Beautiful and smelly plants

This last week I presented at the Society for the History of Natural History summer meeting in Glasgow, Scotland. The image for the call for papers was John Tyley's Passionflower so how could I resist. The theme was A Sense of Nature and for my paper I explored some of Anderson's sensorial expressions about plants growing in the Botanical Garden. I won't wax lyrical about how great the conference was, but suffice to say it was fantastic and I learnt lots, and I will be including some of Anderson's plant descriptions in the Guidebook.

Many of Anderson's plants he describes as beautiful (spelt beautifull in his day). One of the plants he describes as 'the most beautifull tree I ever saw' is Bignonia filicifolia, a basionym of Jacaranda filicifloia, and a synonym of Jacaranda obtusifolia. Plants of the World Online lists it as Bignonia filicifolia Anderson, It was named after Anderson, published in the 1807 Transactions of what is today the Royal Society for Arts. As you can see from the image below it is very beautiful indeed.

However, not all the plants growing in the garden were ones Anderson found pleasant, and he notes two that smell like a rotting human corpse. Of Arum foetidum (today Typhonium trilobatum (L.) Schott) he writes it ‘is a poisonous plant, and has a most disagreeable smell particularly when in flower, like the putrifaction of the human carcass, it taints the atmosphere to a great distance’. Whilst the Posoqueria longiflora is similarly described with the note that it 'has the most disagreeable of smells, as bad as the human body in putrefaction, nor is it hardly possible to stay in a clos'd room where a ripe fruit is.’

Anderson was as much a man of the senses as he was of science. Having noted plants connected with sight and smell, next week I'll look at some plants connected with touch and taste.

Bignonia ficilifolia Anderson

Arum Foetidum

Fruit of Posoqueria Aubl.