From Plant Press, Vol. 6, No. 3 from July 2003.
As children and adults read the latest Harry Potter book by J.K. Rowling throughout the United States and the rest of the world this summer, it should be interesting to note that a collected plant specimen housed in the US National Herbarium has been named after a word found in the Harry Potter series. Jason Grant, a former intern of retired Botany curator Lyman Smith (1989), named a new species of the gentian family after a term from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. The plant Macrocarpaea apparata J.R.Grant & Struwe is described in the June 27 issue of Harvard Papers in Botany [8(1): 61‑81. 2003]. The species name, apparata, is drawn from the term “to apparate” as in apparition, a verb used throughout the Harry Potter book. Rowling uses the word to refer to a wizard’s ability to disappear and reappear elsewhere instantaneously.
Grant, now a graduate student completing a Ph.D. degree on the genus Macrocarpaea (Gentianaceae) at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, and Lena Struwe, an assistant professor at Cook College at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, discovered the species while doing field work in southern Ecuador in 2001 in Parque Nacional Podocarpus, one of the largest National Parks in the Andes. They were traveling along a road in the rain forest when they suddenly found a very strange looking plant without flowers. Since the plant had no flowers or fruits they could not be sure is was a gentian, and if it was, it was a very unique-looking one. They continued on the road and about the time they were ready to give up due to rain and impending darkness, a flowering tree of this plant suddenly appeared, or ‘apparated.’ From this event, the species got the name ‘apparata.’
“When we found the plant, the word came to mind,” Grant says. “We actually decided on the name together, that day in the field. Our collection is the only one of this species.” The holotype is housed in the US National Herbarium. Grant describes the plant as “a small tree, 12‑15 feet tall, full with yellowish‑white, bell‑shaped flowers adapted to nocturnal pollination by bats and moths.”
Struwe had previously identified a new gentian genus in Brazil Aripuana and a dozen new gentian species, while Grant has more than 20 new species of Macrocarpaea to his credit. Their research was funded by the New York Botanical Garden, Rutgers University and the Université de Neuchâtel, Switzerland.
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