An obscure 17thc botanist cleric is very prominent in many  gardens at the moment because of a plant, that as so often in the weird and wonderful ways of botanical names,  he never saw, didn’t even know existed  and had absolutely no connection with in any shape or form.   Yet his is one of the few botanists names that really are well-known. That’s because because the plant is also renowned as a colonising weed, which grows rapidly in the poorest ground, filling waste ground, lining railway embankments and even cracks in walls, roofs and gutters where its hard to imagine how anything survives let alone thrives. It has no predators to munch its leaves, but unlike the other invasive plants such as Japanese knotweed or Himalayan balsam, that this description applies to, it instead attracts butterflies and insects and fills the air with a wonderful honey-like fragrance.

The Guardian in an editorial called this plant “the ragamuffin of the natural world” saying  “It is common as muck and as easy as dandelions to grow”  ….

 

and is, as I’m sure you guessed, Buddleia.

But what’s its connection with an obscure clergyman?

Adam Buddle was born at Deeping St James  in Lincolnshire in 1665.   He was educated at St Catherine’s College, Cambridge becoming a fellow after his graduation, but like many others was then ejected in 1691 after refusing to swear religious allegiance to the new king, William III. He later changed his mind and in 1702 was ordained  at Ely Cathedral.  The following year he became rector of North Fambridge, near of Maldon in Essex, and also accepted the post of reader at the chapel of Gray’s Inn, London. 

While still in his 20s Buddle began studying bryophytes, the plant group that covers mosses, hornworts and liverworts, and was one of the first people in England to do so. He was also in correspondence with other plant lovers like Samuel Doody of Chelsea Physic Garden, and James Petiver, the apothecary of the Charterhouse, as well as with Joseph Pitton de Tournefort in Paris. Once at Gray’s Inn he went botanizing around the capital with them and others.  Buddle also knew and worked with fellow clergyman John Ray author of Catalogus Plantarum Angliae [ A Catalogue of English Plants] (1670), which was together with Ray’s Synopsis of 1696 the standard reference work for English flora and its taxonomy.

Buddle built up a large well annotated herbarium collection [including 22 volumes covering mosses!] and  in 1708 finished writing an accompanying  English Flora.   This was never published, but the manuscript survives – along with his herbarium – as part of the Sloane collection at the Natural History Museum in London. It must have been well regarded since he is known to have lent it to to Petiver, and to Joseph Bobart at Oxford as well as to Tournefort in France.  Bobart wrote thanking Buddle telling him that it was “the best collection of its kind in the world, and as instructive as admirable.”

But Buddle collected more than plants in his herbarium. Given that the Buddleia is popularly known as the butterfly bush its very appropriate that the multi-volume manuscript also contains pressed insects including moths and at least 31 species of butterflies  collected around London. They are all labelled with links to his friend Petiver’s Musei Petiveriani.   It is one of the oldest butterfly collections known.

Buddle died aged only 50 at Gray’s Inn in 1715 and was buried at the nearby church of St Andrews Holborn.

So how come he got the honour of having a whole family of plants named after him? For that we have to thank another now forgotten botanist, William Houstoun. He was a Scottish medic and contemporary of Buddle, who was a ship’s surgeon and collected plants in Jamaica, Cuba, Venezuela, and Mexico sending seeds and plants back to Philip Miller,  at the Chelsea Physic Garden in London.  Amongst them was  the most widespread of all the Buddleja species native to the Americas. His choice of name  was  agreed by Linnaeus in his description of  Buddleja americana. It maybe widespread in its own home territory but it’s very rare in cultivation in Europe becasue it’s not frost-hardy.

And no, I haven’t mistyped the plant’s scientific name.

The reason that it’s buddleja rather than buddleia, which would be the expected spelling, is apparently because Linnaeus used a long-tailed “i” when writing the description. [Early modern handwriting often used such conventions rather like the better known possible confusion between the  long-tailed ‘s’ and an ‘f’ or the use of v for u.] And although he used a standard ‘i’ in the index, and  others tried to correct the misunderstanding, the convention of the first description becoming the officially accepeted one holds good and so buddleja it is officially, although rarely anywhere else.

It came as something of a  surprise to me to learn that Buddleja  is a widespread  genus of about 140 species. John Chau, of the Burke Museum in Seattle, has used genetic  evidence  to trace the environmental history of buddleia and found it originated in southern Africa, about 10 million years ago, and spread  in a series of  separate events to Madagascar, Asia and the Americas. Most are fast growing deciduous shrubs although there a few evergreens, some herbaceous sorts,  and  a few that can be classified as trees growing to 30m [c.100ft].  As you might have guessed from the behaviours of the common form in Britain, they are usually opportunistic colonizers often able to sustain enormous ranges of conditions.

After Houstoun’s discovery the next member of the family to be introduced to the west was of B. globosa  from southern Chile in 1774 which was taken into commercial cultivation via  Lee and Kennedy’s Vineyard nursery at Hammersmith.  The herbarium catalogue at Kew then records a flood of discoveries/ introductions from Asia and the Americas in the earlier decades of the 19thc most of which are relatively unknown to gardeners today. They include Buddleja saligna from Botswana in 1812, Buddleja neemda  from Nepal in 1821, Buddleja parviflora from Mexico in 1830, B. oblonga from Brazil and paniculata and crispa from India in 1831. Of course the fact that they are recorded in the catalogue does not mean they were actually growing in Britain’s gardens or greenhouses.

B. colvilei , for example was collected by Joseph Hooker in Sikkim in 1849 but  Gardeners Chronicle 18th June 1892 has a letter from Irish horticulturist William Gumbleton stating that “this beautiful and most distinctly hardy shrub …is flowering with me this summer. I believe for the first time in Europe, but on this point I shall be glad of correction.” A few weeks later the magazine carried an illustration.  [For more on Gumbleton see “William Edward Gumbleton (1840-1911), Connoisseur and Bibliophile” by B. D. Morley and E. C. Nelson Garden History Vol. 7, No. 3 (Winter, 1979), pp. 53-65]

But to most people Buddleia is almost synonymous with B. davidii, which was first mentioned by, and then named after, the French missionary and explorer in China, Father Armand David. He  collected and sent specimens to  the Paris Musée National d’Historie Naturelle where it was officially described  by Adrien René Franchet in 1869.