White Beech: The Rainforest Years (38 page)

Nobody was less likely to give up the pernicious habit of calling plants after colleagues and friends than the egregious Mueller. Mueller surnamed one of our Sloaneas ‘
woollsii
’ after William Woolls (1814–93), an Anglican minister and schoolmaster who collected for him. No one would jib at calling a genus
Flindersia
after Matthew Flinders, especially when the first example of the genus was collected by Robert Brown on his expedition, but our dominant species was named by Mueller
F. schottiana
for Heinrich Schott of the Austrian Botanic Gardens. An important tree for us is the unspellable Guioa, named for J. Guio, a botanical illustrator of the eighteenth century. Mueller got himself into a fearful tangle with this, identifying our Guioa, which is
G. semiglauca
, so-called because the underside of the leaf is bluish-white, as an Arytera and then as a Nephelium; even Bentham got it wrong, and decided it was a Cupania, and it was not until 1879 that L. A. T. Radlkofer correctly understood our tree to be a member of the genus
Guioa
. Our Foambarks are named Jagera, for Dr Herbert de Jager, who collected for the Dutch botanist Rumphius in Indonesia in the mid-nineteenth century.

For years we have been referring to one of our best performers as
Caldcluvia paniculata
. The genus is named for Scottish botanist Alexander Caldcleugh who collected the first specimens in South America in the early nineteenth century. Interestingly, Cunningham, who had botanised in New Zealand, correctly recognised the Australian tree as a member of the genus
Ackama
, of which the type was first collected in New Zealand, hence the version of the Maori name ‘makamaka’, but he was overruled by Mueller, who first misidentified it as a member of the genus
Weinmannia
(named for eighteenth-century German pharmacist J. W. Weinmann), to which inadvertently he gave two species names
paniculosa
and
paniculata
, before deciding that it was a Caldcluvia after all. Bentham accepted Cunningham and called the species, with admirable forbearance, ‘
Ackama muelleri
’, but Mueller’s name prevailed. Justice has finally been done, and we must get used to calling our trees
Ackama paniculata
.

A similar tree, the Rose Marara, like Ackama in the Cunoniaceae, has the appalling systematic name of
Pseudoweinmannia lachnocarpa
. The specific name is useful, for it means ‘woolly fruit’, but the generic name identifies it as a pretend Weinmannia, as if it deliberately misled people (Engler, 249). As the genus
Pseudoweinmannia
consists of this species only, it seems likely that it will one day be revised. Our Bosistoas have no accepted common name, so whenever we refer to them we have no choice but to do homage to the Melbourne chemist J. Bosisto, who collaborated with Mueller in the preparation of eucalyptus oil. Another of our genera carries the hideous name
Baloghia
, after Dr Joseph Balogh, author of a book on Transylvanian plants; this is the more galling because the Baloghia blossom has perhaps the loveliest scent of any in the forest. It’s bad enough to have to call a beautiful big tree a Grey Walnut, when it is neither grey nor a walnut, but when its scientific name is Beilschmiedia, in honour of C. T. Beilschmied, a botanist and chemist from Ohlau, it is ill-served indeed. As annoying is the name Mueller gave to the Queensland Nut, which eternises John Macadam, Secretary of the Philosophical Institute of Victoria; not content with this, Mueller named another genus
Wilkiea
for the vice-president of the society, Dr D. E. Wilkie. Worst of all is the ridiculously clumsy name Mueller gave the adorable Bopple Nut, which he named after the Secretary of State for New South Wales, Hicksbeachia. Such mad coinages can have no uniform pronunciation; what has grown up instead is a culture of sanctioned mispronunciation. Botanists demonstrate their membership of the inner circle by using agreed or ‘correct’ mispronunciations. ‘Sloanea’ was named by Linnaeus for Sir Hans Sloane, founder of the British Museum; people who know who he was tend to call the trees ‘Slow-nia’; people who don’t render it ‘Slow-aynia’. I pronounce the genus ‘
Olearia
’ ‘Oll-ee-arr-ee-ah’, my sister ‘O’Leary-ah’. Actually, the genus is not called after O’Leary but after the olive tree or
Olea
. People like me who have not mastered the sanctioned mispronunciations can be instantly identified as outsiders and their expertise ignored, which is fine with me.

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.’