Garden Plants - Lonerica

Adam Lonicer, or Lonitzer, depending on the version you prefer, was a German doctor, but his real love was botany and in 1555 he published a book on 'natural history' which contained a huge amount of herbal lore and information.

He wasn't the only botanist to have a confusing name - the father of plant taxonomy, Linnaeus, has more names than one could shake a stick at! In Linnaeus's time, most Swedes had no surnames. His grandfather was named Ingemar Bengtsson (son of Bengt), according to Scandinavian tradition and Linnaeus's father was Nils Ingemarsson. But to enter university, one needed a surname, so when Linnaeus's father went to the University of Lund, he coined himself a Latin surname - Linnaeus, referring to a large lime tree that grew on the family's properly. Accordingly, when Carl Linnaeus enrolled as student he was registered as Carolus Linnaeus. This Latinized form was the name he used when he published his works in Latin, but after he was ennobled, in 1761, he took the name Carl von Linné.

Anyway, in 1753, Linnaeus named the honeysuckle after Lonicer. This was really just a nod to a precursor, as Lonicer's books had not had the kind of academic effect that he might have hoped for, although often reprinted, they remained the preserve of the keen amateur, not the University teaching text he probably hoped he had written.

The honeysuckle, of course, had been known for centuries before Linnaeus renamed it - in Britain it had always had the name woodbind, for the way it wraps around trees, but Shakespeare's woodbine is probably convolvulus, not honeysuckle.

One honeysuckle is regularly cursed in the States - the Japanese or Hall's honeysuckle was introduced in 1862 and became an invasive pest which has spread across most of the eastern coastal region, swamping native plants.

Garden honeysuckle photograph by ndrwfgg, used under a creative commons attribution licence