Passion for natural history

Press, 29 May 1981, Page 14

Passion for natural history

Gardener’s ©diary

Derrick Rooney

’ What's in a name? Plenty, sometimes, when the name belongs ,to a plant. Take Leucothoe catesbei, a shrub, that T am about to plant in my garden to replace a-predecessor that died a couple of years ago.

Its-name contains;, reminders of many things:.scandal among the ancients; nine teenlh-century romanticism, and a remarkable naturalist who was among the eighteenth-century visitors to the English colonies in Virginia and Carolina. The naturalist was Mark Catesby (pronounced Keatsby), whom a later scientist commemorated in the naming of this coolness and moisture-loving shrub which comes from the southeast of. North America where Catesby spent years of his life.

Born in Suffolk in 1682, Catesby became inspired with a “passion for natural history - ’ through a childhood acquaintance with John Ray, naturalist, botanist, and author. This passion led him, at (he age of 23, to Virginia, where his .sister - had gone about the turn of the century to live with her husband, a doctor.

In Williamsburg, the young Catesby found a kindred soul in William Bvrd 11, a notable

amateur naturalist in the colony and an interesting character who owned a cotton plantation, but wore only silk clothes,; and who made a point of reading passages from the Bible in Hebrew before breakfast every morning.

During the next few years Catesby sent back, to‘England seeds and. botanical specimens, many of them new. and by the time he returned to England:in 1719 he had.a well established reputation as a naturalist. Thus he had no difficulty in finding sponsors for his second trip to America.

His salary, though, seems a bit meagre, even by eighteenth-century standards — .£2O a year, paid by the colonial governor. Catesby arrived in Charleston. Carolina, in. 1722 with big plans for collecting seeds, ■ plants, and zoological specimens, but in his first year there he made little headway; first illness, then a hurricane followed by floods kept him in the settlement, and his few trips into the wilds were restricted by the presence of rebellious Indians.

But in 1723 he was able to make trips to the Georgia and Florida frontiers. Early in 1724 he set out on a 400mile trek into the Apalachian mountains. Next, he tried to get permits for a trip into Mexico, but eventually he tired of waiting for them,

and went instead to the Bahamas, where he studied marine life.

A year later this extraordinary man was back in England, living in lodgings at a nursery owned by his patron. Thomas Fairchild, in London. There is where his story really starts: with the beginning of work on his great literary project: “The Natural History of Carolina; Georgia, Florida, and the Bahama Islands.” . This took most of the remaining 24 years of his life. There were two vo T lumes, each with. 100 handcoloured plates, and an appendix with another 20 plates. Most of the subjects were birds, . and Catesby anticipated Audubon by depicting the. birds in their natural surroundings, among appropriate plants. When he had difficulty finding an: engraver who could make satisfactory plates of his paintings at ah ■affordable price, Catesby, then in his mid-fifties and by the standards of his time quite an old man, went “back to school” to learn to do it himself. When his book was completed Catesby was 65 years old, and he celebrated the occasion by getting married. He lived for two more years, and at some time during them he mysteriously acquired two children, one of them a boy aged eight.

He was a strange man — quiet, reserved, and described by one of his friends as “tall,* meagre, hard-fea-tured, and having a sullen look.” He was known to burst into song only once in his life — after an unusually convivial evening with Byrd in Charleston.

Today his book is largely forgotten, except by historians. But some of the American plants that he introduced are still with us — the American wistaria, the catalpa tree, the coreopsis, the Carolina allspice, and many others including the “American cowslip,” dodecatheon. He did not name the leucothoe; that was done later. Originally the genus was part of the large old genus, andromeda. Early in the nine teenth century an English botanist, Don, split the family into a number of genera, leaving one species in andromeda.

For the new* genera he used latinised versions of mythological ladies, to create such names as cassiope, ledum, and leucothoe, which sounded charming, even though most of the ladies had no connections with horticulture. >

Leucothea, who inspired “leucothoe,” was one of the more appropriate choices. She was the daughter of a mythological . Babylonian king, who had her buried alive after she was caught doing naughty things with

Helios, the. sun-god. Helios in his flaming chariot arrived too. late on the scene to save her life, so he changed her into a beautiful shrub.

Perhaps, by a long stretch of imagination, the pendent strings of creamy white bells on, Leucothoe catesbei at flowering time could be seen to resemble Leucothea’s golden tresses. Leucothoe catesbei is a medium-sized coppicing shrub which flowers in early summer from buds set the previous autumn, like its relative, the rhododendron. The old stems tend to die right back after flowering, but when the shrub is happy robust new growth emerges from the base every year. The bark is reddish year round, but brightest in winter, and in the colder months the normally deep green leaves assume'a purplish hue.

A variegated form, “Gerard’s Rainbow,” is the most common form of it in New Zealand, but is not a particularly.attractive shrub because the variegation is messy and the bush looks diseased rather than distinctive.

The straight species is hardier, too; well worth the twoyear search it took to locate a specimen. Another of Leucothea’s American shrubs which occasionally is available here is L. davisoae, a Californian

Sierra species which makes a dense, green, mounded little shrub topped in spring by sprays of waxy white bellflowers. But it is not common and is not likely to become common, because it is extremely slow growing; I have a young plant in my shadehouse, and it is several years old but not yet big enough to put out in the garden. In the Sierra it grows in damp places in clearings in lodgepole pine forests and varies in height from half a metre to one and a half; my plant is obviously one of the smaller forms and there may be bigger ones about. From Japan comes another species, L. keiskei, which is described as a prostrate alpine shrublet with zig-zag shoots springing from a central rootstock. The young leaves are bright red and the flpwers, which are white, are said to be the largest in the genus and on the smallest bush.

' I have not seen the plant, but have ordered seed, which I expect I will find difficult to raise.

The specific names of both these species, incidentally, commemorate botanists. The “Davis” was Miss N. J. Davis, who made the second discovery of the species and introduced it to cultivation; and the “Keisk” of keiskei was a noted Japanese scientist for whom an attractive rhododendron also is named.