In the last issue of the MEMBG newsletter, you were introduced to the family Bignoniaceae, a specialty group of plants featured in our Westwood collection. This family is best described as a lineage of woody plants, but there are a few species of herbaceous perennials among the bignons.
While conducting ecophysiological research in the fog desert of the Chilean Atacama last November, I was able to locate flowering specimens of the remarkable bignon geophyte, Argylia radiata (L.) D. Don. This herbaceous species, with showy orange flowers, is a real eye-catcher in an otherwise bleak landscape. The highly dissected, compound leaves arise from a massive tuber and are positioned close to the ground, whereas two-inch flowers and skinny wooden fruits are borne on an inflorescence about half a meter tall. One fruit I observed had brownish, winged seeds--from which we hope to obtain this bignon to grow along a sunny path at MEMBG.
Even more remarkable than its beauty is the fact that Linnaeus named this plant in 1753, in his seminal nomenclatural work, Species Plantarum, the starting place for the formal naming of plants (known as binomial nomenclature). Nearly all of the species named by Linnaeus were plants growing in European gardens. How, then, did a plant native to a remote desert zone of Chile come to Linnaeus's attention, long before he became aware of the common plants of western South America? The answer is that this argylia had been collected by the Frenchman Louis FeuillČe sometime between 1709 and 1711. FeuillČe was describing medicinal plants of Chile and Peru, and because of him a sample of this species became available in Europe. Linnaeus assigned the species to the genus Bignonia, which at the time included species that are now classified in several different genera