Some people devote their whole lives to the classification of small yellow flowers

Ever since the "father" of biological taxonomy, the Swede Carl Linnaeus, established the binomial nomenclature for naming organisms, biologists have followed the pattern of genus name + specific epithet and written the scientific names of organisms in Latin.

For example, today's main character Hypericum is the genus name of Hypericum, and the specific epithet choisianum distinguishes it from the approximately 500 species of Hypericum. Sometimes, in order to commemorate the name of the species, the name of the namer is also suffixed after the binomial name, such as Hypericum choisianum Wall. ex N. Robson.

Hypericum multiflorum | Krzysztof Golik / Wikimedia Commons

Simple naming is of course a good thing for complex biological species, but behind the simplicity may be a story of twists and turns in the discovery and naming of the plant. This story is hidden in the "ex" in the name of Hypericum multistamens, Wall. ex N. Robson.

Colonial empires’ prey

The bright yellow flowers and slender clusters of Hypericum multi-stamenum are the visual focus of the garden. It took 142 years for it to go from the deep mountains of the Himalayas to the Royal Botanic Gardens in London and to be officially named.

The story begins in 1831. At that time, Britain controlled trade with India through the East India Company. Before India became a British colony, the East India Company actually played the role of governing India on behalf of Britain. The British were not only interested in spices, silk, and tea from the far east, but also particularly keen on collecting various exotic flowers and plants. The East India Company had some botanists who specialized in collecting plants.

Nathaniel Wallich, a Dane, was originally a surgeon working for the East India Company. He gradually developed a keen interest in Indian plants and collected plants on many field expeditions in Nepal, India and Burma. He also founded the Indian Museum in Calcutta and participated in the construction of the Royal Botanical Gardens in Calcutta.

The plant named by Walichi Leycesteria formosa, Chinese name is Ghost Blowing Flute | Denis.prévôt

From 1828 to 1849, Wallach classified and named the plants he and his many assistants collected, and compiled a long list containing 9,148 records and about 20,000 specimens. Some of these precious plant specimens were studied and named by Wallach himself and published as new species, but more were sent back to Europe and studied in depth by experts in various groups. The 4805th record on this list is Hypericum multicarpon, which was collected by Wallach's assistant R. Blinkworth from the Kumaon area in northern India in 1831.

The plant catalog of Wallichi. The 4805th record in the red box is Hypericum multiflorum | botanicus.org

Wallach first named it Hypericum choisianum and signed it with his initials (Wall.). The specific epithet choisianum comes from the Latinized form of the surname Choisy, in honor of the Swiss botanist Jacques Choisy.

If the name is not right, the words will not flow

Hypericum choisianum Wall. may be because there are too many plants to name, and Wallich, who has limited energy, did not describe its morphological characteristics in detail after writing Hypericum choisianum Wall. Other botanists could not recognize this species by its name alone, which made this Latin name a "naked name" and could not be considered a qualified name for publication, so it could be rejected.

Hypericum multiflorum | Krzysztof Golik / Wikimedia Commons

In 1846, Wallich retired and settled in London. The specimens he collected were also shipped back to London and stored in the specimen collection of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. In 1858, India became "British India" and completely became a colony. The East India Company also completed its historical mission and no longer had to bear the responsibility of monopolizing trade and managing India. It was completely dissolved in 1874. At this time, the British Empire was in the "Empire on which the Sun Never Sets" era under the rule of Queen Victoria, and the prosperous economy drove the exploration and discovery of plants.

Flora of British India, 1882 edition | openlibrary

Just one year after the East India Company was completely dissolved, British botanist Joseph D. Hooker began publishing the Flora of British India in 1875, which comprehensively recorded the Indian plants known at the time, and of course included Hypericum hookerianum. However, because it was a "naked name" and was considered a variant of Hypericum stylobatum, it was renamed Hypericum hookerianum var. leschenaultii, and the Hypericum choisianum named by Variche was regarded as a synonym and was not recognized.

Hypericum multiflorum

A century has passed quietly, Great Britain has lost its former "glory", India has become independent, and three countries, Bangladesh, India and Pakistan, have been established on the former colonies, but the tradition of British botanists studying plants in South Asia still exists. In 1973, Norman KB Robson, a botanist at the British Natural History Museum, compiled the Flora of Pakistan. He found that the Hypericum multicarpon in the Himalayas should be an independent species, not the "leschenaultii" distributed in Indonesia. So Robson described the morphological characteristics of Hypericum multicarpon in Latin according to the requirements of the international plant nomenclature regulations at that time, and designated the specimen No. 4805, which was first collected by Warwick, as the type specimen.

The holotype specimen of Hypericum multiflorum designated by Robson (Walley Pond No. 4805), held in the Herbarium of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew | apps.kew.org

In this way, after "running naked" for 142 years, the scientific name of Hypericum multicarpa finally "put on clothes" and became a qualified name. The author of the name became Wall. ex N. Robson. "ex" indicates that this name was published by Robson (N. Robson) instead of Wall.

Robson's steps did not stop at the qualified publication of Hypericum multicarpa. In 1977, he began to publish a monograph on the genus Hypericum, which included nearly 500 species of Hypericum. Because it was too long, Robson divided it into 13 parts and published them successively from 1977 to 2012. In the second part of the monograph published in 1985, Robson described Hypericum multicarpa in detail. It is a species distributed along the Himalayan chain, from west to east in Pakistan, Kashmir, India, Nepal, Bhutan, northern Myanmar, all the way to Tibet and Yunnan in China. So far, Hypericum multicarpa finally has its own "identity file".