"Who's Afraid of Canis Virginiae?"
Dr. Marshall Crosby’s Continuing Ed Class, a fun class for MGs who loved learning all the genera names in MG Class.
With a passion for botany that goes back to his high school days and 44 years at MoBot to his credit, Dr. Crosby held the rapt attention of about 45 Master Gardeners for two hours in the Kemper Classroom today. His lecture covered taxonomy, plant collecting, naming plants (and more about taxonomy!) and the herbarium at MoBot. With numerous engaging examples, we learned that we know many more plant Latin names that we realize, Rhododendron, Magnolia and Forsythia being examples.
Marshall also took us on a picture tour of the process of collecting, drying and archiving plants in a herbarium. Did you know that herbarium specimens are sterilized (usually with a gas) before being filed away? The main target of sterilization is a tiny beetle that is fond of dried plant material. This is also why MoBot’s herbarium is kept at around 62 F. At that temperature adventitious beetle eggs won’t hatch.
Marshall’s particular area of expertise is the mosses (Bryophytes). For some years now he has been culling the existing ~50,000 scientific (Latin) names given to mosses down to the ~12,000 or so actual different species of mosses known. You mean there are duplications of scientific names? Yep there are! For flowering plants the problem is not quite so bad, with about 1 million Latin names for around three to four-hundred thousand actual species of flowering plants thought to exist.
The rules of plant names and naming plants (taxonomy at its highest) are updated and published every six years. The newest version will come out this year. (You’ll want to get your copy of this home soon, right?!?!) Marshall ended class with a fun game that illustrated some of the complex knots that arise from multiple people independently collecting the same plant and giving it a name, decades to hundreds years apart. It’s up to botanists and taxonomists like Marshall to keep (get) this all straight. Stay tuned and be on the lookout for those ever-changing genera names and reshuffling of plant classifications!
Thank You Dr. Crosby for a very interesting class. Another Thank You to our fellow MG Dr. Chris Kirmaier for arranging Dr. Crosby's visit and also for submitting this article.
