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From Plant Press, Vol. 4, No. 1 from January 2001.
Peter Hoch (Missouri Botanical Garden), Ken Sytsma (University of Wisconsin, Madison), Jorge Crisci (Museo de La Plata, Argentina) and Robert Raguso (University of South Carolina) were awarded $83,500 in Smithsonian Mellon Fellowships to work in the Department of Botany over the next three years with Warren Wagner and Elizabeth Zimmer on phylogeny of the Onagraceae.
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From Plant Press, Vol. 4, No. 1 from January 2001.
By Robert DeFilipps
Let us assemble in a spirit of forgiveness, as we review the case of Henry Fletcher Hance (1827-1886), the legendary British botanist in Hong Kong and later consul in Whampoa, Amoy and Canton, who could not have foreseen the great mystery that would arise from his choice of “Rhoeo” as the name of a new genus of Mexican Commelinaceae. To this day the derivation of Rhoeo is cited in botanical reference books as either unknown or obscure. Yet this plant, with purple boat-shaped inflorescence bracts enclosing slightly emergent white flowers, is well known in the vernacular of gardeners and houseplant enthusiasts as the “boat-lily”, “oyster plant”, “Moses-in-a-boat” or “three-men-in-a-boat”.
From E.H.M. Cox’s book on “Plant-Hunting in China” (1945), we learn that Hance “was an expert linguist, completely word perfect in Latin, Greek, French and German.” Inspired by that clue, a search of worldwide websites led me to Peter Hawlina, a professional genealogist residing in Slovenia, who provided an answer to Hance’s puzzle. It transpires that Rhoeo is a Greek mythological figure, the daughter of Staphylos (father) and Chrysothemis (mother), and she was a mistress of the god Zeus. Staphylos became angry when he found out Rhoeo was pregnant, and locked her in a chest and put it in the sea. The chest later washed up on the coast of Euboea (or Delos), after which Rhoeo gave birth to a son, Anius. The “Encyclopedia Mythica” notes that Anius was the father of three daughters: Oeno (wine), Spermo (grain seed) and Elais (oil), who were given the power to generate those crops.
For someone as erudite in Greek as Henry Hance in the 1800s, it would have been appropriate to bestow the name “Rhoeo” on a plant with boat-like bracts enclosing a seemingly hidden inflorescence, to commemorate the mythological Rhoeo’s claustrophobic maritime predicament in the Mediterranean Sea. The boat-lily, long known as Rhoeo spathacea, is currently referable to Tradescantia spathacea, while Rhoeo herself lives on as Tradescantia Section Rhoeo (Hance) D.R. Hunt.
Mexico and Central America, the home of the boat-lily, is along with continental Asia and tropical Africa a center of diversity of the mainly tropical and warm temperate monocot family Commelinaceae, comprised of approximately 41 genera and 650 species. The family is a major research specialty of Robert B. Faden, curator of African plants in the Department. A native of the Bronx, New York, he earned a B.S. cum laude (1962)from City College of New York; M.S. (1964) from the University of Michigan; and a Ph.D. in Biology (1975) from Washington University, St. Louis. After a period of time (1976-1980) as curator of botany at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Illinois, he arrived at the Smithsonian Institution to take up duties as curator in 1980.
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