a search was made for a curator. Bacigalupi quickly came to mind as an excellent prospect and he was appointed curator in 1950. He retired in 1968, being succeeded by the late Lawrence R. Heckard, but continued his botanical studies until suffering a stroke in 1983. In many ways Bacigalupi was uniquely suited for the Jepson position. His knowledge of the California flora was impressive while he had developed a valuable network of botanical friends through his work with the Forest Experiment Station and various teaching and research assignments involving Stanford, Berkeley, and Mills College. Equally important were his maturity, tact, sensitivity, warmth, and complete lack of personal aggressiveness. He had several enduring collateral interests that he developed to a remarkable degree, including graphic and ceramic arts, linguistics, opera, railroads, and philately. He had nearly a complete set of Victor Red Seal records, which, together with his Victrola, he gave to the Department of Music at Berkeley. Bacigalupi was the twentieth century counterpart of the uomo universale [universal man] of the Renaissance. He was truly a walking encyclopedia, able to converse intelligently on a vast array of topics and in several languages. His astounding knowledge of operatic scores had to be tested to be believed. He approached all aspects of his life as a gentleman, with grace and consideration for others. Under Bacigalupi's direction, the Jepson Herbarium and Library gradually but firmly took shape. Although officially designated a research unit, its staff became heavily involved in public service, thus laying the groundwork for extramural support now embodied in the organization Friends of the Jepson Herbarium. Although he did not have a formal teaching schedule, Bacigalupi was an immensely influential teacher of graduate students, who felt welcome to seek his advice and draw on his vast field experience, which had included negotiating nearly every negotiable road in California. He was a staunch conservationist and was a member of the Sierra Club for 71 years. Bacigalupi bequeathed half of his estate to the Jepson Herbarium and Library to further the study of his beloved California flora. His surviving family, all in the San Francisco area, included sisters-in-law Mary and Matilde Bacigalupi, nephews George and Larry Bacigalupi, and nieces Marilyn Adkins and Janice Underwood. All who knew him are the poorer for the loss of his civilizing influence."
  • Baco'pa: from an Indian aboriginal name in French Guiana, referred to by Jean Baptiste Christophore Fusée Aublet in his 1775 Histoire des Plantes de la Guiane Francoise. The genus Bacopa was published by Jean Baptiste Christophe Fusée Aublet in 1775.
  • Baer'ia: named for Karl Ernst von Baer (1792-1876), a Baltic German scientist and explorer. He was a naturalist,
      biologist, geologist, meteorologist, geographer, and a founding father of embryology. He was born in Estonia with ancestors who had come from Westfalia. He was educated at the Knight and Cathedral School in Tallinn and the Imperial University of Dorpat in Tartu. Being dissatisfied with what he considered the lack of quality in the education he had thus far recived, he continued his education in Berlin, Vienna, and Würzburg, where Ignaz Döllinger introduced him to the new field of embryology. Wikipedia says: “In 1817, he became a professor at Königsberg University
    (Kaliningrad) and full professor of zoology in 1821, and of anatomy in 1826. In 1829, he taught briefly in St. Petersburg, but returned to Königsberg. In 1834, Baer moved back to St. Petersburg and joined the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, first in zoology (1834–1946) and then in comparative anatomy and physiology (1846–1862). His interests while there were anatomy, ichthyology, ethnography, anthropology, and geography. While embryology had kept his attention in Königsberg, then in Russia von Baer engaged in a great deal of field research, including the exploration of the island Novaya Zemlya. The last years of his life (1867–1876) were spent in Dorpat, where he became a leading critic of Charles Darwin. Baer was interested in the northern part of Russia, and explored Novaya Zemlya in 1837, collecting biological specimens. Other travels led him to the Caspian Sea, the North Cape, and Lapland. He was one of the founders of the Russian Geographical Society.  In 1849, he was elected a foreign honorary of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1850. He was the president of the Estonian Naturalists' Society in 1869–1876, and was a co-founder and first president of the Russian Entomological Society. In 1875, he became a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.”  He was also a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He died in Tartu, Estonia. The genus Baeria was published in 1836 by Friedrich Ernst Ludwig von Fischer and Carl Anton von Meyer.
  • bae'ticus: named after the Baetis River in Spain.
  • Ba'hia: named for Juan Francisco de Bahí y Fonseca (1775-1841), a Spanish botanist, physician and naturalist, director of the Botanical Garden in Barcelona, and author of the Formulae medicae. He was born in Blanes and studied at the University of Cervera. He was a professor of botany at the Botanical and Agriculture School created by the Barcelona Board of Commerce in 1807 and directed the agricultural section of the Board's Memorias de Agricultura y Artes. He was a leading exponent of the "rationalization" of agriculture in Spain which was aimed at the most efficient use of land through strategies such as the removal of fallows, the production of fodder by means of crops ("alternating farming," as it was called in England), the introduction of a shorter rotations complex to take advantage of a greater variety of soils than in traditional agriculture, and the use of a wider range of natural fertilizers. Bahí wrote on all these subjects. He proposed the use of fallows as "artificial meadows," the cultivation of spring wheat as a precaution against the failure of winter crops and a greater extension for planting potatoes, a crop on which he experimented in the Botanical Garden of Barcelona. With regard to artificial pastures, he stressed that three-quarters of the farmland in England and almost all of the land in the Netherlands had been converted to pasture, with the consequent improvement in the diet due to the greater availability of animal protein. He continually emphasized the practical benefits of rational agriculture under the Diversity Land System. In line with this principle, he advocated reforestation as a means of recovering unused land, particularly by planting holm oaks on clayey soils. To propagate rational methods, he proposed the completion of a compulsory course in rural economics prior to entering any professional school. He was not only interested in agriculture, but defended the theory of contagion in the yellow fever epidemic of 1821, a position that provoked a bitter controversy. He also wrote a naive treatise on meteorology, in which the galvanic energy of weather phenomena was related to animal magnetism. He was briefly the president of the Royal Academy of Sciences and Arts of Barcelona, and died in Barcelona in 1841. The genus Bahia was published by Mariano Lagasca y Segura in 1816.
  • Bahiop'sis: like genus Bahia. The genus Bahiopsis was published by Albert Kellogg in 1863.
  • bahiifo'lia: with leaves like genus Bahia.
  • bahiifor'me: having the form of or a resemblance to genus Bahia.
  • Bai'leya: named for Jacob Whitman Bailey (1811-1857), an early American microscopist and pioneer of this means of
      investigation.  He graduated from West Point Military Academy and from 1834 until his death he taught and eventually became full professor of chemistry, minerology and geology at that institute. He made numerous improvements in the design of the microscope and amassed large collections of slides of microscopic objects. He was elected president of the American Association of the Advancement of Science in 1856 and was the author of more than 50 scientific papers. One of his sons became a chemist and geologist, and another, William Whitman, became a botanist. The genus
    Baileya was published by William Henry Harvey and Asa Gray in 1848.
  • baileya'na: named for Frederick Manson Bailey (1827-1915), an Australian botanist and horticulturalist. He was born
      in Hackney, London, on 8 March, 1827, the second son of an experienced horticulturist, and died in Brisbane, Australia, 25 June 1915. He arrived in Adelaide with his family in 1839 to partner with his father and brother in a nursery near Adelaide. He made a short visit to the Bendigo goldfields, was a land holder in Hutt Valley, New Zealand, from 1858 to 1861, and a seed store owner and collector of plants to send to overseas institutions in Brisbane from 1861 to 1875. He was a botanist on the Queensland Government board to inquire into the causes of diseases affecting livestock and
    plants 1875-1879, and then was acting curator at the Queensland Museum from 1880 to 1882 and colonial botanist, 1881-1915.  He received the Clarke Medal from the Royal Society of New South Wales in 1902. He was president of the Royal Society of Queensland in 1890, and president of the biology section, Australasian Association for the Advance-ment of Science, in 1911.  His name was given to more than 50 species of plants. He was the author of Handbook to the Ferns of Queensland (1874), An Illustrated Monograph of the Grasses of Queensland (1878), The Fern World of Australia (1881) and the 7-volume The Queensland Flora, still the only statewide flora ever produced.
  • bai'leyi: named for John William Bailey (1870-1933). JSTOR provides this about him: "American physician and bryologist based in Seattle. John W. Bailey published a series of semi-popular articles in The Bryologist between 1903 and 1933. Bailey was born in Plattsburg, New York, and studied medicine at the University of Minnesota, graduating MD in 1894. He continued his medical studies at McGill University and joined the staff of the State Hospital, Faribault, Minnesota, in 1895. He moved to Vancouver Island in 1897, where mosses caught his attention and he began his bryophyte collection. Moving to Seattle in 1901, his interest in mosses continued and he became an expert on the bryophytes of the Puget Sound region and gathered specimens for Holzinger's Musci Acrocarpi Boreali Americani and for Grout's North American Musci Pleurocarpi. He served for a while as secretary of the Sullivant Moss Society." (Lescuraea baileyi)
  • bai'leyi: named for Liberty Hyde Bailey (1858-1954), an American horticulturist, botanist and co-founder of the
      American Society for Horticultural Science. He was born in South Haven, Michigan, and entered Michigan Agricultural College, which is now Michigan State University, graduating in 1882. The following year he became a herbarium assistant to Asa Gray, a job he held for two years. In 1884 he returned to Michigan Agricultural College and became professor and chair of the Horticulture and Landscape Gardening Department, an advancement that was quite remarkable for such a young and relatively inexperienced person. This was the first horticulture department in the country. He moved
    to Cornell University in 1888 where he was appointed chair of Practical and Experimental Horticulture. He was elected to the American Academy of Sciences as an associate fellow in 1900 and from 1903 to 1913 was dean of the New York State College of Agriculture. He retired in 1913 and was elected as a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1917. Wikipedia adds: “He edited The Cyclopedia of American Agriculture (1907–1909), the Cyclopedia of American Horticulture (1900–1902, continued as the Standard Cyclopedia Of Horticulture 1916–1919) and the Rural Science, Rural Textbook, Gardencraft, and Young Folks Library series of manuals. He was the founding editor of the journals Country Life in America and the Cornell Countryman. He dominated the field of horticultural literature, writing some sixty-five books, which together sold more than a million copies, including scientific works, efforts to explain botany to laypeople, a collection of poetry; edited more than a hundred books by other authors and published at least 1,300 articles and over 100 papers in pure taxonomy. He also coined the words 'cultivar,' 'cultigen,' and 'indigen.' His most significant and lasting contributions were in the botanical study of cultivated plants. Bailey is credited with being instrumental in starting agricultural extension services, the 4-H movement, the nature study movement, and parcel post and rural electrification. He was considered the father of rural sociology and rural journalism.” (Cornus baileyi)
  • bai'leyi: named for Vernon Orlando Bailey (1864-1942), an American naturalist, plant collector and mammalogist
      who was employed by the USDA's Department of Biological Survey (predecessor of the current US Fish and Wildlife Service), a position he held thanks to its founder Dr. C. Hart Merriam. From 1890 until his retirement in 1933 he had the title of chief field naturalist. From 1933 until 1934 he served as president of the American Society of Mammalogists and a member of the American Ornithologists Union. His wife Florence Augusta Merriam was an accomplished ornithologist and author of Birds Through a Looking Glass, and they often travelled and worked together in the
    field. He conducted major biological surveys of Texas, New Mexico, North Dakota and Oregon, and among the 244 publications he authored was Mammals and Life Zones of Oregon. He was also recognized and honored for designing many devices for live and humane trapping of animals. (Photo courtesy US National Library of Medicine). (Campanula baileyi, Sarcobatus vermiculatus var. baileyi)
  • bai'leyi: named for William Whitman Bailey (1845-1914), son of Jacob Whitman Bailey. He graduated from Brown University and then studied at Harvard under Professor Asa Gray, becoming botanist to the United States Geological Survey of the 40th parallel, and later professor of botany at Brown. (Eriogonum baileyi, Ivesia baileyi)
  • bajacalifor'nicum: of or from Baja, California.
  • ba'keri: named for Charles Fuller Baker (1872-1927), an American entomologist, botanist, agronomist, plant collector
      and dean of the College of Agriculture, University of the Philippines. He was born in Lansing, Michigan. He was trained at Michigan Agricultural College and taught for several years in Colorado, Akabama and Missouri before going to California where he received an MS degree at Stanford in 1903. In 1902 he collected lichens and fungi on Santa Catalina Island with his wife, Ninette Evans, and collected there again in 1904.  He was briefly at Pomona College and then taught and did further field work in Cuba and Brazil. Returning to Pomona for several years, he
    then was appointed professor of agronomy at the University of the Philippines in 1912, a post he held until his death. He was also a staff member of the botanic gardens in Singapore and temporarily appointed acting assistant director (1917). His personal mycological herbarium was bequeathed to the Philippines National Herbarrium but destroyed during the Japanese occupation of the Philippines during the Second World War. He made a significant addition to the United States National Museum, to which his collection passed at his death. (Photo credit: ResearchGate) (Species in Aconitum, Amsinckia, Ceanothus, Eschscholzia, Euclisia, Lessingia, Mimulus, Pleuridium, Salix)
  • ba'keri: named for English botanist John Gilbert Baker (1834-1920), father of botanist Edmund Gilbert Baker. He was
      born in Guisborough, Yorkshire,  and was educated by the Quakers at Ackworth School and Bootham School, York. He was married to Hannah Unthank in 1860. Wikipedia adds this: “He then worked at the library and herbarium of Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew between 1866 and 1899, and was keeper of the herbarium from 1890 to 1899. He wrote handbooks on many plant groups, including Amaryllidaceae, Bromeliaceae, Iridaceae, Liliaceae, and ferns. His published works include Flora of Mauritius and the Seychelles (1877) and Handbook of the Irideae (1892). He was
    elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1878 and was awarded the Veitch Memorial Medal of the Royal Horticultural Society in 1907.” During his lifetime he was closely associated wuth the Thirsk Natural History Society and participated in a botanical exchange until 1864 when a fire completely destroyed his house and business premises, and all of his botanical material and that belonging to the Society. After the fire he was offered a position in 1866 by Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker as assistant curator at the herbarium at Kew. In this capacity he was able to organize a new London Botanical Exchange Club and served as editor of the New Journal of Botany. He published an enormous amount, especially on the genus Iris.  He died at Kew. (Lilium bakeri)
  • ba'keri: named for Milo Samuel Baker (1868-1961), a botanist who listed thousands of North Coast plants, among them the endangered wildflower Blennosperma bakeri, which has had a major impact on the development of Sonoma County's seasonal wetlands.  He is revered by those who love the wildflowers carpeting the Sonoma County landscape in spring. During decades of ground-combing research, he carefully collected and identified some 15,000 specimens that now are mounted at Sonoma State University. A Santa Rosa Junior College teacher, he cataloged the flora of Sonoma County and was one of the most respected botanists in the state. But he may be remembered chiefly as the man who identified a small yellow flower with the might to stop bull-dozers. The little Sonoma Sunshine, partial to the hog wallows of spring, is one of three native Sonoma wildflowers listed as rare and endangered. The fragile flower has altered the course of development in the 55,000-acre Santa Rosa plain stretching from Cotati to Windsor. In the 1980s and 1990s, the words Blennosperma bakeri were almost blasphemy to developers and farmers who discovered the daisy-like flower on their land, and ran up against stiff state and federal laws aimed at protecting them and the dwindling number of vernal pools where they thrived. Milo Baker died a quarter-century before the flower that bore his name -- like the spotted owl in North Coast forests -- became the axis in a battle between environmentalists and developers. Endangered species weren't discussed in his lifetime. Yet, he fought his own uphill battles at the junior college to gain support for his growing herbarium and a life's work seen as esoteric. After he died, a science wing was named for Baker, but it wasn't big enough to house his collection, which eventually went to Sonoma State. ''He was pretty much alone, caring for those wildflowers,'' former student and longtime assistant Vanette Bunyan once lamented.  ''He had a show every year, and more people came from out of town than from in town.'' With a digging tool, a field press and newspaper, he embarked on weekend botanical treks to list North Coast plants. It was a massive project, he said, ''undertaken for the sheer pleasure of finding out what seed plants grow in this vast and varied region.'' Although in death he would be most closely associated with Baker's blennosperma, violets were his first love. The wildflower garden at his Kenwood ranch flourished with violets grown from seeds sent by correspondents all over the world. Baker, an Iowa native, came to California as a child. It was on a 100-mile walk to his first teaching job in Modoc County that he began to collect his first specimens. Much of the flora of eastern Shasta, Modoc and Lassen counties was made known through his work, including the Modoc cypress, named Cupressus bakeri in his honor. He moved to Sonoma County in 1901, beginning a 20-year period he called ''my Rip Van Winkle sleep.'' During that time, he developed his wildflower garden, earned a master's degree from Stanford, and was a trustee of the new Santa Rosa Junior College until he was recruited for the faculty. Still, he never let up on his field studies, leading students on scouting trips in his black Model-A Ford for several weeks every April, then sending them out the day before his annual wildflower show to gather specimens he then spent all night meticulously identifying. It was a single-minded pursuit that blurred the lines between work and leisure. That didn't matter to Baker. After retiring in 1945 he remained curator of the North Coast Herbarium, served as president of the California Botanical Society and occasionally taught. His scientific ambitions exceeded his declining physical abilities, a fact he defied. He taught his last class in field botany at 90. Weeks before his death, he was planning a trip to the Trinity Alps and still hoping to collect violets on Alaska's Mount Whitney. Curious to the end, he urged an assistant just before he died,  ''Come again, and tell me all of your secrets.'' Baker was enamored of the mysteries of the natural plant world in the way his contemporary Luther Burbank was beguiled by how man could improve on nature.  His was an irrepressible drive to understand the intricate life under his feet.  He once wrote in one of his plant lists that "the names may change from time to time but the plants remain unchanged and unmindful of attempts to classify them.'' Baker did not foresee the development that would one day threaten those fields of wildflowers. But his meticulous documentation was a key step in saving them so many years later." [This entry was largely extracted from a website entitled 50 Who Shaped Our Century put online by the Santa Rosa, California, Press Democrat]. (Species in Amelanchier, Arctostaphylos, Blennosperma, Crepis, Chrysopsis, Cryptantha, Cupressus, Delphinium, Eryngium, Fissidens, Iliamna, Lasthenia, Limnanthes, Linanthus, Lupinus, Navarretia, Viola)
  • Balar'dia: named for French chemist Antoine Jérôme Balard (1802-1876), one of the discoverers of bromine. He was
      born at Montpellier, France. His parents were extremely poor and he was adopted by his godmother who was better able to provide him with a proper education. At 17 years old he was enrolled in the École de Pharmacie, Montpellier. There he became eligible for an assistant position in the chemistry lab. By 1824 he was investigating the salt marshes near his home, taking samples of seawater and plants back to the laboratory for further inquiries. In 1826 he discovered the element bromine in seawater, recognizing it as a previously unknown element, and sharing the honor of its discovery
    with Carl Jacob Löwig.  In 1826 he also became professor of chemistry at the royal college and school of pharmacy and later succeeded Louis Jacques Thénard as chair of chemistry at the faculty of sciences in Paris. In 1851 he was appointed professor of chemistry at the College de France. Balard had Louis Pasteur as a pupil when Pasteur was only 26 years old. He spent his life in study, analysis, experimentation and teaching, and without question was one of the significant figures of his day in the field of chemistry. Balard died in Paris in 1876. The genus Balardia was published in 1829 by Jacques Cambessédes.
  • baldschuan'ica: of or from Baljuan, Turkistan, Central Asia.
  • baldwin'ii: named for surgeon and botanist William Baldwin (1779-1819), born to a Quaker family in Newlin, Chester
      County, Pennsylvania. His father was a Quaker minister. The following is excerpted from the website of the Harvard University Herbaria: “He was educated in rural schools and taught for a while before deciding to study medicine. While attending his first year of medical lectures at the University of Pennsylvania, 1802-1803, he developed a friendship with William Darlington, then also a first-year medical student. Unable to afford to attend the second year of lectures, Baldwin continued to work as an assistant of Dr. William A. Todd. During this time he met Dr. Moses
    Marshall, who aroused an interest in him in botany. After serving as a surgeon on a merchant ship to Canton, China (1805-1806), Baldwin was able to a attend the 1806-1807 lectures at the University of Pennsylvania, and he received his MD in 1807. He moved to Wilmington, Delaware, where he met and married Hannah M. Webster (ca. 1808). Baldwin continued to practice medicine, and in 1811 joined the Delaware State Medical Society. He suffered hereditary tuberculosis, and in 1811 moved to Georgia in the hopes that the milder climate would aid his health. He began collecting plants around Savannah and St. Mary's. With the outbreak of the War of 1812, Baldwin accepted a commission as a naval surgeon, based at St. Mary's, Georgia, for 2-1/2 years and at Savannah, Georgia, for 2 years. During his years in Savannah, Baldwin began a correspondence with Stephen Elliott. With his naval service ended, Baldwin sent his family back to Wilmington while he went south and botanized, especially in East Florida (winter-spring 1816-1817). During this time he renewed his correspondence with William Darlington. From late 1817 to July 1818 he served as surgeon on the frigate Congress on its voyage to Buenos Aires and other South American ports, and he carried out some botanical exploration on the trip. After this trip, Baldwin returned to his family in Wilmington. With the encouragement of Darlington, Baldwin began work on a botanical study which was to be titled "Miscellaneous Sketches of Georgia and East Florida, to which will be added a descriptive catalogue of new plants, with notices of the works of Pursh, Elliott and Nuttall, to which will be added an appendix containing some account of the vegetable productions on the Rio de la Plata, etc." Work on this was halted by his acceptance of an appointment as botanist on the expedition of Major Stephen H. Long to the Rocky Mountains. He left with the expedition in March 1819; his health deteriorated along the way and he was forced to leave the group. He died in Franklin, Missouri, on September 1, 1819. Though Baldwin published only two scientific papers, his unpublished manuscripts were used as contributions to works by Torrey and Gray. His herbarium passed through the hands of Zachary Collins and L. D. de Schweinitz before being sent to the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Science.”
  • balfouria'na: named for John Hutton Balfour (1808-1884), who attended the University of Edinburgh where he
      obtained his medical doctorate in 1831 and that year became a member of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, and a fellow in 1833. He subsequently commenced medical practice but in 1840 began giving lectures in botany and in 1841 was appointed professor of botany at the University of Glasgow. In 1845 he moved to the same tenure at Edinburgh, also becoming head of the Royal Botanical Garden and Queen’s botanist for Scotland. For 30 years John Hutton Balfour was dean of the medical faculty in Edinburgh, where he first introduced teaching in microscopy.
    He retired from his tenure in 1879, receiving an honorary LLD from the three universities to which he had been affiliated. Balfour’s numerous publications during the years 1862 to 1875 exclusively concern botany. Medical works include the paper describing the disease named for him, which was a disturbance characterized by multiple tumorous masses formed by the bony infiltrates in myelogenous leukemia and which may be present in any portion of the skeleton, but is found most frequently in the skull. His son, Isaac Bayley Balfour (1853-1922) also studied botany and went on to transform the Royal Botanic Garden of Edinburgh into one of the world's great gardens. (Photo credit: Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh)
  • balfour'ii: named for Isaac Bailey Balfour (1853-1922), son of John Hutton Balfour, see above entry. Isaac Balfour
      was a Scottish botanist, professor of botany at Glasgow University 1879-1885, professor of botany at the University of Oxford 1884-1888, and professor of botany at the University of Edinburgh 1888 until his death. He was also appointed as the 9th Regius Keeper of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, and carried on his father’s work there completely transforming the garden, adding an arboretum and new laboratories and other facilities. He had a particular interest in Sino-Himalayan plants and received botanical specimens and seeds collected by botanist Reginald Farrar. He was
    elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and was awarded the Linnean Medal from the Linnean Society and the Victoria Medal of Honor of the Royal Horticultural Society.
  • bal'lii: named for John Ball (1818-1889), an Irish politician, naturalist and alpine traveller. He was born in Dublin, His
      father was a judge on the court of common pleas and he was educated at Oscott College near Birmingham, and at Christ's College, Cambridge. Because he was a Roman Catholic he could not be admitted to a BA degree. He was drawn from his early years to the natural sciences and particularly to botany. After leaving Cambridge he travelled around Switzerland (which he had visited first as a seven-year old child) and elsewhere in Europe and contributed papers on botany and the Swiss glaciers to scientific journals. From 1846 to 1858 his life was dedicated to politics,
    and he rose to the House of Commons, and was made under-secretary of state for the colonies, a post which he held for two years. An electoral defeat in 1858 caused him to give up politics altogether and devote himself to natural history. In 1857 the Alpine Club had been founded and he became its first president. It was through his work as an alpinist that he is chiefly known, having climbed many peaks in the Dolomites and in Morocco (with Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker) and South America (a five-month trip), and having written books of careful observations recorded in a clear and often entertaining style which were recognized as having scientific value. One of his major achievements was The Alpine Guide (1863-1868), which was a work dealing with the Alps and alpine travel generally, both from the scientific and practical point of view, including the special geological and botanical features of each district. He was a scientific traveller more than he was a dedicated mountain climber, and by his own word, before 1863 he had crossed the main chain forty-eight times by thirty-two different passes, besides traversing nearly one hundred of the lateral passes. He was also the author of Journal of a Tour in Morocco (1878), and Notes of a Naturalist in South America (1887). He was also a fellow of the Linnean, Geographical, and Antiquarian Societies of London, and of the Royal Irish Academy. He died in London.
  • balsam'ea: aromatic, from Latin balsamum "gum of the balsam tree."
  • balsamif'era: yielding a fragrant gum or resin.
  • Balsamorhi'za: from the Greek balsamum, "balsam," and rhiza, "root," alluding to the plants having roots with a balsamic or resinous smell or exudation. The genus Balsamorhiza was published by William Jackson Hooker in 1840.
  • bal'ticus: of the area of the Baltic Sea.
  • bambuso'ides: resembling genus Bambusa, the bamboo.
  • Banal'ia: named for Antoine Guillaume Banal (1738-1812), a French gardener and botanist at the Montpellier Botanical Garden, author of Catalogue des plantes medicinales et economiques... (1784). The genus Banalia was published in 1849 by Christian Horace Bénédict Alfred Moquin-Tandon.
  • banksia'na: named for Sir Joseph Banks (1743-1820), an English naturalist, botanist, explorer, patron of science,
      president of the Royal Society for more than four decades, and unquestionably one of the giants of the world of botany. He was born at Westminster. His father, grandfather and great-grandfather had all been members of Parliament. Joseph was educated at home and then attended Harrow in 1752 and Eton in 1756. He entered Christ Church, Oxford, in 1760. The local wildflowers at Eton had first drawn his interest, and discovering that there were no botany lectures at Oxford, he arranged for one from Cambridge. He was a person of considerable means, thanks to his wealthy family,
    and leaving Oxford he joined HMS Niger in 1766 and collected rocks, plants and animals in Newfoundland and Labrador, and then was elected a fellow of the Royal Society. When the Royal Society persuaded the Admiralty to send James Cook in command of an expedition to observe the transit of Venus, Banks was invited to join the expedition which included other naturalists and landscape and natural history artists. Banks made a personal contribution to the expedition of some £10,000. They sailed on the Endeavor in 1768. They made collections and observations at Rio de Janeiro, Tierra del Fuego, Tahiti, and during the survey of New Zealand. They also landed at Botany Bay and the Endeavor River in Australia noting plants, insects, molluscs, reptiles, birds, fish, quadrupeds, etc. as well as aboriginal customs. More observations were made along the coast of New Guinea, and further collections were made at the Cape and St. Helena. In 1772 he made an expedition to the Isle of Wight, the western islands of Scotland and Iceland. The following year he visited Holland and toured Wales. His London house, where Daniel Solander, one of his companions on the Niger, had been installed as secretary and librarian. In 1778 he was elected president of the Royal Society. He was one of those who testified before a House of Commons committee and strongly recommended Botany Bay as a location for a penal colony. He was a member of a vast number of professional and social societies, and gathered around him a number of fine botanists. He was involved with choosing captains for various expeditions, including William Bligh, and they competed to send him huge quantities of natural history material. Collectors for Banks and the King were sent out to the Cape, West Africa, the East Indies, South America, India, Australia and on world voyages. It was truly an amazing period, and it has been estimated that during George III's reign some 7,000 new exotic plants were introduced into England, chiefly by Banks. He became the acknowledged authority on New South Wales, and on an amazing range of other subjects: colonization, exploration, currency, botanic gardens, merino sheep, earthquakes, plant diseases and leather tanning. Even on the eve of death in a wheel chair and crippled by gout, his offer to resign as president of the Royal Society was roundly rejected. He died at his house at Spring Grove, Isleworth. The genus Banksia was published in 1782 by Carl Linnaeus the Younger.
  • bara'tum: I had originally thought that the many listings of Eriogonum barbatum as a synonym for this taxon was a clue that what is referred to is the quality of being bearded. Also the original description of the taxon contains mention of ciliate bristles among the pedicels which would seem to qualify as "bearded." However, I received with much appreciation the following from Dr. Jim Reveal: "There is no Eriogonum barbatum. Elmer proposed E. baratum in Botanical Gazette (39: 52. 1905) and distributed specimens with this name. The name was seemingly taken from the Greek baris, "a small boat," and the Latin -atus, "having the nature of," but I am uncertain of this. It would be unusual for Elmer to mix Greek and Latin. This word "baratum" is unique to this one entity in systematic botany." Originally published by Adolph Daniel Edward Elmer as Eriogonum baratum in 1905, and subsequently by Reveal in Brittonia as Eriogonum deflexum var. baratum in 1968, it was most recently published by Philip Munz in 1974 (the year that he died) in Flora of Southern California as Eriogonum deflexum ssp. baratum. Jaeger's Source-Book of Biological Names and Terms does give baris as Greek for an Egyptian flat-bottomed boat, but also as a castle or other similar structure. That same source says that Latin -atus is a suffix added to noun stems to form adjectives meaning "provided with." Reveal is correct that Greek and Latin epithets are not normally used together, and none of these meanings seem to have any botanical application, and so baratum must remain for the moment uncertain.
  • bar'barae: since the common name of this species is Santa Barbara jewelflower, I infer that this epithet relates to Santa Barbara, California.
  • Barbar'ea: named for St. Barbara, the patron saint of artillerymen and miners, as this plant in the past was used to soothe the wounds caused by explosions. It was once generally known as her herb, or the Herba Sanctae Barbarae. St. Barbara was an early Christian Lebanese and Greek saint and martyr. According to legend, after having expressed her belief in Christianity, she was dragged before the prefect of the province, Martinianus, who had her cruelly tortured, but Barbara held true to her Christian faith. During the night, the dark prison was bathed in light and new miracles occurred. Every morning, her wounds were healed. Torches that were to be used to burn her went out as soon as they came near her. Finally, she was condemned to death by beheading. Her father, a wealthy heathen named Dioscorus, carried out the death sentence himself. However, as punishment, he was struck by lightning on the way home and his body was consumed by flame. The genus Barbarea was published by William Townsend Aiton in 1812.
  • bar'barum: foreign.
  • barba'ta/barba'tus: from the Latin barba, "beard," barbed, bearded, furnished with long, weak hairs.
  • barbellula'tus: with very tiny short, stiff hairs or barbs.
  • barbig'er/barbig'era/barbig'erum: bearded.
  • barbino'dis: with beards at the nodes or joints.
  • barclaya'na/bar'clayi: named for George Barclay (col. 1835-1879), a botanist, gardener and plant collector sent out by Kew on the mission (1835-1840) of the HMS. Sulphur captained by Edward Belcher to Chile, Peru, Panama, the Sandwich Islands and the west coast of North America. His time on board was somewhat controversial and he was not entirely happy or satisfied with his position, being prevented from participating in some of the landings, but who nevertheless made a significant number of collections which were transported back to Kew. He was born in Huntley, Aberdeenshire, and died in Buenos Aires. There is some evidence that he became involved in a duel shortly after his arrival in Brazil and may have died in prison. The collection dates given above are from the Harvard University Herbaria list of botanists, and do not entirely correspond with his birth and death dates of c. 1789-1869 as given by the the National Archives at Kew.
  • Barkhau'sia: named for German physician and botanist Justus Christian Gottlieb Willibald Barckhausen (1748-1783), author of Specimen botanicum sistens fasciculum plantarum ex flora comitatus Lippiaci, which was basically just a plant list with no locality information. The genus Barkhausia in the Asteraceae was published by Conrad Moench in 1794. IPNI also lists a genus Barckhausia in the Asteraceae published by Augustin Pyramus de Candolle in 1815 (Tropicos says 1813) and a genus Barckhausenia in the Asteraceae now considered illegitimate published by Karl Theodor Mencke in 1854, which may or may not refer to the same plant.
  • barkleya'na/bark'leyi: named for American botanist Fred Alexander Barkley (1908-1989). He was born in Hobart,
      Oklahoma, and died in Tecumseh, Oklahoma. JSTOR says: “[He] held positions at various times in institutions across the United States, and in Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, and Jamaica. As curator of the Plant Resources Center at the University of Texas at Austin from 1945 to 1948, he increased the herbarium's Latin American holdings by establishing active plant collection programs in Texas and Mexico and initiating exchange programs with other herbaria. As a researcher, he was particularly interested in Begonia and authored a number of publications on the genus as well as
    more general texts on plant taxonomy.” He studied at the University of Oklahoma, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and got his undergraduate and masters degree. He then received a PhD degree from Washington University in St. Louis in 1937. He either taught at or ran departments at the University of Montana, the University of Baghdad in Iraq, and Northeastern University in Boston. He was the author of Begoniaceae: The genera, sections, and known species of each (1972) and co-author with Jack Golding, VP of the American Begonia Society, of The Species of the Begoniaceae (1974).
  • Barkworth'ia: named for Mary Elizabeth Barkworth (1941- ), an American agrostologist with the Intermountain
      Herbarium at Utah State University and professor emerita at Utah State University in Logan, Utah. She was born n Marlborough, England. She is the author of a number of papers on grasses, was lead editor of the Manual of Grasses for North America, published by Utah State, and contributor to the grass section of Flora of North America. Wikipedia outlines her career this way: "Barkworth has a B.Sc. from the University of British Columbia, and went on to teach school in British Columbia after graduation. She has an MEd and a PhD in 1975 from Western Washington University where
    she worked on variation in Brodiaea. Following her PhD she worked with Agriculture Canada until moving to Utah State University in 1979, where she also served as the director of the Intermountain Herbarium. Barkworth is known for her work on grasses, particularly members of the Stipeae and Triticeae, and she has worked to digitize collections at OpenHerbarium.org, which includes collections from Pakistan and Somaliland. In 2013 Barkworth established a collaboration with the Daggett County Jail whereby inmates helped catalogue specimens through a collaboration between the herbarium and the jail." She retired in 2012. The genus Barkworthia was published by Konstantin Romaschenko, Paul M. Peterson, and Robert John Soreng in 2019, and is now considered part of Achnatherum.
  • barnebya'na/bar'nebyi: named for Rupert Charles Barneby (1911-2000), acclaimed as one of the world’s leading
      taxonomists and a world expert in Fabaceae and Menispermaceae, who was born in England and educated at Harrow (1924-1929), where he met the aspiring fellow botanist Harry Dwight Dillon Ripley (1908-1973) (see ripleyi), who became his lifelong partner. He went on to Trinity College, Cambridge University (1930-1932), and after graduating his father threatened to disinherit him if he did not relinquish his relationship with Ripley. He never saw his father again. Early on the two men collected widely in the Mediterranean and North Africa, returning with many live plants for
    their garden at Sussex. He came with Ripley to the United States first in 1936, with the intention of collecting in Mexico as a substitute for Spain which was embroiled in civil war, but never made it to the Mexican border. They returned to California in 1937 and the following year established a holding garden for their collections from Death Valley and Titus Canyon. In 1939 they moved permanently to the US, settling in Los Angeles, and beginning systematically to search out and identify plants of the western United States and Mexico. Barneby established permanent residency in 1941, and from then until 1953 they collected together, although they moved their home to Wappingers Falls, New York, in 1943, Ripley in particular being attracted to the art scene there. Both at their home there and at the home they moved to in 1959 at Greenport, NY, they established renowned rock gardens filled with plants from the Southwest. Throughout most of the 1950s and 1960s Barneby collected by himself (although he and Ripley typically made an annual collecting trip out west), and then after 1971 with Noel and Patricia Holmgren. Ripley died in 1973 and Barneby continued this practice and made his last trip at the age of 81. In 1978 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from City University of New York. He had begun his long association with the New York Botanical Garden as a visiting scholar as early as 1943 and then was appointed honorary curator of western botany in 1980. He received almost every award the botanical field can give out, and the president of the NYBG described him as "one of the most productive botanists of the twentieth century, a giant in the field of botanical research." Over the course of his career, he published more than 6,500 pages of papers, monographs and journals, describing over 1,100 species new to science, being honored with 25 species and three genera being named for him! He was a self-taught botanist who was one of America's leading taxonomists. He was exceptionally well-liked and loved to mentor his students and indeed anyone who wished to learn. He was honored with the genus name Rupertia, published by James Walter Grimes in 1990. (Photo credit: LuEsther T. Mertz Library/The New York Botanical Garden)
  • barnes'ii: named for Charles Reid Barnes (1858-1910), an American botanist, and professor of plant physiology,
      University of Chicago. He was born in Madison County, Indiana, graduated from Hanover College in 1877 where one of his instructors was John Merle Coulter, and then studied at Harvard where he became friends with Asa Gray. He taught public schools for a few years and then became a professor of botany at Purdue University in 1882. He was called to the University of Wisconsin in 1887 and there for the next eleven years developed the department of botany. In 1898 he became professor of plant physiology at the University of Chicago. He shared the editorship of the
    Botanical Gazette with Coulter, and became a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1884 and a fellow in 1885, followed by a number of executive positions in that organization. He was also secretary of the Botanical Society of America from its organization in 1894 to 1898, and became its president in 1903, giving his retiring address at Philadelphia in 1904. In 1905 he was a delegate at the International Botanical Congress at Vienna. Barnes died in Chicago from injuries sustained in an accidental fall.
  • barrelier'i: named for French botanist, physician and Dominican friar Jacques Barrelier (1606-1673), author of
      Plantae per Galliam, Hispaniam per Galliam, Hispaniam et Italiam Observatae, Iconobus Aeneis Exhibitae (Paris, 1714). He was born in Paris and undertook extensive travels throughout France, Spain and Italy and spent 25 years in Rome, where he founded the botanical garden of the Saint-Xyste convent. During his time in Rome he worked on his magnum opus, which was later to become the Plantae per Galliam, for which he had an enormous amount of engravings made after his numerous drawings of plants. When he returned to Paris in 1672, he had stopped working on
    his great work, and in 1673 he died of an asthma attack. After his death, the text for the work was destroyed in a fire, but the engravings were saved, which made it possible for Antoine de Jussieu, brother of Bernard de Jussieu, about 40 years later to publish the work that Barrelier never came to finish himself. The work edited by de Jussieu contains 334 botanical plates, in folio, with 1,392 figures.
  • bartlettia'num: named for American botanist and biochemist Harley Harris Bartlett (1886-1960), an expert in tropical
      botany and an authority on Batak language and culture. He was born at Anaconda, Montana and moved with his family to Indiana when he was thirteen. He worked at his former high school in Indianapolis for two years as a teacher's assistant in botany and chemistry, and then studied chemistry at Harvard where he received a AB degree in 1908. While there he spent three years at the Gray Herbarium as an undergraduate assistant to B.L. Robinson and M.L. Fernald. He was hired as a chemical biologist by the Bureau of Plant Industry of the United States Department of
    Agriculture, where he worked on plant nutrition and biochemistry as well as taxonomy. He also began publishing on the genetics of the genus Oenothera. His first publication for the Bureau was on the taxonomy of Dioscorea, and he continued working on Oenothera, for which he eventually described some 45 species.  In 1915, Bartlett joined the faculty of the University of Michigan, where he eventually became full professor (1921), head of the botany department (1922-1947), and director of the botanical garden (1919-1955). His overseas trips included two to Sumatra where he first became interested in the ethnography of the Batak people. He undertook an exchange professorship with the University of the Philippines in 1934-35 and then was a visiting professor again after WWII. He was a prolific author of scientific papers and reviews, and ethnographic, ethnobotanical, and linguistic studies particularly in Indonesia and the Philippines. The herbarium at Michigan holds his original collections and approximately 60,000 specimens he acquired from resident collectors and other explorers in Asia and Australia. He was a member of the American Philosophical Society from 1929, and served terms as secretary, vice president and president of the Botanical Society of America. Bartlett remained in Ann Arbor after his retirement, where he died of heart failure on February 21, 1960. (Information partially excerpted from Wikipedia, JSTOR and Find-a-Grave) (Photo credit: Find-a-Grave)
  • Barton'ia: named for Benjamin Smith Barton (1766-1815), an American botanist, naturalist, and physician. He was
      born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the son of an Irish immigrant, the Rev. Thomas Barton, and studied at York Academy in Lancaster (1780-1782), then the College of Philadelphia School of Medicine. His uncle, David Rittenhouse, had been commissioned to survey the western boundary of Pennsylvania in 1785, and young Benjamin accompanied him, arousing in him an interest in natural history and native Americans. He transferred to the University of Edinburgh in 1786 where he studied for two years before leaving without a degree, possibly due to some financial irregularities
    involving an unpaid loan from the Royal Medical Society, of which he was a member. He was appointed as professor of natural history and botany in the medical department of the University of Pennsylvania. In 1791 he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Despite not having a degree he had begun practicing medicine and in 1796 he became professor of materia medica and was awarded (possibly through a purchase) an honorary degree of doctor of medicine by Christian-Albrechts University at Kiel which legitimized his practice. Eventually he succeeded to the professorship of the Theory and Practice of Medicine but continued to lecture in natural history and botany. He served as a physician at Pennsylvania Hospital from 1798 to his death in 1815. He was the author of Elements of botany, or Outlines of the natural history of vegetables (1803) which was the first American textbook on botany and which included illustrations of North American plants prepared by William Bartram. He also published a work on medicinal plants, Collections for An Essay Towards a Materia Medica of the United-States. From 1802 to 1805 Barton edited the Philadelphia Medical and Physical Journal, and in 1803, Barton founded the short-lived American Linnaean Society of Philadelphia. He published further works on rattlesnakes, archeology, linquistics and ethnography of native Americans.  He was the editor of the Philadelphia Medical and Physical Journal (1805–1808), one of the oldest scientific publications in the United States. He became a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1814, was president of the Philadelphia Medical Society, vice-president of the American Philosophical Society and was a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. He died of tuberculosis in New York City. (Partially excerpted from Wikipedia and JSTOR). The genus Bartonia was published by Gotthilf Heinrich Ernest Muhlenberg in 1801. (Photo credit: Find-a-Grave)
  • Bartram'ia: named for botanist, horticulturist and explorer John Bartram (1699-1777), founder of the Bartram botany
      family which included his son William Bartram (1739-1823), his granddaughter Ann Bartram Carr (1779-1858), and another direct descendent, Edwin Bunting Bartram (1878-1964). He was the man often referred to as ‘the American Linnaeus’ and the ‘father of American botany.’ Linnaeus himself referred to him as the greatest natural botanist in the world. He was born into a Quaker farm family near Darby, Pennsylvania, and was largely self-educated. Encyclopedia Britannica says: “Bartram was a friend of Benjamin Franklin and an original member of the American Philosophical Society.
    As a recognition of his work he was appointed as botanist for the American colonies by King George III. Bartram was the first North American experimenter to hybridize flowering plants, and he established near Philadelphia a botanical garden that became internationally famous. He collected and exported seeds and plants that were in great demand abroad and thus established friendships with European botanists. [He] made scientific forays into the Alleghenies, Carolinas, and other areas of North America, and in 1743 he was commissioned by the British crown to visit the Indian tribes of the League of Six Nations and to explore the wilderness north to Lake Ontario in Canada. In 1765–1766 he explored extensively in Florida with his son William, also a naturalist, whose Travels Through North & South Carolina, Georgia, East & West Florida (1791) greatly influenced English Romanticism.” He was the author in 1751 of Observations on the Inhabitants, Climate, Soil, Rivers, Productions, Animals, and other Matters Worthy of Notice, made by Mr. John Bartram in his Travels from Pennsylvania to Onondaga, Oswego, and the Lake Ontario, in Canada. He also wrote Diary of a Journey through the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida about a trip he took from July, 1765 to April, 1766. He made significant contributions by sending seeds from the New World to European horticulturists and many North American trees, shrubs and flowers were introduced into Europe because of his efforts. He sent seeds to Philip Miller at the Chelsea Physic Garden among others in England. His first wife, Mary Maris, bore him two sons and died in 1727, after which he married Ann Mendenhall who was the mother of five boys and four girls. Bartram's Garden remained the major botanic garden in Philadelphia until the last Bartram heirs sold out in 1850. He died at Darby. The genus Bartramia was published in 1801 by Johann Hedwig. (Photo credit: Mill Hill Preservation Society)
  • bartram'ii: named for Edwin Bunting Bartram (1878-1964), an American botanist and bryologist, and direct descendent of botanist John Bartram. He was born in Philadelphia and dropped out of high school to support his mother by working at the Insulated Wire Co. of Philadelphia as an office boy. He rose to the position of company manager before retiring at the age of 39. He made several botanical collecting trips with Merritt L. Fernald of Harvard University during that time and also began his botanical publishing career. Between 1909 and 1922 he published numerous papers on the flowering plants of Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Arizona, and his first publication on bryology appeared in 1922. He later became associate curator of the Bernice P. Bishop Museum in Honolulu and honorary curator of mosses of Farlow Herbarium of Harvard. Wikipedia says: “He described many dozens of new species in bryology, and contributed 143 works, including a number of books. He was a member of the Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia Botanical Club, Torrey Botanical Club, New England Botanical Club, and the Sullivant Moss Society. His collections and publications contributed to the growth of the Farlow Herbarium of Cryptogamic Botany.” His books included Mosses of Guatemala (1949), Mosses of the eastern highlands, New Guinea, from the 6th Archbold Expedition, 1959 (1965), Manual of Hawaiian mosses (1933), Costa Rican mosses collected by Paul C. Standley in 1924-1926 (1928), Honduran mosses collected by Paul C. Standley (1929), Mosses of the Philippines (1939), Contribution to the mosses of Fiji (1936), and Polynesian mosses (1933). He also published papers specifically about the mosses of Western Australia and Queensland in 1951 and 1952, and was a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Philadelphia Society of Friends. His eyesight began failing in the 1950s, limiting his ability to conduct research, and he died at his home in Bushkill, Pennsylvania.
  • Bartschel'la: named for Paul Bartsch (1871-1960), an American malacologist and carcinologist. He was born in
      Tuntschendorf, Silesia and emigrated with his parents to the US in 1880, first to Missouri and later to Burlington, Iowa. In his early years he developed an interest in nature, kept a small menagerie at home, and then collected birds and prepared skins. He entered the University of Iowa in 1893 and by that time had collected some 2,000 skins. Among his university professors were botanists, a geologist and a zoologist, and he graduated with a BS degree in 1896, an MS in 1899, and a PhD in 1905. In 1896 he was invited by William H. Dall to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington
    to serve as his assistant in the Division of Mollusks. In 1899 he became an instructor in zoology at the Columbian University (later George Washington University), but declined the next year a full-time professorship as he was more devoted to scientific research, although he continued to teach zoology until his retirement in 1945 as professor emeritus. He also became a lecturer in histology at the Medical School of Howard University in 1901, and later became director of the histology laboratory. The following year he became director of the physiology laboratory and lecturer in medical zoology, positions he held for 37 years. In 1902 he began the first scientific banding of birds, and in 1914 he became curator at the National Museum of Natural History of the combined divisions of mollusks and marine invertebrates. He sailed in 1907 on the steamer Albatross to collect specimens of marine and non-marine snails in Philippine waters and the China seas where over 87,000 specimens were catalogued, and 1909 found him on another voyage on the same ship along the coast from San Diego to Baja. In 1912 he sailed on the vessel Anton Dohrn to the Bahamas. Another expedition occurred in May and June 1914 with the schooner Thomas Barrera in Cuban waters. This made a lasting impression on Bartsch and led to his later expeditions to the Greater and Lesser Antilles, resulting in several publications on West Indian land snails. In 1915 he published his five-year study of South African marine mollusks and the following year studied shipworms at the request of the US Navy. Over the course of following years he conducted further trips to Florida, the Bahamas, Cuba and the West Indies, collecting more than half a million mollusks, as well as many other things. In 1922 he invented one of the first underwater cameras, and over the course of the rest of his life he continually studied marine organisms. He retired from the Smithsonian in 1956 after more than fifty years of dedicated service. The genus Bartschella was published by Nathaniel Lord Britton and Joseph Nelson Rose in 1923.
  • Bart'sia: named for Johann Bartsch or Bartsius (1709-1738) (Latin name Johannes Bartsius), a German botanist and physician of Königsberg.  He graduated in 1737 from Leiden University in the Netherlands. His graduating thesis was the only work he published. He became associated with Carl Linnaeus during the latter’s year-long visit to Herman Boerhaave at Leiden. Bartsch assisted Linnaeus with the publication of Flora Lapponica, and he was sent by Boerhaave to Suriname, where within six months he fell ill and died. I don;t know why the genus was spelled Bartsia and not Bartschia. The genus Bartsia was published by Carl Linaeus in his honor in 1753.
  • bartsiifo'lia: with leaves like genus Bartsia.
  • basal'tica: of or from basaltic regions or soils. David Hollombe contributes the following: "Potentilla basaltica occurs near the head of the west arm of the Black Rock Desert, named for the dark pinnacle at the south end of the Black Rock Range known as Black Rock Point. The point owes its color to a cap of basalt rock. Our specific epithet is intended to honor this seemingly desolate area of Nevada."
  • basilar'is: basal, stretching from the base, from basis, “a pedestal, foot, base,” and the adjectival suffix‎ -aris, "belonging or pertaining to."
  • Bas'sia: named for Ferdinando Bassi (1710-1774), an Italian botanist and prefect of the Bologna Botanical Garden. A website of the Coimbra Group hosted by the University of Edinburgh provides this description of him. “Ferdinando Bassi was born in Bologna in 1710 into a family of merchants and shipping agents. He studied natural sciences and soon became the assistant of the famous botanist Giuseppe Monti, an eminent representative of the Academy of Sciences. He introduced Bassi to the scientific world and, by letting him deal with the exchanges of scientific specimens for the Academy museum, allowed Bassi to get in touch with the chief Italian and European naturalists. As time passed, these relationships were maintained and intensified, and Bassi's name became very familiar amongst European scientists. The professional activity of Ferdinando Bassi was strongly connected, as far as his scientific research is concerned, with two main institutions, the botanic garden and the Academy of Sciences. In 1763 Bassi held the post of keeper of the Garden of Exotic Plants, a post he maintained throughout his lifetime. Under his direction, the garden became considerably larger and richer in species, and a new glasshouse was built, in which exotic plants were kept during the coldest months of the year. Bassi also expanded his contacts with other botanists, receiving plants and seeds from his correspondents. Thanks to the improved facilities of the garden, especially the new glasshouse, Bassi succeeded in cultivating new species, and in obtaining for the first time the flowering of poorly-known plants. These new findings were communicated to his correspondents, and to the Academy of Sciences. Bassi's research activities as a member of the Academy followed two main directions: a specialised one, focused on botany through the description of new plants and a better understanding of poorly-known species, and a more generalist one, aimed at a complete description of the natural environment of the surrounding territory. In those years, Bassi was in contact with Linnaeus, and communicated to him the main results of his botanical investigations, hoping to receive authoritative support of his findings. Unfortunately, a series of adverse circumstances consigned to oblivion what Bassi thought to be the crowning achievement of his works: the description of three new species (Cynanchum viminale, Alisma parnassifolia and Psoralea palaestina) and of the new genus Ambrosina, so that nowadays the name of Bassi in not very familiar amongst botanists and naturalists. Nevertheless, he was one of the most renowned scientists of the 18th century. At the time, there were only four noteworthy botanists in all of Italy, and Bassi was one of them.” The genus Bassia was published by Carlo Allioni in 1766.
  • Bat'is: from the Greek for the name of some seashore plant. The genus Batis was published by Patrick Browne in 1756.
  • batracho'pus: the name of a crocodilian dinosaur, but probably from a botanical perspective related to the genus Batrachium, from the Greek batrachos, "a frog," because of the resemblance of the leaves to a frog's foot.
  • Bat'schia: named for August Johann Georg Karl Batsch (1761-1802), a German naturalist and recognized authority on
      mushrooms who also described new species of ferns, bryophytes, and seed plants. He was born in Jena, Saxe-Weimar and then educated at the city school as well as having private tuition. He subsequently studied at the University of Jena from 1772 to 1781 when he was awarded his doctorate. He obtained a further doctorate in medicine in 1786 and began teaching natural history that same year and medicine the following year. He founded a botanical garden in Jena in 1790 and became a professor of philosophy in 1792. He discovered almost 200 new species of mushrooms
    and was the author of Elenchus Fungorum (Discussion of Fungi) between 1783 and 1789, and Versuch einer Anleitung zur Kenntniss und Geschichte der Pflanzen (Attempt at Instruction in the Knowledge and History of Plants) between 1787 and 1788. The genus Batschia was published by Johann Friedrich Gmelin in 1791.
  • battandier'i: named for Jules Aimé Battandier (1848-1922), a French pharmacist and botanist who was an authority on
      North African flora, particularly of Algeria. He was a native of Annonay, department of Ardèche. JSTOR says: “[Battandier] was employed as chief pharmacist at the Mustafa Hospital in Algiers before being appointed in 1879 professor of the faculty of medicine and pharmacy at the Medical University in Algiers. He was also government inspector of pharmacies. Battandier undertook a number of botanical collecting expeditions in Algeria and Tunia. The genus Battandiera was named in his honor and many North African plants including Cytisus battandieri, Ophrys battandieri and
    Viola battandieri.” Cytisus battandieri is commonly known as the Moroccan broom. He was also the co-author of Flore de L'Algerie. He died in Algiers.
  • baueria'na: named for Ernst Bauer (1860-1942). The following is quoted from JSTOR: “Czech (Bohemian) bryologist from Pisek who collected for a number of exsiccatae series. Ernst Bauer worked as a 'Finanz-Prokurator' as well as in the Prague government and was later based in Obersdorf city. His bryological collection of some 27,000 specimens is one of the most valuable assets of the Silesian Museum in Opava (OP). Bauer's publications include Beiträge zur Moosflora von Centralböhmen [Contributions to the moss flora of Central Bohemia] (1895) and Beiträge zur Moosflora Westböhmens [Contributions to the moss flora of West Boehemia] (1893). Bauer also published a large exsiccatae entitled Musci Europaei Exsiccati between 1903 and 1936.”
  • bauer'ii: named for John August Bauer (1825-1890), a German pharmacist and bryologist. David Hollombe provided this information. He studied at Collegium Carolinum, now the Technical University of Braunschweig. Born in Blankenburg (Harz), Germany, he left in 1848 and visited with his friend, the curator of the Botanical Garden of Rio de Janeiro, before going to California. He went to Mokelumne Hill, where he made some money gambling. After his first pharmacy burned down, he painted signs for a living and later surveyed for John Sutter and claimed 160 acres on Putah Creek. While there, he collected plants for George Ernst Ludwig Hampe. He then returned to San Francisco and the pharmacy business, serving two non-consecutive terms as Treasurer of San Francisco.
  • Bauhin'ia: named for Swiss herbalist and botanist brothers Gaspard Bauhin (1560-1624) and Jean Johannes Bauhin
      (1541-1613), both of whom were born in Switzerland to a French physician father, Jean Bauhin, who had fled his native country to escape persecution. Gaspard Bauhin was a botanist and physician who had studied medicine at Padua, Montpellier, and in Germany, received a medical degree, taught botany and anatomy, became a professor at the University of Basel, and then chair of anatomy and botany. He was the author of an index of plant names and synonyms called Pinax Theatri botanici which described and classified some 6,000 species. He introduced many names of genera that were later adopted by Linnaeus, and remain in use, and his system of nomenclature, while binomial, only in part predated that of Linnaeus. His names for genera and species were still either single or multiple word phrases that were descriptive, whereas Linnaeus used many names in honor of people that were not in any way descriptive of the plant. His principal work on anatomy was Theatrum Anatomicum infinitis locis auctum published in 1592. Jean Johannes Bauhin was the elder brother of Gaspard, botanist and physician, primary author of the great work Historia Plantarum universalis,
    a compilation of all that was then known about botany which contained detailed descriptions of 5,226 species (mostly from Europe) and 3,600 illustrations, and was published some thirty-seven years after his death. He had studied botany first at the University of Tübingen under Leonhard Fuchs and later at the University of Zürich under Conrad Gessner. Although it is not clear that he ever graduated with a medical degree, he nevertheless practiced medicine and set up a medical practice in Lyon in 1563, but five years later was forced to flee to Geneva because of religious persecution. At some point he was appointed professor of rhetoric at the University of Basel. He devoted himself chiefly to botany, travelled extensively in Europe and collected plants, and maintained several botanical gardens. He and his friend Conrad Gesner conducted seminal studies of alpine flora in the Rhaetian Alps, and also collected in Provence. In 1571 he became physician to Frederick I, Duke of Württemberg in Montbéliard and remained in that position throughout his life.  He established there a botanic garden and an archeological museum, and then in 1575 founded the College of Medical Practitioners. The genus Bauhinia was dedicated to him and his brother by Carl Linnaeus in 1753, perhaps because it has two-lobed leaves symbolizing the system of binomial nomenclature.
  • Bazzan'ia: named for Matteo Bazzani (1674-1749),an Italian physician and naturalist born at Bologna. An essay on him in a website called Amazon Web Services provides this information. "He studied at the University of Bologna and graduated in philosophy and medicine on 5 March, 1698, in his fourth year. Most of his research was on bone growth. He obtained his degree in 1700 and the next year was appointed professor of anatomy. For several years he taught theoretical and practical medicine, building up a reputation as a doctor, anatomist, naturalist and a fluent writer of Latin, and was president of the Bologna Academy of Sciences until December 1711. Matteo Bazzani supported the scientific work of others. In 1733, when physicist Laura Bassi (1711–1778) became the second woman to receive a university degree and the first to be offered an official teaching position at any university in Europe, he made an impressive oration praising her talents and drawing attention to the long heritage of learned women associated with the University of Bologna. He was also a patron of Pier Antonio Micheli (1679–1737), Italian botanist, mycologist, plant collector, professor at Pisa and curator of the Florence botanical garden, after whom Linneaus in 1737 named Michelia in the Magnoleaceae – a group of trees and shrubs (now included in Magnolia) that have become popular ornamentals in New Zealand. After many years of tireless work at the university, Bazzani retired and became emeritus professor in 1739. He died at Bologna on 20 December 1749." The genus Bazzania was published by Samuel Frederick Gray in 1821.
  • bealia'num: named for Mary A. Beal (1878-1964). The following is quoted from Wikipedia: “…pioneering botanist
      who spent most of her life in Daggett, California, living at the ranch of local judge Dix Van Dyke. Though an amateur botanist, she was praised by Willis Linn Jepson for her excellent botanical specimens, and many of these were kept by the University and Jepson Herbaria to this day. She wrote a regular botany column for the Desert Magazine from 1939-1953. Back-issues of this publication are available online today through Desert Magazine. Some of her papers are held at the Mojave Desert Heritage and Cultural Association and some of her paintings of Mojave Desert
    flowers are held at the Mojave River Valley Museum in Barstow, California. Other papers and plant specimens are held at the archives of the University and Jepson Herbaria at the University of California, Berkeley.” Another website reports that she had come west for her asthma on the advice of her doctor, lived in a rustic cabin and went about by burro collecting native plant specimens. She was unmarried and between 1939 and 1953, she contributed 56 plant profiles to Desert Magazine. She was a passionate, dedicated, self-taught plant collector who loved the West and the wildflowers she sought.
  • beamish'ii: named for Canadian botanist Katherine I. Beamish (1912-2003). She was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Her first three years were spent with her family in Vancouver before returning to their farm. In 1925 they headed west again. She graduated from high school in Burnaby in 1930 and started teaching at Edmonds school for $800.00 a year in February 1931. She taught there for ten years and at the Kitchener Street School for two years. She joined the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1943 and after training in Ottawa, she was assigned to Halifax and then to Gander, Newfoundland, returning to Vancouver in 1946. She resigned from the Burnaby School and entered the University of British Columbia to take her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in science and agriculture, graduating in 1951. She next moved to Madison, Wisconsin where she received a PhD in genetics and botany in 1954. She returned to Vancouver in 1955 to teach at UBC and retired in 1997.
  • bean'ii: named for Russell Roland Bean (1913-1993), a ‘guard with forest ranger duties’ in Dixie National Forest who guided Ira Waddel Clokey, and later was an engineer for the Union Pacific Railroad. He was born in Provo, Utah, and died in Las Vegas.
  • beanea'nus: named for artist Lawrence Beane (1901-1978). He was born in Arkansas and was a resident of Los Angeles by 1930, but then relocated to Fresno County where he lived until his death. He was an art teacher at Clovis Adult School and at one time sketched wildflowers in the San Joaquin Valley as part of a research project for the Department of Agriculture.
  • beards'leyi: named for Amos Foster Beardsley (c.1820-1869). He was born in New York state and died in San Francisco.
  • beat'leyae: named for Janice Carson Beatley (1919-1987), a member of the Nevada Native Plant Society, botanist and
      ecologist who did extensive work in the Mojave Desert, and author in 1965 of Ecology of the Nevada Test Site and in 1973 of Checklist of Vascular Plants of the Nevada Test Site and Central-Southern Nevada. The following is quoted from an article by Ronald Stuckey in the May 1990 issue of Taxon, the journal of the International Association for Plant Taxonomy: "Janice Carson Beatley, native Ohio botanist of the United States, will be remembered for her contributions toward the understanding of the wintergreen herbaceous flora of the deciduous forest region, the primeval
    forests of the unglaciated plateau in southeastern Ohio, and the ecological relationships of the vascular-plant flora of the Atomic Test Site in south-central Nevada. Throughout her professional life, Dr. Beatley was an outspoken advocate for ecological and environmental concerns while employed in seven different academic and research institutions and through active memberships in seven societies, whose mission is to save habitats and environments of natural areas. In her last academic appointment as a professor of biological sciences at the University of Cincinnati (1973-1987), Dr. Beatley taught courses in plant ecology and field botany and continued her research on the flora of the Nevada Test Site. In that capacity she fulfilled a long dream of returning to Ohio and teaching in the same department where Dr. E. Lucy Braun, the eminent plant ecologist, taught for 34 years and maintained her lifetime affiliation. Miss Beatley was educated in the Columbus public school system, graduating from North High School (1935). All other college degrees were from The Ohio State University: BA (cum laude, 1940) with a major in zoology, MS (1948) and PhD (1953), both in botany with research in plant ecology. While a graduate student, she assisted in the general botany program and held appointments as an assistant, assistant instructor, and instructor, in addition to a pre-doctoral university scholarship (1953), a postdoctoral Mary S. Muelhaupt Scholarship (1957-1958), and instructorships in general botany (1955-1956). Other professional positions included science teacher, McArthur High School in Ohio (1943-1945), instructor in botany, University of Tennessee (spring-summer 1952; summers 1953-1955) and later acting assistant professor (summers 1957, 1959-1960); assistant professor, East Carolina College, Greenville (1954-1955); acting assistant professor, North Carolina State University, Raleigh (1956-1957); research associate, New Mexico Highlands University (1959); assistant (1960-1967) and associate (1967-1973) research ecologist, Laboratory of Nuclear Medicine and Radiation Biology, University of California, Los Angeles, and the Nevada Test Site at Mercury, Nevada; associate professor (1973-1977) and professor (1977-1987) of biological sciences, University of Cincinnati; and research associate in the Herbarium of The Ohio State University (1983-1987). Janice Beatley's research efforts were ambitious, being stimulated and directed by Professor John N. Wolfe, under whom she complete both degrees. Her master's thesis "The Wintergreen Herbaceous Angiosperms of Ohio" (1948) was published in the Ohio Journal of Science (56: 349-377, 1956), and her doctoral dissertation, "The Primary Forests of Vinton and Jackson Counties, Ohio" (1953) was prepared as a Bulletin of the Ohio Biological Survey. Miss Beatley's study of the wintergreen herbaceous flora is believed to be the first comprehensive study of its kind for any geographical area of North America. Initially, more than 1,000 species of plants from various habitats in central and southern Ohio were studied over a 3-year period in their winter condition in the field and in the greenhouse. She provided an ecological classification, descriptions of the plants, and a taxonomic key for 287 species, about 16% of Ohio's herbaceous flowering plant species. Miss Beatley's study of the forests of Vinton and Jackson counties was conducted to recognize and describe the major primeval or primary forests which occurred there immediately prior to European settlement. She also correlated these forest communities and their distribution patterns with factors of their physical environment. During 40 years previous, a major program in the then Department of Botany and Plant Pathology at The Ohio State University, was aimed at mapping the natural vegetation types of Ohio. This long-range study was fostered and guided by Drs. Edgar N. Transeau and Homer C. Sampson. Janice's study was an important contribution to that effort, because it was conducted in one of the most heavily forested regions remaining in Ohio. It also was located on the unglaciated Allegheny Plateau near the peripheries of the Illinoian and Wisconsinan glacial boundaries and near former valley and tributaries of the ancient preglacial Teays River. This two-county region had for 20 years previous been recognized as one of unusual botanical interest, because of the extensive numbers of species known to be in Liberty Township, Jackson County, based on the field collections of Floyd Bartley and Leslie L. Pontius. It was believed that here occurred the greatest number of vascular-plant species of any comparable size in the state, and upon completion of the study, 1,100 species (about half of Ohio's vascular-plant species) were recorded from the 42-square-mile area of Liberty Township. Miss Beatley's comprehensive study was based on field work of approximately 140 days during three years (1950-1953) driving over 20,000 miles in the two-county area of 837 square miles. Published by The Ohio Biological Survey, and long since out-of-print because of its thoroughness and usefulness. Dr. Beatley dedicated the Bulletin to Drs. Transeau and Sampson, "whose understanding of the landscape and its problems are the foundations upon which rest this and future studies of Ohio Vegetation." Dr. Beatley's career research was conducted at the Nevada Atomic Test Site in south-central Nevada, where, for 13 years (1960-1973), she studied the region's ecological-floristic relationships. At least 36 published papers and 11 abstracts are cited in her bibliography. Among the major topics published are: annotated check-lists of the vascular plants, geographical distribution, effects of radioactive and non-radioactive dust, status of introduced species, survival of winter annuals, relationships of plants to precipitation, discovery of new species, endangered and threatened species. Her most comprehensive study resulted in a 316-page book, Vascular Plants of the Nevada Test Site and Central-southern Nevada: Ecological and Geographic Distributions (1976), published by the National Technical Information Service, Springfield, Virginia. The entire region studied, containing some 25 mountain ranges, lies within the Basin and Range Province, between the Colorado Plateau to the east, the Sierra-Cascade Province to the west, and the Death Valley region to the south. The region essentially was unknown biologically at the outset of Dr. Beatley's study. The major plant associations are described on the basis of floristic composition and in relation to physiographic, geologic, edaphic, and climatic features. Emphasis is on the drainage basins of the Nevada Test Site, where Dr. Beatley studied the vegetation, flora, and physical environments for more than a decade. Janice Beatley had definite opinions about certain ecological concepts and processes. For example, she did not believe in the concept of competition, as revealed in a letter of 15 January 1978, to Charles C. King, director of the Ohio Biological Survey: "... the existence of 'competition' has rarely been proved under field conditions; . . . the theories relating to it are just that-theories-and are based on laboratory studies almost exclusively." To support her own viewpoint having "lived on the desert for 13 years," she cited her study of the "Effects of rainfall and temperature on the distribution and behavior of Larrea tridentata (creosote-bush) in the Mojave Desert of Nevada" (Ecology 55: 260, 1974) where populations of tall, large diameter plants were correlated with higher rainfall and lower temperatures; whereas, plants in populations with low or reduced densities "were more difficult to explain." "In view of the low percentage of germinable seed produced probably in most years by these [low density] populations,. . . [it] seem[s] most likely to be the result of failure of the reproductive process through time to maintain the populations at high densities. There is no evidence to suggest that "competition' with other shrub species plays any significant role in maintaining these low densities of Larrea." The anonymous author of a short notice about Janice Beatley's life (Bull. Ecol. Soc. Amer. 69(2): 114. 1988) evaluated her 13 years of botanical research at the Nevada Atomic Test Site as follows: "Janice's long-term measurements and observations of germination and growth of desert plants led to an improved understanding of the importance of winter rainfall in setting the stage for events during the ensuing growing season. She showed that, contrary to prevailing views, survival and germination of annuals varied from year to year depending on soil moisture and temperatures in the critical months following germination. These insights have proven important in subsequent interpretations of variation in above-ground net production by plants in the northern Mohave Desert." With Dr. James L. Reveal of the University of Maryland, Dr. Beatley published names and descriptions of new species of vascular plants discovered on the Nevada Test Site. Dr. Reveal also published new taxa from her specimens. Three species commemorate her name: Astragalus beatleyae Barneby, Eriogonum beatleyae Reveal, and Phacelia beatleyae Reveal and Constance. Dr. Beatley's other research interests included a publication on "The sunflowers (Helianthus) in Tennessee" (J. Tenn. Acad. Sci. 38: 135-154, 1963), and on the "Distribution of buckeyes (Aesculus) in Ohio" (Castanea 44: 150-163, 1979). The latter study, begun while a graduate student in the early 1950s, was followed with extensive field studies in 1958 and completed in 1976-1978. The buckeyes were one of her favorite botanical endeavors, and Dr. Clara G. Weishaupt, her good friend and then curator of The Ohio State University Herbarium, was a frequent companion on these "buckeye" field trips of the 1950s. Another field botanical friend was Mr. Floyd Bartley who accompanied her while on field work in Jackson and Vinton counties. Dr. Beatley was member of a number of professional scientific organizations, including the Ecological Society of America, American Society of Plant Taxonomists, the Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee academies of science, California Botanical Society, Association of Southeastern Biologists, Southern Appalachian Botanical Club, and the Northern Nevada Native Plant Society."
  • Beaucar'nea: named for Jean-Baptiste Beaucarne (1802-1889), a well-known 19th century Belgian plant collector. He was a notary and a passionate cultivator who was the first to make the Beaucarnea recurvata flourish. The genus Beaucarnea was published by (Antoine) Charles Lemaire in 1861.
  • beaudet'tei: named for Palmer Thayer Beaudette (1914-1968). He was born in Pontiac, Michigan and died in Santa Barbara, California. He was married to Cobina Wright and had three sons and a daughter. He financed the Beaudette Foundation for Biological Research. He was also honored with the amphipod genus Beaudettia.
  • Beb'bia/bebbia'na: named for Michael Schuck Bebb (1833-1895), an amateur systematic botanist and a distinguished
      American specialist on willows in both America and Europe. His interest in botany and horticulture was born from his boyhood on a farm in Ohio where he read about plants and began collecting and preparing botanical specimens. His father became active in politics, campaigned for William Henry Harrison in two election years, and in 1846 became the governor of Ohio. Later the young Bebb moved with his family to Illinois where he encountered and learned new plants. He established a relationship with George Vasey which continued throughout the years and also began corresponding
    with Asa Gray and Henry Nicholas Bolander. In 1861, after marrying, he moved his family to Washington, DC. where he worked in the Pensions Office. He joined the Naturalists Club and continued collecting new plants. Two years after his wife died in 1865, he remarried, resigned from the Pensions Office and moved the family back to Illinois, beginning what would become his special study of the genus Salix. Through his study and writing he became the preeminent authority on willows. The genus Bebbia was published by Edward L. Greene in 1885, and he had several other taxa named in his honor. (Photo credit Missouri Botanical Garden)
  • beccabun'ga: Various suggestions have been made for the derivation of this epithet, and they are all clearly related. Gledhill says: "from an old German name backbungen, 'mouth-smart or streamlet-blocker.' " The website First Nature says the origin of the word beccabunga is the Dutch word beekbunge, and in Belgium and Flanders they have similar folk names for this plant. The words beek, bech and bach all mean brook or creek. Another site says from the Flemish bachpunge. Finally Wikipedia says the species name beccabunga comes from Danish bekkebunge, literally "brook bunch." The species in California is Veronica beccabunga, commonly called European speedwell or brooklime.
  • Beckman'nia: named for German botanist Johann Beckmann (1739-1811). The following is quoted from Wikipedia:
      "[Beckmann] was a German scientific author and coiner of the word 'technology,' to mean the science of trades. He was the first man to teach technology and write about it as an academic subject. He was born on June 4, 1739 at Hoya in Hanover, where his father was postmaster and receiver of taxes. He was educated at Stade and the university of Göttingen, where he studied theology, mathematics, physics, natural history and public finance and administration. After completing his studies, in 1762 he made a study tour through Brunswick and the Netherlands
    examining mines, factories and natural history museums. The death of his mother in 1762 having deprived him of his means of support, he went in 1763 on the invitation of the pastor of the Lutheran community, Anton Friedrich Büsching, the founder of the modern historic statistical method of geography, to teach natural history in the Lutheran academy, St Petersburg, Russia. This office he relinquished in 1765, and travelled in Denmark and Sweden during 1765-1766, where he studied the methods of working the mines, factories and foundries as well as collections of art and natural history. He made the acquaintance of Linnaeus at Uppsala. His travel diary of these journeys Schwedische Reise in den Jahren 1765-1766 was published in Uppsala in 1911. In 1766 he was appointed extraordinary professor of philosophy at Göttingen. There he lectured on political and domestic economy, and in 1768 he founded a botanic garden on the princples of Linneaus. Such was his success that in 1770 he was appointed ordinary professor. He was in the habit of taking his students into the workshops, that they might acquire a practical as well as a theoretical knowledge of different processes and handicrafts. While thus engaged he determined to trace the history and describe the existing condition of each of the arts and sciences on which he was lecturing. But even Beckmann's industry and ardour were unable to overtake the amount of study necessary for this task. He therefore confined his attention to several practical arts and trades; and to these labors we owe his Beiträge zur Geschichte der Erfindungen (1780-1805), translated into English as the History of Inventions, Discoveries and Origins (1797, 4th ed., 1846) a work in which he relates the origin, history and recent condition of the various machines, utensils, etc., employed in trade and for domestic purposes. This work entitles Beckmann to be regarded as the founder of scientific technology, a term which he was the first to use in 1772. Beckmann's approach was that of a scholar working in the Enlightenment, and his analytical writings on technology mirrored the work of Diderot and his Encyclopedie, and the Descriptions des Arts et Metiers. He must have been inspired by the taxonomic work of Linnaeus and the Bibliothtecae of Albrecht von Haller. Nothing similar was being produced in English at that time. He was the first to write historical and critical accounts of the techniques of craft and manufacture and publish classifications of techniques. His goal was to produce a survey which would inspire others to make useful improvements. In 1772 Beckmann was elected a member of the Royal Society of Göttingen, and he contributed valuable scientific dissertations to its proceedings until 1783, when he withdrew from all further share in its work. He was also member of scientific societies in Celle, Halle, Munich, Erfurt, Amsterdam, Stockholm and St. Petersburg. In 1784 he was appointed a councillor to the Hanoverian Court. He died on the 3rd of February 1811." He was the author of numerous other works. The genus Beckmannia was published by Nicolaus Thomas Host in 1805.
  • beckwith'ii/Beckwith'ia: named for Edward Griffin Beckwith (1818-1881), "...soldier, born in Cazenovia, New York,
      25 June 1818; died in Clifton, New York, 22 June 1881. He was graduated at West Point in 1842, served in the war with Mexico at Tampico and Vera Cruz. In the civil war he served as chief of commissariat of the 5th Army Corps, and of the Army of Virginia, and in fitting out General Banks' Louisiana expedition. He was Provost-Marshal-General of the Department of the Gulf in 1863, in command of the defenses of New Orleans from 25 August 1863 until 12 January 1864, also for a time chief commissary of the Department, was made Major on 8 February 1864, and received the
    brevet rank of Brigadier-General, United States Army, on 13 March 1865, for faithful and meritorious services during the war. After the war he was employed in the Subsistence Department." (Quoted from Virtual American Biographies) Wikipedia adds that he was also "engaged in the Pacific Railroad Survey from 1853 to 1857 with John Williams Gunnison. Notably, the First transcontinental railroad followed his recommended route. His report, which also included an extensive survey of the Great Salt Lake, contained 'much information on the plants, animals, climate, and geographical features of the lands he had explored.' He succeeded Gunnison as leader of the survey after his death, and personally recommended the route for the railroad. He was also involved with constructing military roads in Nebraska and Kansas, between 1857 and 1859." The genus Beckwithia was published by Willis Linn Jepson in 1898.
  • beecheya'na: named for Frederick William Beechey (1796-1856), an English naval officer, artist, explorer,
      hydrographer, author and geographer. Both of his parents, three of his brothers and his daughter were all painters. He was born in London and entered the Royal Navy at the age of ten and a year later was rated a Midshipman. He served on several ships, in 1815 distinguishing himself in the British attack on New Orleans and being promoted to Lieutenant. In 1818 he served under John Franklin in David Buchan's Arctic expedition. In 1821 he was part of a survey of the Mediterranean coast of Africa and in 1825 was appointed to command HMS Blossom to explore the Bering Strait,
    a voyage that lasted more than three years. In 1835 he participated in a coast survey of South America and then from 1837 to 1847 along the Irish coasts, the North Sea and the English Channel.His tidal charts published by the Royal Society in 1848 and 1851 were the first since those of Edmund Halley in 1802. He presided over the Marine Department of the Board of Trade in 1850 and was made a rear-admiral in 1854 then became president of the Royal Geographical Society the next year. He was the author of two volumes of travel: Voyage of the Dorothea towards the North Pole 1818 (1843), and Narrative of a voyage to the Pacific and Bering 's Strait in HMS. Blossom 1825-28 (1831). The importance of Beechey as one of the first artists and explorers of Canada’s Arctic regions is seen in the many sketches and observations he made of the territory during his voyages of exploration. Beechey Island, where Sir John Franklin overwintered, was named by him after his father.
  • beenia'na: named for Frank Theodore Béen (1899-1992), a superintendent of Mt. McKinley/Denali National Park, 1939 to 1943 and again from 1947 to 1949. He had previously been a park naturalist at Sequoia National Park. He was born in Brooklyn and died in Orange County, California.
  • beeringia'num: of or from the Bering region, this being a species called Bering chickweed and often found in Greenland, the Yukon, Northwest Territories, Arctic islands and other northern areas as well as in the High Sierras and the White & Inyo Mts.
  • behr'ii: named for German-American doctor, entomologist and botanist Hans Hermann Behr (1818-1904). He was
      born in Köthen, Germany, and died in San Francisco. Wikipedia says: “He attended schools in Köthen and Zerbst where he studied Greek, Latin, Hebrew and mathematics. As a boy he developed an interest in natural history, including collecting birds' eggs. In 1837 he began his study of medicine, first at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg and later at the Humboldt University of Berlin where he graduated in 1843 as doctor of medicine. (In 1898, on his eightieth birthday, he was given the unusual honor of having his degree renewed by the University of Berlin
    at the recommendation of Rudolf Virchow.) Whilst at Wittenberg he had developed an interest in botany and a passing interest in the sport of duelling which left him with scars on his face.” Alexander von Humboldt was a friend and mentor and encouraged him to go to Australia in 1844 to study botany and entomology. He spent over a year in South Australia collecting insect and botanical specimens and sending reports back to Europe. Returning to Germany in 1845, the small vessel he was on was attacked by pirates near Bali but all on board survived, and they made it to Cape Town and eventually to Amsterdam. He spent the next couple of years publishing on the flora and insects of Australia. Because of a tense political situation in Germany, his father arranged for him to go back to Australia and he sailed as a ship’s surgeon to Adelaide via Rio de Janeiro. He spent another year there and then travelled to the Philippines where he practiced medicine for seven months and then sailed for the US. He lived in San Francisco for the next 54 years, returning briefly to Germany in 1853 to get married. He practiced medicine and collected plants and insects, studying the relationship between them. He was named a professor of botany by the California Pharmaceutical Society in 1872 and vice-president of the California Academy of Sciences in 1895, and then became curator of entomology three years later. He was the author of the book The Plants of the Vicinity of San Francisco.
  • belenid'ium: this is not clear to me, but Brown's Composition of Scientific Words has a listing for belenium, from the Greek belenion, as a name for a kind of plant, and the suffix -idium is used as a diminutive, so perhaps this means something like "a small plant." There is or was also a genus Belenidium with a species candolleanum. The taxon in the California flora is Thymophylla pentachaeta var. belenidium, commonly called five-needled thymophylla or five-needled prickly-leaf.
  • bel'la/bel'lum/bel'lus: handsome, from Latin bella, femine form of bellus, "beautiful, fair."
  • bellado'na: from Stearn's Dictionary of Plant Names: "Italian word meaning beautiful lady. Specific epithet of Atropa and Amaryllis. Ladies used it to give brilliancy to the eyes - a property of the juice being to dilate the pupil. That vision was affected was probably not considered important." Although the species Atropa belladona is the deadly poisonous member of the nightshade family known to the world as belladona, the bulbs of Amaryllis belladona also contain some alkaloid compounds similar to those in Atropa and are also toxic if ingested.
  • Bellar'dia/bellar'dii: after Carlo Antonio Lodovico Bellardi (1741-1826), an Italian doctor, botanist, mycologist, bryologist, algologist and pteridologist, and a professor of botany at Turin, Italy. He was a pupil of the Italian botanist Carlo Allioni. He was the author of a work published in 1808 entitled Stirpes novæ, vel minus notæ Pedemontii descriptæ et iconibus illustratæ which was about new and little known plants of the Piedmont region where he had collected plants. The genus Bellardia was published by Carlo Allioni in 1785.
  • bell'iae: named for Rose May Bell Zundel (1886-1954), the wife of American mycologist, phycologist, and plant pathologist George Lorenzo Ingram Zundel.
  • bellidiflor'a: with flowers like the daisy, genus Bellis.
  • bellidifo'lia: with leaves like genus Bellis.
  • bellidifor'me: daisy-like, having the form of genus Bellis.
  • bellingeria'na/bellingeria'num: named for Grover Cleveland Bellinger (1884-1956) and Hattie Caroline Beckley Bellinger (1887-1978).
  • bellio'ides: resembling genus Bellis.
  • Bel'lis: from the Latin bellus for "pretty." The genus Bellis is called English daisy and was published by Carl Linnaeus in 1753.
  • Belopero'ne: from the Greek belos, "an arrow," and perone, "something pointed." The genus Beloperone was published by Christian Gottfried Daniel Nees von Esenbeck in 1832.
  • benedic'tus: well-spoken of, blessed, from Latin benedictus.
  • beneo'lens: good-smelling (compare graveolens, "strong- or ill-smelling," suaveolens, "sweet-smelling").
  • benghalen'sis: of Bengal, India, of uncertain application, though an undoubted reference to the region where such named plants originated.
  • beniten'sis: same as next entry.
  • Benito'a: named for San Benito County (this county and surrounding areas are the range for this genus). The genus Benitoa was published by David Daniels Keck in 1956.
  • ben'neri: named for botanist Walter MacKinnett Benner (1888-1970). He was born in Souderton, Pennsylvania. He obtained a BS degree from Muhlenberg College in 1920 and began teaching biology at Central High School in 1925. He worked there until his retirement in 1954. He received a master's degree from the University of Pennsylvalia in 1926 and from 1928 to 1932 was president of the Philadelphia Botanical Club. Also in 1932 he became a research associate in botany at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. In 1932 he published a Flora of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and received a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. From 1958 to 1962 he was acting chairman of the department of botany at the Academy of Natural Sciences and from then until 1967 he was a scientific advisor in the same department. From 1962 to 1967 he was again president of the Philadelphia Botanical Club. He was a victim of Parkinson's disease and died at the age of 82.
  • Benson'ia/Bensoniel'la: named for Gilbert Thereon Benson (1896-1928), librarian of the Dudley Herbarium at Stanford University and co-author with Roxana Ferris of The Trees and Shrubs of Western Oregon (1930). The genus Bensoniella was published by Conrad Vernon Morton in 1965, and the genus Bensonia was published in 1929 by Leroy Abrams and Rimo Carl Felici Bacigalupi.
  • benson'ii: named for Lyman David Benson (1909-1993), an American botanist from California who did extensive
      work on the Cactaceae and the taxonomy of Ranunculus. He was born and raised on a pear farm north of San Francisco. His uncle had been president of the California Audubon Society and that no doubt influenced him greatly. In 1926 he enrolled in a journalism program at Stanford but switched to botany. He received an MA (1931) and a PhD (1938) degree from Stanford. While in graduate school he taught botany and zoology at Bakersfield Junior College and then was hired as an instructor and botanist at the University of Arizona. He transferred to Pomona College in 1944
    as associate professor, chairman of the botany department, and director of the herbarium. At that time his personal herbarium consisted of some 21,000 specimens. He also taught at Claremont Graduate School and was promoted to full professor in 1949 and was named professor emeritus in 1974 after his retirement. His books include The Cacti of Arizona (1940), Trees and Shrubs of the Southwestern Deserts (1944, 1954, 1981), Plant Classification (1957, 1979), Plant Taxonomy, Methods and Principles (1962), and The Native Cacti of California (1969). His final work was the monumental Cacti of the United States and Canada (1982), the result of 48 years of research. Dr. Lyman David Benson died in Portola Valley, California after a long illness.
  • bentham'ii: named for George Bentham (1800-1884), an English botanist, taxonomist, author, president of the Royal
      Society, and a fellow of the Linnaean Society of London. He was born in Devon and became interested in botany while living with his parents in France. From 1826 to 1832 he managed his father's estate and worked as secretary to his uncle, the famous jurist and philospher Jeremy Bentham, at the same time studying law. His passion for botany and taxonomy however displaced his interest in legal matters, and the deaths of his uncle and father with the inheritance he received allowed him to give up the law in 1833, having already published Catalog of the Indigenous
    Plants of the Pyrenees and Lower Langedoc in 1826 in Paris and Outlines of a New System of Logic in England in 1827. From 1832 until 1836 he specialized in the mint family and published Labiatarum Genera et Species in eight volumes. Then he turned his attention to the Scrophulariaceae and the Fabaceae, producing equally extensive materials on those two huge families. For years he worked on describing specimens that had been collected by others, Eriogonums procured by David Douglas, many of Karl Hartweg's specimens from Mexico and California, and also many of the plants collected on the voyage of the HMS Sulpher. In 1854 he donated his botanical collection of more than 100,000 specimens to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, at which time he was pursuaded to establish permanent quarters there by the director, William Hooker, and he worked there for the remainder of his life, producing among other things his Flora Hongkongensis (1861) and the seven-volume Flora Australiensis. His major work was a collaboration between himself and Hooker's son, Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, the Genera Plantarum (1862-1883), which is still considered one of the standards of plant classification. He also published the Handbook of British Flora in 1858, and this too remains a standard work. George Bentham made a massive contribution to the fields of botany and taxonomy, was a prolific author and was the preeminent describer of species of his time.
  • berberidifo'lia: with leaves like those of Berberis, the barberry.
  • Ber'beris: the Latinized form of the Arabic name for the fruit. The genus Berberis was published by Carl Linnaeus in 1753.
  • berchtol'dii: named for Count Friedrich Carl Eugen Vsemir von Berchtold, Baron von Ungarschitz (1781-1876), a
      German-speaking Bohemian botanist and physician of Austrian descent. He was born in Stráž nad Nežárkou in the Ausrian empire and graduated from medical school in 1804,  after which he practiced medicine and devoted much of his time to botany and natural history. He gradually began giving up his medical practice in the 1830s and travelled extensively throughout Europe, the Middle East, the Orient, and Brazil from 1836 to 1855. He collaborated with and co-authored several important research papers with the botanists Carl Borivoj Presl and his brother Jan Svatopluk Presl.
    He was involved in the creation of the Prague National Museum. He died in Buchlau (now Buchlovice), Moravia (now part of the Czech Republic). He was honored with the genus name Berchtoldia which was published by Carl Presl in 1830.
  • ber'geri: named for Matthew C. Berger (1990- ). His brief bio on Calphotos says "Passionate backpacker, hiker and flora and fauna enthusiast. Lives in Redding, California. Bachelors degree in horticulture, master of science in plant pathology. Hobby photographer of plants, fungi and animals I encounter on all my adventures." A personal communication from Matt for which I thank him provides this info: "I'm from Loveland, Ohio. I went to West Virginia University in Morgantown, WVa, where I earned my bachelor's degree in horticulture and my master's degree in plant pathology. I am a passionate hiker and long distance backpacker. I've completed the Appalachian Trail, Pacific Crest Trail and Continental Divide Trail, all while photograping the interesting native plant species I encountered along the way. I became interested in plants in Boy Scouts, when I saw all sorts of interesting plants on our campouts and adventures. I was first interested in insects, and would collect native plants seeds on Boy Scout trips which I then planted in my garden at home in order to attract the insects I wanted to see, and in the process became obsessed with the plants themselves. I am especially interested in desert plants, with the Great Basin and Mojave being my favorite places to botanize and search for rare or under-documented plants. My favorite genera are Eriogonum, Penstemon, Erythranthe and Diplacus, and all sorts of uncommon graminoids."
  • Bergerocac'tus: named for Alwin Berger (1871-1931), a German botanist, horticulturist and landscape gardener, and
      succulent specialist. He was born in Germany and worked at botanical gardens in Dresden and Frankfurt, eventually becoming the superintendent and curator of the Giardini Botanici Hanbury at La Montola in northwestern Italy, a position he held from 1897 to 1914. The next five years he worked in Germany then he studied in the United States for three years, and finally took up the position of director of the department of botany at the Natural History Museum of Stuttgart. He was best known for his work on the nomenclature of succulent plants, especially the agaves and the
    cacti. His main work, Die Agaven, published in 1915, described 274 species of agave, divided into 3 subgenera, Littaea, Euagave and Manfreda, but he produced many other books and papers. He also recognised a new genus of cactus, Roseocactus, in 1925. The genera Bergerocactus (Cactaceae) and Bergeranthus (Mesembryanthemaceae) are named in his honor, the former by Nathaniel Lord Britton and Joseph Nelson Rose in 1909 and the latter by Martin Heinrich Gustav (Georg) Schwantes in 1926.
  • Ber'gia: named for Peter Jonas Bergius (1730-1790), a Swedish medical doctor and botanist. He trained in Lund
      (1746) and Uppsala (1749) and was a student of Linnaeus. In 1758 Bergius was elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.  He had a medical practice in Stockholm (1754-1761) and was later appointed professor of natural history and pharmacy (1761) at the Collegium Medicum in Stockholm. He described South African plants in his book Descriptiones Plantarum ex Capita Bonae Spei (1767). He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1770 and a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1785. He is commemorated
    by the genus Bergia in the Elatinaceae which was published in 1771 by Carl Linnaeus. He left his estate including his library, herbarium and the private botanical garden, originally created with his brother Bengt, to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm.
  • berg'ii: named for Ken S. Berg (1957- ), a botanist for the Washington state Fish and Wildlife Service. At one point he was a national botanist, Western Region, USDI Bureau of Land Management. The most current information I have about him is that he lives in Ashland, Oregon. No other information available.
  • berg'sonii: named for Charles Steven Bergson (1949?-1991). He assisted Alfred Schuyler in his collecting in Texas in 1968 for the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. He attended the Lepidopterists Society meeting in Tucson in August, 1991. David Hollombe says: “Probably the same as Charles S. Bergson of 4601 Penhurst St., Philadelphia, who joined the Lepidopterists Society in 1968 and died August 16, 1991. His father changed their surname from Bergdoll before Charles was born."
  • berlandier'i: named for Jean Louis Berlandier (1803-1851), a French-Mexican botanist, anthropologist, historian,
      geographer and meteorologist who was born near the Swiss border and trained in Geneva, later studying botany under Augustin Pyramus de Candolle, and at some point serving as an apprentice to a pharmacist. Chosen by de Candolle to make botanical collections in Mexico, Berlandier arrived at Pánuco, Vera Cruz, on December 15, 1826, and made botanical collections near Matamoros before continuing to Mexico City where he joined as a biologist and plant specialist the Mexican Boundary Commission. In 1827 the members of the commission left Mexico City for Texas and Berlandier
    conducted botanical explorations and made collections around Laredo, Texas and San Antonio. He collected a great deal of information and made ethnological studies of forty native American tribes, but after contracting malaria in 1829 he returned to Matamoros where he settled, was married, and worked as a physician and pharmacist. He subsequently made additional botanical and animal collecting trips in Texas and other parts of Mexico, and continued gathering information which was among the earliest ethnological studies of the tribes of the southern plains. At the outbreak of the Mexican-American War in 1846 he became a Captain, cartographer, and aide-de-camp in the Mexican army and later was placed in charge of the hospitals in Matamoros. In 1850 his knowledge of areas both north and south of what would eventually become the border was invaluable and he was asked to participate in the International Boundary Commission to define the postwar border between Mexico and the United States. In May, 1851, at the age of 48, he drowned while crossing on horseback the swift currents of the San Fernando River near Matamoros. A devoted student of science, Berlandier kept detailed meteorological and astronomical journals throughout his lifetime. These notes continue to aid scholars and are among the oldest and most complete records of this variety for southeastern Texas and northeastern Mexico. He also made a remarkable collection of drawings and watercolors depicting several specimens of birds, fish, reptiles, and amphibians, and his name was appended to more than thirty species of plants. Inasmuch as there have been various recordings of his birth year, I was pleased to receive notice from David Hollombe of an authoritative article in Biblioteca Herpetologica, Vol. 12, pp. 18-40, entitled "Where and When was Jean Louis Berlandier born?" that pinned down the correct year as 1803. (Photo credit: Texas State Historical Association)
  • Bernar'dia: named for Bernard de Jussieu (1699-1776), a French taxonomist, brother of Antoine and Joseph de
      Jussieu. "Bernard was born at Lyons, 17 August, 1699 and died at Paris, 6 November, 1777; the date of death is sometimes given as 1776. He was educated at the large Jesuit college at Lyons until he had finished the study of rhetoric. In 1716 he accompanied his brother Antoine on the latter's journeys to Spain, and developed into an enthusiastic botanist. He studied medicine at Montpellier, obtaining his degree in 1720, but practiced medicine only for a short time. He was called to Paris by his brother Antoine, at the request of the botanist Vaillant, and after Vaillant's death in 1722 was
    appointed the latter's successor as professor and assistant demonstrator at the Jardin du Roi. He devoted all his energies to the royal garden, which his brother Antoine left almost entirely to him. He also made botanical excursions in the country surrounding Paris, and was able in 1725 to issue a revised and enlarged edition of Tournefort's work, 'Histoire des plantes des environs de Paris'; this publication gained his admission into the Academy of Sciences. Many persons studied botany under his guidance, including the chemist Lavoisier. Owing to de Jussieu's unusual modesty and unselfishness he published very little, notwithstanding the wide range of his learning. He wrote an important paper on zoophytes, sea-organisms whose classification as plants or animals was then a matter of dispute. To study them he went three times to the coast of Normandy, proved in the 'Mémoires' of 1742 that they belonged to the animal kingdom (before Peyssonel), and sought to classify them at this early date into genera. He also separated the whale from the fish and placed it among the mammals. The few botanical papers which he published (1739-42) treat of three water-plants. In 1758 Louis XV made de Jussieu superintendent of the royal garden at Trianon near Paris, in which all plants cultivated in France were to be reared. His greatest achievement is the system according to which he arranged and catalogued the plants in the garden at Trianon; it is called 'the older Jussieu natural system of plants of 1759,' or the Trianon system. Jussieu himself never published anything about his system, nor did he offer any explanation of his arrangement, or give it a theoretical foundation. The genera are not arranged systematically in groups according to a single characteristic, but after consideration of all the characteristics, which, however, are not regarded as of equal value. De Jussieu proposed three main groups, to which he gave no name; these contained altogether fourteen classes, with sixty-five orders or families. Beginning with the cryptogams, the system proceeds from the monocotyledons to the dicotyledons, and closes with the coniferæ. Before this Linnæus had pointed out that only the natural system should be the aim of botanical classification, and published, outside of his artificial system, fragments of a natural system as early as 1738. Compared to the present development of the natural system, both Linnæus and de Jussieu offer scarcely more than a weak attempt at a natural classification of plants, but their attempt is the first upon which the further development rests. De Jussieu was a thoughtful observer of nature, who behind things saw the laws and the Mind which gave the laws. Notwithstanding the great range of his knowledge he was exceedingly modest and unselfish. He was always animated by an intense love of truth, and his influence in the Academy and over French scholars was very great. He was besides deeply religious, preserving his religious principles and acting upon them to the end of his life. An old biography says of him: 'No one has proved better than he how religious feeling can be combined with many sciences and true knowledge.' He was a member of numerous academies and learned societies, e.g. the academies of Berlin, St. Petersburg, Upsala, London, and Bologna. In 1737 Linnæus named for him the genus Jussieua, which belongs to the family of the Onagraceæ, and at the present day includes some thirty-six tropical species, chiefly South American." (Quoted from the online Catholic Encyclopedia.) The genus Bernardia was published by William Houstoun in 1754.
  • bernardia'nus: incorrect spelling of bernardinus.
  • bernardi'na/bernardi'nus: of or from the San Bernardino Mts region.
  • ber'ryi: named for Lucien Seneca Berry (1869-1939). The following is from Cantelow and Cantelow, "Biographical Notes on Persons in Whose Honor Alice Eastwood Named Native Plants" in Leaflets of Western Botany (1957): "Berry, Seneca Lucien. Engineer; born in Mt. Vernon, Indiana, 1 June 1869, died in Sunnyvale, California, 16 Mar. 1923. Mr. Berry, Pierson Durbrow, and Benjamin Brooks were Alice Eastwood's companions in 1899 when they explored the South Fork of the Kings River and Bubbs Creek, proceeding as far as Harrison and Kearsarge passes. In 1901 with Dr. Kasper Pischel and Carlos Hittell, he assisted her on a pioneer-botanical exploration of the Trinity Alps region which the party entered by Canyon Creek. Miss Eastwood records the fact that "without his assistance the trip to this inaccessible region would have been unsuccessful."
  • berteroa'nus: see following entry.
  • ber'teroi: named for Carlo Giuseppe Bertero (1789-1831), an Italian physicist, physician, naturalist, botanist,
      bryologist and pteridologist. He was born in Santa Vittoria d'Alba and after moving to Turin he enrolled in the faculty of medicine and graduated in 1811 with a thesis on indigenous species. He became secretary of the Jury de Médecine and then studied herbal plants in the Alps, following which he went to Paris and gained a position as doctor on board the vessel Guadalupe. He became one of the most widely travelled Italian plant collectors of the New World. Between 1816 and 1821 he investigated the flora of St. Thomas, St. Croix, Puerto Rico, Hispaniola and northern Columbia,
    then returned to France and Italy. After his mother died in 1827 he again went to France and signed on another vessel bound for Chile. As he had on his previous expedition, he alternated between botanical research and medical duties. From 1828 to 1830 he made huge collections in the central regions of Chile, the Juan Fernández Islands and Tahiti, which he sent back to Europe. He also collected seeds which contributed to the collections of both private and public gardens.  Many of his collections were of species unknown to science. He was lost in a shipwreck while sailing from Tahiti back to Valparasio.The genus Berteroa published in 1821 by Augustin Pyramus de Candolle and other taxa are named for Carlo Bertero.
  • Berthelo'tia: named for Sabin Berthelot (1794-1880), a French naturalist and ethnologist. He was the son of a
      Marseille merchant and entered the French navy and served as a midshipman during the Napoleonic Wars, following which he joined the merchant fleet and travelled between Marseille and the West Indies. He was in the Canary Islands first in 1820 and taught school in Tenerife and managed a botanical garden at La Orotava for the Marquis of Villanueva del Prato. Wikipedia adds that: “Berthelot studied the natural history of the islands. He was joined in this task by [Philip Barker] Webb in 1828, and by 1830 they had collected sufficient information for publication. They
    travelled to Geneva, and produced the first volume of L'Histoire Naturelle des Îles Canaries in 1835. Berthelot concentrated on the ethnography, history and geography of the islands, with Webb completing the natural history sections. The ornithological section was mainly written by Alfred Moquin-Tandon. In 1845 Berthelot founded the Société d'Ethnologique. In 1846 he returned to Tenerife, and in 1848 was nominated the French consular agent for the island, being promoted to full Consul in 1867. He retired in August 1874, and was given the freedom of the city of Santa Cruz de Tenerife.” He wrote several other works while on the Canary Islands, including Les Guanches (1841 and 1845), a book about the Guanches or aboriginal inhabitants of the archipelago. He was also appointed in 1867 as French Consul to the Canary Islands. The Berthelot's pipit (Anthus berthelotii) was named for him by his friend Carl Bolle. The genus Berthelotia was published by Augustin Pyramus de Candolle in 1836.
  • Ber'ula: a Latin name of some aquatic plant like water-cress. The genus Berula was published by George Franz Hoffmann in 1822.
  • Bes'sera: named for Wilibald Swibert Joseph Gottlieb von Besser (1784-1842), an Austrian-born botanist who worked
      most of his life in western Ukraine. He was born in Innsbruck, and was raised by a relative of his mother after both of his parents died when he was 13. This relative, S.B. Schivereck, was a professor of botany at the University of Lemberg (now Lvov in western Ukraine), and it was through him that he developed what would be his lifelong love of botany. Von Besser accompanied Schivereck on his first field trips and Schivereck left his herbarium to Besser. He graduated from the University of Krakow in 1807, worked for a while as a medic at the Krakow Clinic, and taught
    zoology and botany at a school for a couple of years first at Volhynia and then at Kremenets where he was also the director at the botanical garden, a garden that he developed into one of the finest in Russia. In 1808 he published a flora of Galicia including descriptions of 360 plants from the region around Krakow, and in 1809 he began to teach at Krzemieniec (Kremenets) College.  In 1822 he became a member of the German Academy Leopoldina and in 1834 was appointed professor of botany at the University of St. Vladimir at Kiev. All his responsibilities being too great to manage, he left that position in 1837 and returned to Kremenets where he involved himself in doing botanical and entomological studies for the remainder of his life, concentrating in particular on the genus Artemisia. His most important works include Numerato Plantarum Hucusque in Volhynia, Podloa, Gub. Kiovensis etc. (1822) and Ueber die Flora des Baikals (1834), and the genus Bessera was published in his honor by Julius Hermann Schultes in 1829.
  • Best'ia/best'ii: named for American bryologist Dr. George Newton Best (1846-1926), born in Readington, New Jersey. He worked on the farm as a boy and later clerked in a store. He taught in a country school to earn tuition to Pennington Seminary, then attended Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania for 2-1/2 years, and taught at Riegelsville, PA, and Wilmington, Delaware. He graduated from the medical department at the University of Pennsylvania in 1875, and relocating to Rosemont practiced medicine for fifty years. He was married to Hannah Wilson and they had one child. He was a member of several medical societies and of the Masons. His hobby which brought him much pleasure was botany. He had long studied the plants and flowers in his vicinity. He was a member of the Torrey Botanical Club of New York and the New Jersey Natural History Society. He travelled extensively in Europe. He died at his home in Rosemont after a long fight with heart disease. The genus Bestia was published in 1906 by Viktor Ferdinand Brotherus.
  • Be'ta: from Latin beta, "beet," perhaps from the Celtic bett, "red," because of the red roots, and ultimately from Greek and perhaps some previous language. In any case this was the ancient Latin name for the beet. The genus Beta was published in 1753 by Carl Linnaeus.
  • Bet'ckea: after Ernst Friedrich Betcke (1798-1864). a German physician and botanist, not to be confused with Daniel Ludwig Ernst Betche (1851-1913), German botanist who worked in Australia. Betcke practiced as a doctor in Malchin and was then from 1830 in Penzlin and Mecklenburg. He wrote a dissertation in 1826 entitled Animadversiones Botanicae in Valerianellas. The genus Betckea was published by Augustin Pyramus de Candolle in 1830.
  • be'thelii: named for American naturalist Ellsworth Bethel (1863-1925). He was born in Ohio into a farming family. He
      attended Scio College (now University of Mount Union), and then was a senior student of science and graduate at Grant Memorial University (now Tennessee Wesleyan University) in 1885-86. He moved to Colorado in 1890 to teach high school in Denver, and in 1917 he joined the United States Department of Agriculture’s Forest Pathology laboratory, remaining in that position until his death. He received an honorary masters degree from the University of Denver in 1905. He collected specimens, mostly fungi, on Santa Catalina Island for a day each in 1912, 1913, 1914 and 1915, and
    these specimens are located in the Colorado State Museum herbarium. One of the singular interests for which he worked was the naming of Colorado peaks for native American tribes, something that was only partially successful, although his influence still lives today in the mountains of the Indian Peaks Wilderness Area. He died at age 62 and is buried in Wheat Ridge, Colorado.
  • bet'tinae: named for Bettina (Betty) Louise Brown Hoover (1912-1992), wife of American botanist Robert Francis Hoover, collected in California.
  • bettzichia'na: named for German gardener Friedrich Wilhelm August Bettzich (Bettzick) (1814-1865).
  • Bet'ula: the Latin name for the birch. A website of Washington College says "Betula comes from the Gaulish betu- meaning bitumen or asphalt. This refers to how the Gauls used extracted tar from birches." Another website entitled the A. Vogel Plant Encyclopedia says "The botanical term betula does not originate from a Latin word but rather from a Celtic term, which has its root in the syllable betu, or beth. Shakespeare’s 'Macbeth' in fact means 'son of birch'." The genus Betula was published in 1754 by Carl Linnaeus.
  • betulo'ides: like Betula, the genus of the birch, and refers to the leaves.
  • beyrichia'na: named for Heinrich Karl Beyrich (1796-1834), a Prussian botanist, gardener and plant collector in North and South America. He was born in Wernigerode and studied botany at the University of Göttingen. He was employed as a gardener in both Vienna and Kew. Wikipedia says: “In 1819 he performed botanical excursions throughout northern Italy and the eastern Alps. In 1822-23 he went on an expedition to Brazil on behalf of the Prussian government in order to collect flora for Pfaueninsel [an island in the river Havel which is part of the Palaces and Parks of Potsdam and Berlin UNESCO World Heritage Site] and the Neu-Schönberger Botanical Garden. In September 1834, while on an expedition through North America, he became ill and died at Fort Gibson, located in the present-day state of Oklahoma.” He had numerous plant species named for him including the genus Beyrichia which was published by Ludolf Karl Adelbert von Chamisso and Diederich Franz Leonhard von Schlechtendahl in 1828.
  • bi-: Latin prefix for "two, twice, twofold, double."
  • biannula're: from the Latin prefix bi- for "two, twice, double" and annulare for "ring-shaped."
  • bicarpella'tum: with two carpels.
  • bicknel'lii: named for Eugene Pintard Bicknell (1859-1925), an international banker, botanist, ornithologist and
      youngest founder of the American Ornithological Union. He worked with the banking firm John Munroe & Co. and was a prolific writer on natural history subjects and an amateur botanist. Wikipedia says: “He was interested in natural history from an early age. He wrote an article on the birds of the Hudson Valley in 1878 and in 1882 he wrote about the birds of the Catskill mountains in the Bulletin of the Nuttall Ornithological Club. He collected a specimen of a thrush that was described by Robert Ridgway and named as Bicknell's thrush. He served as a secretary to the
    American Ornithologists' Union upon its founding and was a member of the Torrey Botanical Club, the New York Botanical Garden and other societies. He published more on plants and discovered several new species. Some of the species were found right in New York and local observers had never noticed the fine differences that Bicknell noted. He noted that there were two species of Helianthemum with a difference that had not been noticed before. This was followed by more species in the genera Sanicula, Sisyrinchium, Scrophularia, and Agrimonia. Bicknell's works include Review of the Summer Birds of Part of the Catskill Mountains (1882) and The Ferns and Flowering Plants of Nantucket (1908–1919).  His plant collections were gifted by his wife to the New York Botanical Garden.
  • bi'color: two-colored, possibly referring either to a plant that contains two colors or a plant that has two color variations.
  • bicor'nis: two-horned.
  • bicornu'ta: two-horned.
  • bicrista'tus: divided into a pair of crested or comb-like structures.
  • Bi'dens: derived from the Latin bis, "twice," and dens, "tooth," hence meaning "2-toothed" and alluding to 2-awned pappi of the original species. The genus Bidens was published by Carl Linnaeus in 1753.
  • bidenta'tus: with two teeth.
  • bidwel'liae: named for Annie Ellicott Kennedy (Mrs. John Bidwell) (1839-1918). The following is quoted from
      Wikipedia: "Annie Kennedy Bidwell, with her husband John Bidwell, was a pioneer and founder of society in the Sacramento Valley area of California in the 19th Century. She is also known for her contributions to social causes, such as women's suffrage, the temperance movement, and education. Annie Bidwell was a friend and correspondent of Susan B. Anthony, Frances Willard, and John Muir. Born Annie Ellicott Kennedy, she was the daughter of Joseph Kennedy, a politician in the Whig party, who served as director of the United States Census for 1850 and 1860. The Kennedy
    family lived in Wshington, DC from Annie's 10th year until after her marriage to John Bidwell in 1868. Her strong religious beliefs motivated her to dedicate herself to social and moral causes. From her teenage years, she was associated with the Presbyterian church. She was later to commission the building of a Presbyterian church in Chico, California. She married John Bidwell on April 16, 1868 in Washington, DC. Their wedding guests included then President Andrew Johnson and future President Ulysses S. Grant. After their marriage, Annie returned with her new husband to his home in Chico, California. The Bidwell mansion in Chico is now preserved as a state historic park. While Annie and John Bidwell resided in the mansion, they were hosts to many prominent figures of their era, including President Rutherford B. Hayes, General William T. Sherman, Susan B. Anthony, Frances Willard, Governor Leland Stanford, John Muir and Asa Gray. Annie was concerned for the future of the local Mechoopda native Americans, and was active in state and national indian associations. She also worked to provide education to the Mechoopda. As a woman interested in botany in the 19th century, alongside the extremely high barriers for women to enter academia, Annie studied botany in her own free time, and collected the first known specimen of a small annual plant, which was named Bidwell's knotweed (Polygonum bidwelliae), after her. She clearly was a woman of some significance because her name was also put on an Allium and a Corydalis by Sereno Watson and an Orthocarpus by Asa Gray. After her husband's death Ann remained a beloved citizen of Chico, the town her husband founded. Her final act of benevolence was to donate to the city of Chico on July 10, 1905, some 2,238 acres (almost ten square miles) of land, along with a Children's Park in downtown Chico. Since then the land has remained in the public trust and is now known as Bidwell Park.
  • bieberstein'ii: named for German-born botanist and explorer Friedrich August Marschall von Bieberstein (1768-1827), author of Flora Taurico-caucasica in three volumes (1808-1819), the first extensive flora of the Crimean/Caucasus region including 2,322 species. His collection is stored in the herbarium of the Komarov Botanical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences at St. Petersburg. Marschall von Bieberstein collected materials for a major work on the entire flora of Russia, including Siberia, but I am not aware that it was ever published. He was also the co-author with Jacob Reineggs of A General, Historical, and Topographical Description of Mount Caucasus, with a Catalogue of Plants Indigenous to the Country in two volumes.
  • bien'ne/bien'nis: biennial, completing the life cycle in two growing seasons, usually blooming and fruiting in the second.
  • bi'fidum: bifid, split or divided into two, from Latin bifidus, "split into two parts," from bi-, "two," and -fid, from the stem of findere, "to split."
  • biflor'a: two-flowered.
  • bifo'lium: two-leaved.
  • bifor'mis: of two forms.
  • bi'frons: two-faced.
  • bifurca'tum: twice-forked.
  • bigelo'vii/Bigelow'ia: named for botanist and physician Jacob Bigelow (1787-1879), author of one of the first
      textbooks on botany. The following is quoted from the Appleton's Encyclopedia website on Famous Americans: "...born in Sudbury, Massachusetts, 27 February 1787; died in Boston, 10 January 1879. He was graduated at Harvard in 1806, studied medicine, opened his office in Boston in 1810, and displayed unusual skill. In 1811 he delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society a poem on "Professional Life," afterward published at Boston. He early made a reputation as a botanist, had an extensive European correspondence, and different plants were named for him by Sir J. E. Smith, in
    the supplement to "Rees's Cyclopaedia," by Schrader in Germany, and De Candolle in France. He was one of the committee of five selected in 1820 to form the "American Pharmacopoeia," and is to be credited with the principle of the nomenclature of materia medica afterward adopted by the British Colleges, substituting a single for a double word whenever practicable. He founded Mount Auburn, the first garden cemetery established in the United States, and the model after which all others in the country have been made. The much-admired stone tower, chapel, gate and fence were all built after his designs. During a term of twenty years Dr. Bigelow was a physician of the Massachusetts General Hospital, and in 1856 the trustees of that institution ordered a marble bust of him to be placed in the hall. He was professor of materia medica at Harvard University from 1815 to 1855, and from 1816 to 1827 held the Rumford professorship in the same institution, delivering lectures on the application of science to the useful arts. These lectures were published in a volume entitled Elements of Technology, republished with the title Useful Arts considered in Connection with the Applications of Science (2 vols., New York, 1840). Notable among his papers was one entitled "A Discourse on Self-Limited Disease," which was delivered as an address before the Massachusetts Medical Society in 1835, and had a marked effect in modifying the practice of physicians. He was during many years the president of that society, and was also president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retiring from the active practice of his profession some years before his death, Dr. Bigelow gave much attention to the subject of education, and especially to the matter of establishing and developing technological schools. In an address "On the Limits of Education," delivered in 1865 before the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he emphasized the necessity of students devoting themselves to special technical branches of knowledge. He published, besides works already mentioned, Florula Bostoniensis (1814; enlarged eds., 1824 and 1840); an edition, with notes, of Sir J. E. Smith's work on botany (1814); American Medical Botany (3 vols., Boston, 1817-'20) ; Nature in Disease, a volume of essays (1854) ; A Brief Exposition of Rational Medicine, to which was prefixed The Paradise of Doctors, a Fable (Philadelphia, 1858); History of Mount Auburn (1860); and Modern Inquiries and Remarks on Classical Studies (Boston, 1867). Dr. Bigelow was also known as a writer on other than medical subjects. He was a frequent contributor to the reviews and periodicals, and was the reputed author of a volume of poems entitled "Eolopoesis" (New York, 1855), containing imitations of American poets." The genus Bigelowia was published in 1836 by Augustin Pyramus de Candolle. (Salicornia bigelovii, genus Bigelowia)
  • bigelo'vii: named for Dr. John Milton Bigelow (1804-1878), a surgeon and botanist. He was born in Vermont, grew up and was schooled in Ohio, gaining a medical degree in 1832 from Detroit Medical College in Cincinnati. He taught school to afford his education and becoming interested in botany, aquired a good knowledge of Ohio flora. After graduation he married and established a country medical practice in Lancaster. In 1841 he published Florula Lancastriensis, a catalogue of the plants of Fairfield County which included medical notations on almost 200 plants. Learning that the US Army was going to be conducting a Mexican Boundary Survey under Lt. Amiel Weeks Whipple and William Emory, and recognizing that it was going to be covering a region that would be largely new to botany where a great number of species were yet to be discovered and identified, Asa Gray and John Torrey were able to recommend that it include botanical surveys, and in 1849, after publishing a treatise on grasses, Bigelow was recommended to Torrey by the bryologist William S. Sullivant from Columbus, Ohio, whom he had known since about 1840. Three other collectors were attached to the survey, C.C. Parry, George Thurber, and Charles Wright. Bigelow then collected plants on the Pacific Railroad Survey of 1853-1854, which was a survey to determine the most practicable and economical route for a railroad from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean. The route of this survey followed the 35th parallel from Ft. Smith, Arkansas, to the Mojave Desert in southwestern California and finally to Los Angeles. In 1854 he made botanical collecting trips to northern California, surveying the region from the redwoods north of Mount Tamalpais to the ocean on Point Reyes Peninsula, an area which had not been visited by botanists, and his collection with respect to the novelties in it is considered the richest ever made in the region. From Marin County, Bigelow went on to other botanically rich areas in Sonoma and Napa counties, and thence to the foothills and middle slopes of the Sierra Nevada. Scoliopus and Whipplea, two genera of frequent occurrence in the woods of Marin County, were based on Bigelow's collection, and no fewer than twenty species and varieties were described by Torrey and others in the botanical reports of the expedition and elsewhere. Following these activities he returned to Ohio to take up his medical practice again. At some point he moved to Detroit where in 1860 he was placed in charge of the meteorological division of the United States Lake Survey, a position he retained until January 1, 1867. He helped to found the Detroit Academy of Medicine and served as ‘surgeon in charge’ of the Detroit Marine Hospital, 1869-1873. After retirement he moved to a farm outside Detroit, where he died after suffering an injury. (Artemisia bigelovii, Brandegea bigelovii, Crossosoma bigelovii, Cylindropuntia bigelovii, Diplacus bigelovii var. bigelovii, Diplacus bigelovii var. cuspidatus, Helenium bigelovii, Leptosyne bigelovii, Linanthus bigelovii, Microseris bigelovii, Mirabilis bigelovii, Nicotiana bigelovii, Nolina bigelovii, Plantago bigelovii, Poa bigelovii, Selaginella bigelovii)
  • Bignon'ia: named for the Abbé Jean-Paul Bignon (1662-1743), a French ecclesiastic, statesman, writer, scholar,
      preacher, and advisor and librarian to Louis XIV of France at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France from 1718 to 1741. The Bibliotheque was originally set up in 1368 and by 1719 had become the leading library in Europe. The number of volumes it carried had outgrown the most immediate database system of the time, in that the librarians could no longer rely on their memories to find titles. Bignon expanded on the classification system of his predecessor Nicolas Clement to make use of the library more manageable and reorganized the library to accommodate to modern scholarly
    requirements. Toward the end of Louis XIV's reign the library contained more than 70,000 volumes. Bignon was born in Paris and did his elementary studies at the school of the famed Abbey of Port Royal in Paris, then studied at the Collège d'Harcourt, following which he entered the Oratory of Paris, and did theological studies at the Seminary of Saint Magloire attached to it. In 1691 he completed his studies and was ordained to the priesthood. In that same year he became a member of the Académie Francaise and he worked with his uncle to prepare a new set of rules for the Academy, allowing for honorary membership, which were signed by the king in January 1699. The new rules, however, were rejected by its members, and the rejection shocked him to such a degree that he refused to attend its meetings thereafter. In 1699 he became an honorary member of the Académie des Sciences, followed by membership in the Académie Royale des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in 1701 and editorship of the scholarly Journal des savants (1705-1714). In 1693 he was made commendatory abbot of Saint-Quentin-en-l'Isle and preacher to King Louis XIV. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1734. He was charged by the minister Colbert to head the Bignon Commission, and began the compilation of a guide to French artistic and industrial processes, published in the following century as the Descriptions of the Arts and Trades. Beside his scholarly and ecclesiastical endeavors, Bignon was a patron of Antoine Galland, the first European translator of One Thousand and One Nights, and was the author of Les aventures d'Abdalla, fils d'Hanif (The adventures of Abdalla, son of Hanif), published in 1712–1714, a novel framed as the title character's search for the fountain of youth. His protégé, Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, named the genus Bignonia in his honor in 1794.
  • bignonio'ides: resembling genus Bignonia.
  • bilbaoa'na: named for Francisco de Sales Bilbao Barquín (1823-1865), a Chilean-born writer, philosopher and
      politician of Basque descent and liberal ideas who studied astronomy, the sciences and music. He was born in Santiago de Chile the son of the liberal leader Rafael Bilbao Beyner. After conservatives took power in 1829, Francisco accompanied his father who left Chile. It was not until 1839 that he returned with his family and studied at the National Institute. His publication in 1844 of the work  La sociabilidad chilena (Chilean Sociability) caused a scandal and he was forced to move to Paris. Returning to Santiago de Chile in 1848, he held public office but dedicated himself
    to the formation of a radical movement that was intended to overthrow conservative rule. To further this movement he founded the Equality Society which was politically dangerous and was suppressed, forcing him into hiding once again. He was excommunicated by the Catholic Church, took part in a failed mutiny, and fled to Peru and then to Europe for a second time, where he was credited with being the first person to use the term ‘Latin America.’ After a few years he settled in Buenos Aires, married and occupied himself mainly in writing. Affected by tuberculosis, he died in 1865, the same year his complete works were published. His remains were repatriated to Chile in 1998.
  • Bilderdyk'ia: named for Dutch poet Willem Bilderdijk (Bilderdyk) (1756-1831). Born into an Amsterdam Calvinist
      and monarchist family, he was incapacitated at the age of six for ten years because of an accident. He studied law at Leiden University and obtained a doctorate in law in 1782, beginning to practice as an advocate at The Hague. He was forced to leave the Netherlands in 1795 because of a political dispute, and he went to Hamburg and then to London. He returned to the Netherlands in 1806 after a monarchy was established led by Louis Bonaparte, brother of the French emperor Napoleon. Bilderdijk was made the king’s librarian and eventually president of the Royal Institute. Louis
    Napoleon eventually abdicated and when William I of the Netherlands ascended to the throne, Bilderdijk became a history tutor at Leiden. He was an inflential poet and the work for which he is best remembered is the unfinished epic poem De ondergang der eerste wareld (1810; “The Destruction of the First World”), which dramatically portrays the primordial struggle between Cain’s son and the progeny of his daughters. He died at Haarlem. The genus Bilderdykia was published by Barthélemy Charles Joseph Dumortier in 1827.
  • -bilis: a Latin adjectival suffix indicating a capacity or ability to do something, which takes the form -abilis when the root infinitive ends in -are, and -ibilis when the root infinitive ends in -ere (e.g. flexibilis, "capacity or ability to bend, bendable" from flectere, "to bend," variabilis, "ability to change," from variare, "to change").
  • Billardier'a: named for Jacques Julien Houtou de Labillardière (1755-1834), a French naturalist who first described
      the flora of Australia in his work Novae Hollandiae Plantarum Specimen. He made numerous collecting trips to Britain, the French Alps, the Mediterranean and the Near East. He was the author of Icones plantarum Syriae rariorum which described species he collected on his visits to Cypress, Syria, Lebanon, Crete, Corsica and Sardinia. When he went as naturalist on an expedition to search for the lost ships of Jean-François de Galaup, comte de La Pérouse, he visited Australia, Tasmania, New Zealand and the East Indies. During this voyage war broke out between France and Great
    Britain, and his entire collection of zoological, botanical and geological specimens were seized by the British, but thanks to the close ties with Sir Joseph Banks he had established during his two years in Britain, the matter was later resolved and the collection returned to him. He wrote about this voyage in Relation du Voyage à la Recherche de la Pérouse. He was honored with the names of several geographical points and several animal species such as the red-legged skink. The genus Billardiera was published in 1793 by James Edward Smith.
  • Bill'bergia: named for Gustaf Johan Billberg (1772-1844), a Swedish  botanist, zoologist and anatomist by avocation and professional lawyer by training. He was born in Karlskrona and earned his legal degree in Lund. In 1798 he became a member of the county administrative board in Visby. He returned to Stockholm in 1808 and from 1812 to 1837 he served as a member of the administrative court. He was elected member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1817, and he was the author of Monographia mylabridum (1813), Ekonomisk botanik (1815), Enumeratio insectorum in museo (1820) and Synopsis Faunae Scandinaviae (1827). The genus Billbergia was published in 1821 by Carl Peter Thunberg.
  • bilo'ba/bilo'bus: two-lobed.
  • bingham'iae: named for Caroline Priscilla Bingham (née Lord) (Mrs. Richard Fitch Bingham) (1831-1932), an American botanist who was one of the earliest American women to publish scientific papers on botany. She was born in Pennsylvania, moved to Ohio with her family when she was five and married her husband Richard Bingham there. In 1873 they moved to Montecito, California where she became an enthusiastic student of botany. She was an influential collector of botanical specimens and an obituary in the New Bedford, Massachusetts, Standard-Times claimed that she discovered "30 new specimens of flora and a new genus, as well," although only one taxon bears her name at the present time. That taxon in the California flora is Calystegia sepium ssp, binghamiae. She was a member of the Santa Barbara Natural History Society and held the position of secretary. She was also a member of the publication committee for the Bulletin of the Santa Barbara Society and published an article in that journal in March 1887. Her husband died in 1895 and she moved back east. Wikipedia says: “As well as publishing papers on her botany work Bingham collaborated with botanists such as Alpheus Hervey, William Gilson Farlow and Jacob Georg Agardh. Bingham assisted their work by providing specimens, lists of plants she collected, notes on special habitat, seasons of growth and frequency of appearance. Bingham also corresponded with Joseph Dalton Hooker at the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew on botanical matters. When she died in 1932 at 101, she was said to be the oldest woman in New Bedford.
  • binomina'tum: twice-named, with two names? David Hollombe says "I think this refers to the species having been previously given two invalid names, both names having been previously applied to other species." IPNI lists only a single taxon with this name, Ribes binominatum, and it is a species in California.
  • Biolet'tia/biolet'tii: named for Frederic Theodore Bioletti (1865-1939). "Frederic Theodore Bioletti was of Italian, Welsh, and English ancestry. He was born in Liverpool, England, on July 21, 1865, and lived in Scotland and England until he came to America in 1878. For the ensuing ten years he lived in Sonoma County, California. During this period he attended a private school and Heald's Business College in San Francisco. In 1885 and 1888 he served on the Vina Ranch of Senator Stanford, where he held a responsible position in the senator's commercial cellar. He had learned the arts of grape growing and wine making from his future stepfather. In 1897 he married Eugenie H. Carlton. From 1889 to 1900 Bioletti was in Berkeley, being engaged as a student and as assistant to Professor Eugene Woldemar Hilgard. He received the bachelor's degree in 1894 and the degree of Master of Arts in 1898 at this University. In 1901 he was appointed instructor in viticulture, enology [the study of wines] and horticulture at Elsenburg College, Cape Colony, South Africa. He served in that position until 1904, when he resumed his position at the University of California in viticulture and enology. In 1908 he became a partner in managing a vineyard at Hollister, California, but returned to university work in 1910. Except for an absence of ten months in 1930, when he was on leave in the employ of the United States Department of Agriculture as agricultural explorer, collecting varieties of apricots and grapes in French North Africa, he served continuously as assistant professor, associate professor and professor of viticulture until his retirement as professor emeritus in 1935. He died September 12, 1939. From the beginning of his career Professor Bioletti was primarily interested in improvement, not only in agricultural practices, but also in the conditions of rural life. In his earlier years, when the experimental method was rarely employed by agriculturists, he attacked the problems of wine grape production in California. Despite many difficulties a rather definite relation between certain varieties, the soils, and also the climatic conditions of the principal grape growing districts were obtained prior to 1900. During the same period he made various plant collections in the pursuit of his avocation, systematic botany. His interest in this subject was aroused through his contacts with Professor Edward L. Greene, and it continued throughout his life. His last published contribution dealt with the classification of the vinifera grapes grown in California. While an assistant and later an associate of Professor Hilgard from 1889 to 1900 he conducted experiments on the fermentation of wines under various conditions. The results of these studies and the assistance rendered by him to the vintners of that era were of much importance in improving the practices and the products of the wineries in this state. He devoted much effort to the improvement of viticultural practices in California, bringing information directly to the growers through farmers' institutes and publications. He was active in the introduction of varieties of grapes new to California and was the recognized leader in this field. However, he was interested not only in finding new varieties but also in their production through breeding, and he started the important grape breeding program now under way in the University's Experiment Station. Just prior to the period of prohibition in California, his wide experience was put to the task of finding new uses for wine grapes. About that time he also gave much attention to olive products, particularly olive pickling, and was instrumental in establishing the canning of olives as an industry. Professor Bioletti possessed to a high degree the rare faculty of influencing the research of others by suggestion and discussion rather than by direct order. He was accustomed to permit the young worker to proceed under his own power after preliminary suggestions had been offered; but he was always cheerfully willing to discuss problems with his associates and to offer helpful advice. He was a keen student of English and rendered valuable service to the University in the editing of manuscripts. He served as chairman of the editorial committee of the Agricultural Experiment Station from 1926 to 1932. His comments and especially his insistence on conciseness and clarity of expression in writing for publication were very helpful to his colleagues. He was the author or co-author of approximately four hundred publications, dealing with viticulture, wine making, olive culture, olive pickling, vinegar making, grape juice production, systematic botany and plant diseases. A modest and retiring man, Professor Bioletti was nevertheless persistent, and even aggressive when the occasion demanded it, in working toward his high ideals in scientific research, in the application of the results of research in industry, and in the broad field of agriculture and rural life." (Quoted from a Memorium essay from the University of California) The genus Biolettia was published by Edward L. Greene in 1891.
  • bipar'tita/bipar'titus: twice-parted, having two parts.
  • bipet'alus: two-petalled.
  • bipinna'ta/bipinna'tus: having leaves doubly pinnate or feathered.
  • bipinnati'fida: twice pinnately cut, like a pinnate leaf whose sections are again pinnate.
  • bisanc'tus: from bi, "two, twice, twofold, double," and sanctus, "sacred, saintly."
  • biscep'trum: having two structures similar to a scepter, which is a staff or baton carried by a sovereign as a symbol of authority, of uncertain application to this species.
  • bisec'tus: cut into two parts.
  • bishal'lii: apparently an old synonym for Carex hallii and referring to Elihu Hall (1822-1882), according to David Hollombe, in reference to the taxon Carex halli having been published twice and hence Carex bishallii was "the second Carex hallii." The word bis is Latin for "twice or double."
  • Bistor'ta/bistor'ta: from bis, "twice," and tortus, "twisted," thus twice-twisted, in reference to the double turn of the fruit. The genus Bistorta was originally published in a different genus by Linnaeus and then subsequently moved to the Polygonaceae by Joannes Antonius Scopoli in 1754.
  • bistorto'ides: having the shape or form of the plant bistort, the genus Bistorta.
  • bithyn'ica: from the region of northwest Asia Minor called Bithynia.
  • Bituminar'ia: from the Latin and Greek bitumen, see bituminosa below. The genus Bituminaria was published by Lorenz Heister in 1759.
  • bitumino'sa: tarry, in some way resembling bitumen, which in ancient times was an asphaltic product used in Asia Minor as a mortar or cement, but in modern times refers to a mixture of hydrocarbons occurring either naturally or after a process of refinement.
  • bizona'ta: from the roots bi-, "twice or two," and zonata, "banded or with a girdle usually of a distinct color" from the Greek zone, "a girdle or belt."

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