Many plants are named after people linked to imperialism and the slave trade, and some common plant names are offensive. Dr Ken Thompson ponders what can be done.
When, in 1934, a German palaeontologist named an extinct insect from the Carboniferous period after the new German Chancellor, he probably didn’t realise the trouble he was going to cause. But now, we’re stuck with Rochlingia hitleri, a name that no one is happy about.
So, why doesn’t it get changed? Plenty of people think it should be. But the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN), which governs the scientific naming of animals, has one aim above all others, and that aim is stability. When scientists use a name, they rely on everyone else, both now and in the future, knowing exactly what they mean by that name. In other words, the ICZN believe that the scientific name of any living organism should stay the same, unless there’s a good taxonomic reason for changing it.
As gardeners, we’re all too aware that names of plants keep changing. For example most former members of Aster are now in Symphyotrichum, and most former Sedum species are now in Hylotelephium. But those changes come from a new understanding of plants’ evolutionary relationships, largely from looking directly at DNA rather than relying on morphology, a process that (to everyone’s relief) is now mostly complete.
The current rules do not allow names to be changed because we don’t like them. And the people who administer the rules argue that if we did, we might find that we’ve bitten off more than we can chew. An estimated 20 per cent of the 1.5 million animal names commemorate people, and among them are more than a few that have troubling associations.
For example, about 1,500 African vertebrates are named after people, and many of those names reflect the continent’s history of Imperialism. Nor are the problems confined to animals; for example, does British colonial administrator Sir Stamford Raffles still deserve to have the genus Rafflesia named after him? The Australian genus Hibbertia (guinea flower) honours English slave trader and plantation owner George Hibbert. And as much as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson are revered in many quarters, both were slave owners, so what price Washingtonia and Jeffersonia?
The commissioners who run the ICZN think several hundred thousand scientific animal names alone might be challenged on ethical grounds, and that possibly changing many of them would be an almost impossibly vast undertaking. They have also stated that it is not their job to adjudicate those potential challenges, and they probably wouldn’t be very good at it, being experts on nomenclature and taxonomy, not ethics. So who decides?
And that’s just scientific names; there’s also the question of offensive common plant names and how to change them. But challenging as these issues are, we must look past the difficulties and figure out a way forward.