FLORA & FAUNA

C HARLES E LLIOTT ELEGANT TAXONOMY

T HE N AMINGOF N AMES

★By Anna Pavord (Bloomsbury 471pp £30)

A ROUNDTWOTHOUSAND years ago, a Greek doctor named Dioscorides described a plant that he considered to be medically useful. It was called ‘crocodilium’, he said, and it was supposed to help people who were splenetic. When boiled and drunk, it ‘causes copious bleeding at the nose’. Other characteristics, apart from the shape of its roots and seeds, and the fact that it grew in ‘wooded places’, were unfortunately obscure. What exactly was crocodilium? And why should anyone care? As Anna Pavord splendidly makes plain in this elegant and scholarly history of taxonomy, a science usually regarded as even dismaller than economics, such questions are far from insignificant. Exactly which plant is which, and what its relationship is to other plants, are matters central to our understanding of the world we live in. Crocodilium is a case in point, though on the whole a depressing one. The confusion surrounding it, as with so many of the plants mentioned by Dioscorides, lasted for hundreds and hundreds of years. Even when the sixteenthcentury Italian botanist Luca Ghini finally managed to pin it down as being most likely a species of Eryngium(at the same time apologising for not drinking an infusion to see whether it really did make his nose bleed), he was taking only a modest step out of the chaos. In Pavord’s firmly expressed view, the problem started with the ancient assumption that plants should be viewed primarily in terms of their usefulness. In practice, this meant their use in medicine. Right up until – and during – the Renaissance, botanical studies concentrated on pharmacology, ignoring what she calls ‘the big picture, the altruistic, intellectual search for the key to the order of the universe’. What was seen to be interesting about clove pinks was their efficacy against the plague, not their flowers or the genus they belonged to. Yet from the very beginning, in the work of the often overlooked third-century-BC Greek philosopher and proto-botanist Theophrastus, another approach could be discerned. Theophrastus is one of Pavord’s heroes, and

Flos Africanus

rightly so. The first man to write a book about plants, his ‘complex, quizzical take’ led him beyond mere recording to think about plant relationships, about names, about the actual shape of the natural world and the way living things fit into it. Unfortunately, his works were lost in the West; they survived only among Arab scholars in the East. Dioscorides, the medicine man (and far less important figure), held sway in Europe, repeatedly translated, the one and greatest authority right up until the seventeenth century. So most writing on plants took the form of herbals, simple lists of plants together with their therapeutic qualities. Despite advances in technology during the Renaissance – in engraving, printing, papermaking – which brought huge improvements in the way plants could be described, the old-fashioned herbal continued supreme. Pavord is wonderful on this phenomenon, and The Naming of Namesis beautifully illustrated. Gradually, however, the constant recourse to classical authority became harder and harder to justify. Northern Europe had plants that the ancient Greeks could not have known (and vice versa); still more new species were flooding in from the Near East and the Americas. Instead of simply copying precedent, men like Otto Brunfels, Leonhart Fuchs, Ghini, and Andrea Cesalpino were inspired to make their own observations and develop their own techniques, such as herbaria of dried specimens. They also began to think about how plants might be related to each other. ‘All science’, wrote Cesalpino, ‘consists in the gathering together of things that are alike.’ In support of this thesis, he set out 1,500 plants in his own 1583 book De Plantis in thirty-two different groups ranging from Umbelliferae to Compositae. Cesalpino used similarities between fruits and seeds to classify his plants; Lobelius attempted to do the same using leaf shape in his ‘nieuwe ordeninghe’ of 1581. Neither worked very well. (Lobelius concluded that there was no way to distinguish apples from pears.) The Englishman John Ray, following the fundamental division into trees, shrubs, sub-shrubs and herbs first employed by Theophrastus, developed yet another, more sophisticated classification scheme and got a little further. Yet there were always ambiguities or plants that didn’t fit. Even today, it seems, serious classification problems remain. Pavord writes delightfully about all this. Fine anecdotes and memorable pocket biographies tumble through what in lesser hands could be very dry text. Especially affecting is her account of the sad life of another of her particular

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LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006