Taxa Field Guide

Gk. ereike = to break. The name used for a heath by Theophrastus (372–287 BCE) and Pliny the Elder. The stems are brittle and break easily (Lindsay); or possibly but less likely because of the ability of the plant to break up bladder stones (Paxton’s Botanical Dictionary).

Santalum, Latin name for sandalwood, perhaps from the Persian shandal.

Named after the genus Crassula

From the Latin ‘saxi’ / ‘saxum’ meaning ‘boulder’; and the Latin ‘fraga’ / ‘fragans’ meaning ‘breaking’.

For Johann Rudolf Suter (1766–1827), Swiss physician, botanist, politician and professor. He studied classical philology and natural sciences at the University of Göttingen, PhD (1787), and philosophy and medicine at Mainz, MD (1794). He practised as a doctor in Zofingen until 1798. He became politically involved in the Jacobin Republic of Mainz, and later became a subprefect of the district of Zofingen, a member of the Canton of Aargau, and of the Switzerland’s Grand Council in the Helvetic government (1798–1800), belonging to the Reform Party. In 1802, he published his book on Swiss flora, Flora Helvetica, with the help of Johannes Hegetschweiler (1789–1839). In 1819 he became professor of philosophy, Greek literature and history at the Academy of Berne.

For William Watson (1715–1787), English physician, apothecary, botanist and naturalist. He introduced the work of Linnaeus and his botanical classification system to Britain. He was the first scientist to observe the flash of light from the discharge of a Leyden jar and to show that electricity could pass through a vacuum and that it had a positive and negative charge; he coined the word ‘circuit’. His articles, entitled Experiments on the Nature of Electricity, appeared from 1745 onward in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, of which he became a member (1741) and vice president (1772). Both he and Benjamin Franklin discovered some of the same characteristics of electricity at the same time, but independently. The two men became friends.

Gk. myrike = fragrance; also murikē (myrike) meaning a Tamarisk (= a family of mainly Old World desert shrubs and trees); referring to the plant’s aromatic leaves in many species.

Gk. strouthos = a starling. The seeds are pointed like a starling’s beak (Hugh Glen). Alternately, Gk. strouthion = a small bird, sparrow (dim. of strouthos = ostrich). Perhaps the seed resembles a sparrow’s beak (WPU Jackson).