If you look up White Beech in a botanical textbook, you will find it listed as ‘Gmelina leichhardtii (F. Muell.)’. What that means is that the plant or ‘taxon’ was first described and recognised as a separate species by Mueller, who published his description in 1862 (Fragmenta, 3:19, 58). What it doesn’t tell you is whether he got it right. He didn’t. He mistook the genus and identified the specimen, which had been collected by Leichhardt at Myall Creek in New South Wales on 20 November, 1843, as a Vitex. He sent Leichhardt’s specimen with another collected by Hermann Beckler on the Clarence River in 1859 plus his own description to Bentham. In 1870 in Volume 5 of his Flora Bentham published Mueller’s Vitex as Gmelina leichhardtii (66).
Altogether Bentham identified three Australian species of Gmelina, a genus which ‘extends over tropical Asia and the Indian Archipelago. The Australian species, though with the aspect of some Asiatic ones, appear to be all endemic.’ Bentham described the fruit of G. macrophylla as ‘closely resembling that of G. arborea’, a valuable timber tree native to wet forests from Sri Lanka through India and Burma to Southern China, and well known to European botanists. He also noted that Robert Brown had misidentified G. macrophylla as a Vitex in the Prodromus. Mueller had not only made the same mistake, he had also changed the descriptive species name, which means ‘large-leaved’, for ‘Dalrympleana’, honouring the explorer George Augustus Frederick Elphinstone Dalrymple. The next Gmelina Bentham described was G. fasciculiflora; in this case Mueller had not understood that he was looking at a distinct species and described it as a variety of his Vitex leichhardtii.
‘Why wouldn’t Mueller have known a Gmelina when he saw one?’
Jane stopped drying her hair and looked at me sternly.
‘For the same reason that Robert Brown didn’t know what he was looking at was a Gmelina. And anyway, his name is von Mueller.’
‘Von Mueller is a ridiculous name. His family name is the German for Miller, tout court, a good artisan class name, not to be cluttered up with particles of imaginary nobility.’
‘He was awarded that barony. It’s not up to you to strip him of it.’
‘I thought you said he was resisting imperial hegemony. Accepting foreign honours was against British law. He didn’t just have the barony – he had twenty knighthoods as well. I think he wore his medals in bed.’
Mueller was my bête and I was determined to paint him noire. I banged on.
‘The man was a menace. Surely he should have known better than to introduce and aggressively propagate tamarisks?’
Jane’s eyes widened. ‘Did he?’
‘He actually boasted about it.’ (In a lecture Mueller claimed that his nursery had propagated ‘from a solitary Tamarix plant, 20,000 bushes, now scattered through our colonial shrubberies . . .’)
Jane protested. ‘He thought his introductions would be useful. He hadn’t any experience of how introduced plants could behave in a place like Australia.’
‘That simply isn’t true. He knew what invasive weeds were, and how rapidly they spread.’ Mueller protested that he was not responsible for the introduction of Capeweed, ‘as it had already impressively invaded some parts of Australia as early as 1833’. (Mueller, 1872, 179; Ewart, 38) Clearly he knew how problematic plant introductions could be, but the knowledge did nothing to abate his enthusiasm for acclimatisation. Though willows, first brought to the colony in 1800 (Bladen, iv, 277), were already choking whole river systems, he thought nothing of importing more, apparently for basketmaking.
It should be ascertained how many of the 160 true species of Willows and of their numerous hybrids are available for wickerwork; and we should learn, whether any of the American, the Himalayan or the Japanese Osiers are in some respect superior to those in general use.
No one had put more energy into mapping the biodiversity of Australia, yet Mueller had no qualms about eliminating it.
Test experiments initiated from a botanic garden might teach us whether the Silk Mulberry Tree can be successfully reared in the Murray desert, to supplant the Mallee-scrub . . .
Supplant the Mallee-scrub! Such reckless arrogance is breath-taking. I don’t know what the Red Kangaroos would have to say about supplanting the Mallee-scrub, or the Paucident Planigales – if there are any left. Or the poor old Mallee Fowl.
It must not be thought that after Mueller’s orgy the fashion for naming plants after botanists slowed down. If anything it has got worse. When Wayne Goss, premier of Queensland from 1989 to 1996, gave substantial funds to the Queensland Herbarium, a part of the genus Austromyrtus was renamed Gossia in his honour; the other part was given the grotesque name Lenwebbia, in memory of pioneering rainforest ecologist Len Webb, who died in 2008.
‘They’re a blokey lot these botanists, don’t you think?’
Jane looked up from her book.
‘Not any more. Some of the most influential botanists in Australia are women – Gwen Harden, Pauline Ladiges . . .’
‘I’m thinking more then. Linnaeus preferred to send unmarried men on plant-hunting expeditions because they so often lost their lives, and he didn’t want any more widows hassling him. Solander never married. Dryander never married. Banks was supposed to have been extra keen to accompany the Endeavour expedition because he needed to get away from a woman he was expected to marry. When he got back to England he had to pay compensation for messing her about. He married later in life but the marriage was childless. Brown never married. Neither of the Cunninghams married. Frazer didn’t marry. Caley brought his black tracker Moowat’tin back to England with him only to have Banks send him straight back again.’ (Currey, xi, 140, 173–4, 191, 194)
‘Perennial bachelors,’ said Jane. ‘So?’
‘You have to wonder whether plant-hunting was a way for gay men to escape from societal pressure. I can’t help thinking of my darling Leichhardt.’
‘You think Nicholson and Leichhardt were lovers.’
‘I don’t know whether they had sex together, but it’s clear that they were as close as people can be, with or without sex. But when Nicholson decided not to go to Australia Leichhardt didn’t act like a man who was broken-hearted, so you do wonder if he was just a leech and a chancer. The thing that strikes you about Leichhardt is his optimism, his trustingness. He is incredibly lovable.’
‘Not to the men who accompanied him on his expeditions, he wasn’t. Men lost their lives because of his poor management.’
There was no denying this, so I changed the subject.
‘Mueller’s an even more interesting case. He was engaged to be married twice, in 1863 to Euphemia Henderson who painted flowers for him, and in 1865 to Rebecca Nordt, but he couldn’t bring himself to marry either of them. He waits till he’s nearly forty, and then funks it, tries again and funks it again. He kept Rebecca waiting around so long he ruined her chances of finding a man, and that at a time when women were in distinctly short supply. He ended up like Banks, having to pay her compensation. His reason for not marrying her was that she was no longer of child-bearing age! Whose fault was that? The man was a wretch.’
Part of the blokiness of botany stems from its needing to be done in Latin; girls’ schools were more likely to teach modern languages than Latin. Many women botanised, and bred and grafted horticultural varieties, but the intellectual conquest and ordering of the vegetable world cannot have held the same appeal for them as it did for men. The number of women who authored plant names is pathetically small; not only did very few women do it, they only did it once or twice, whereas men like Hooker, Bentham and Mueller authored literally hundreds of names.
When Jane asked me if any of the plant species at Cave Creek was named by a woman, all I could say was that I didn’t think so. ‘We’ve got one named for a woman but none named by a woman, as far as I know.’
The one named for a woman is Syzygium hodgkinsoniae. The Hodgkinson in question is supposed to be Miss M. Hodgkinson, a collector of plants in the Richmond River area.
‘What does
the M. stand for?’ Jane asked.
‘No idea. She isn’t even on the Australian National Botanic Garden Biography database. No dates. No nothing. One of the most beautiful trees at Cave Creek to remember her by and we’ve got no idea who she was.’
Syzygium is a myrtaceous genus, with shimmering paired leaves of forest green, and flowers in terminal cymes. Though S. hodgkinsoniae is supposed to need rich alluvial soil it seems happy enough at Natural Bridge on the montane basalt. It’s rare and listed as threatened, but at CCRRS there are hundreds of them. The ghost of Miss Hodgkinson is always with us, especially when the tree is in flower and the glades are full of its seductive scent. The man who named the plant for Miss H. was none other than Ferdinand Mueller. Needless to say he got the genus wrong: he thought it was a Eugenia, as did everyone else until Lawrie Johnson sorted out the Syzygiums by phylogenetic analysis in 1962. Till then the Syzygiums were called Acicalyptus, Acmena, Acmenosperma, Anetholea, Caryophyllus, Cleistocalyx, Jambosa, Lomastelma, Pillocalyx, Waterhousea, Xenodendron – and Eugenia. Not everyone has accepted Johnson’s revision, which has resulted in an enormous and rather too various genus. So the old synonyms are usually listed along with the Johnsonian name. Mueller published his Eugenia hodgkinsoniae in the Victorian Naturalist No. 8, in July 1891, but it seems that F. M. Bailey had already published the plant in the Botany Bulletin of the Queensland Department of Agriculture, as Eugenia fitzgeraldii, citing two isotypes, one collected on the summit of the Blackall Range in March 1891, the other at the Richmond River by R. D. Fitzgerald, and in the possession of ‘F. v. M.’ (APNI). Miss Hodgkinson could have lost her tiny claim to fame there and then but, incomprehensibly, she didn’t.
Mueller named another species after a Hodgkinson. Hodgkinsonia ovatiflora is named for his boss, Clement Hodgkinson, Deputy Surveyor General and later Assistant Commissioner and Secretary of the Board of Crown Lands and Survey. Although it may look very likely that the Hodgkinson who received the honour of having a Syzygium species named after her is one of Clement’s connections, it seems rather that it is not a Miss Hodgkinson whom we seek, but Mary, wife of James Hodgkinson, the first settler at Lennox Head, near the mouth of the Richmond River. Mary lived at North Creek from 1866 until her death in 1889 at the age of sixty-five. Contrariwise it may have been one of her five daughters, none of whom however has the initial M. The holotype of a lichenised fungus Pseudocyphellaria glaucescens (Lobariaceae) was collected by a ‘Miss Hodgkinson’ on the Richmond River in 1880 (Flora of Australia, 58:1, 62).
Louisa Atkinson collected for both William Woolls and Ferdinand Mueller. Mueller named a genus of mistletoe Atkinsonia after her, as well as two Asteraceous species and a species of fern. In 1869 at the age of thirty-five she married James Snowden Calvert, a survivor of Leichhardt’s expedition of 1844–5. Mueller then named two species for her, Epacris calvertiana and Helichrysum calvertiana. Sadly, she died not long after the birth of her first child in 1872.
With Mary Strong Clemens (ADB) we find ourselves once again in the company of an amateur botanist. She was married to a chaplain in the US army; from 1905 to 1907, when her husband was serving in the Philippines, Mary made field trips to Luzon and Mindanao, collecting plants, apparently for Elmer Drew Merrill, USDA botanist in the Philippines. After her husband’s retirement from the ministry he assisted her. Between the wars the couple made collecting trips to China, Indo-China, North Borneo, Sarawak, Java and Singapore. In August 1935 they transferred their operations to New Guinea. When Mary’s husband died, five months after their arrival, she stayed on collecting in the New Guinea highlands until the Japanese invasion, when she was compulsorily repatriated to Queensland.
When Mrs Clemens arrived in Australia in December 1941 she was sixty-nine. She recommenced work at once, in a shed behind the Queensland Herbarium. At first she slept in the shed, but she was eventually persuaded to accept accommodation in a hostel. All day and as much of the night as she could, she spent pressing and labelling the plants she collected on her walk to work or on excursions by train, tram or bus. Her labels were based on identifications made by her colleagues at the Herbarium. These were not always correct but, with no formal training, she was in no position to question them. Some new species have been identified from specimens she collected, while information gained on her wanderings has increased the range of many known plants. The botanists she helped have generously remembered her in the naming of their species: the specific epithet ‘clemensiae’ is to be found on more than seventy species. However botany wouldn’t be botany if her biographer, R. F. N. Langdon of the Department of Botany at the University of Queensland, hadn’t decided to reduce her to size. His verdict is that ‘Mrs. Clemens probably lacked the capacity to determine plants. As years passed botanists became very wary of Mrs. Clemens and her plants.’ (380)
Bananas
The Australian writer Rosa Praed, who was born in 1851, spent her early childhood not far from Numinbah, at Bromelton on the Logan. She hardly noticed that her family was poor, because she had the riches of the rainforest.
. . . a huge Moreton Bay fig tree . . . gave us more delicious fruit than any we could get in the garden. Then there were mulgams – native raspberries peculiar to the Logan; and there was the chucky-chucky, a most pleasant tasting wild plum, which had a way of hanging tantalisingly over the water, so that if the pool were deep, there was a little difficulty in gathering it. The geebong was not so nice – its fruit was slimy and rather sickly, though not unpalatable . . . There is no end to the delights of a scrub.
Little Rosa was more easily pleased than today’s children, who would never dream of putting a mulgam or a chucky-chucky into their mouths. ‘Mulgam’ or, in his spelling, ‘malgum’, is listed by Gresty as the local Aboriginal name for the wild raspberry of the Numinbah Valley (Gresty, 62, 72). According to the Macquarie Dictionary the chucky-chucky is usually the fruit of the American snowberry, or the Tasmanian Gaultheria. Praed’s ‘geebong’ is nowdays better known as ‘geebung’, a name given to various Persoonia species. In Western Australia and South Australia geebungs are known also as ‘Snottygobbles’.
In the Cave Creek rainforest at all times of the year there is fruit. Sometimes there is so much squishy fruit underfoot that you find yourself walking in jam. Most prodigal are the figs, being in fruit all the year round. The botany of figs is still in its infancy, which is the kindest way of saying that the botanists have signally failed to answer any of the big questions about figs. What we think of as the fruit of a fig is actually a hollow structure called a synconium, like an inside-out umbel, containing hundreds of male pollen-bearing and/or female seed-forming flowers. In about half the 800–1,000 fig species in the world the fig contains flowers of both sexes; in the other half the synconia are unisexual. All fig species breed their own pollinators, tiny symbiotic wasps, inside the synconia; the adult wasps travel from fig to fig through the tiny hole at the bottom, carrying pollen from the male synconia to the female, or from one bisexual synconium to another. Some synconia will be visited by more than one species of fig wasp, and some of the wasps are cuckoo-wasps that live on the flesh of the synconium, or the seeds or the wasp larvae in it.
The entomologists have performed marvels in studying the complex interaction between fruit and insect. Unfortunately the botanists are still in total disarray when it comes to the systematics of fig species. None of the botanists who have visited Cave Creek can establish how many species of figs grow there, or just which species they are. Dearest to my heart, and the easiest to identify, are our sandpaper figs, called that because their leaves, abrasive as glass paper, were used by the Aborigines for smoothing off spears. There are supposed to be two species of these: Ficus fraseri which grows on the drier slopes, and F. coronata which grows on the creeks, in rainforest and in open country from far eastern Victoria as far north as Mackay. In our rainforest some F. coronata produce swarming clusters of fruit on the trunk (cauliflory) and branches (ramiflory) as well as in the leaf axils. The
species name coronata refers to the crown of rather stiff silvery bristles at the tip of the fruit, which ripens to a rich purple if the birds will let it. Though usually these trees are smallish and fairly shapeless, a few put out beautifully regular branches with fruit in every leaf axil. Breeding from these could result in a very handsome garden cultivar. F. fraseri, which has a much more restricted range, grows into a full-sized forest tree which bears copious hairless fruits that ripen from orange to red. Both trees are favourites of the Figbirds, who wear natty suits of olive green and big red sunglasses.
White Beech: The Rainforest Years Page 28