Species Ferraria spithamea

For Giovanni Batista Ferrari (1584–1655), Italian Jesuit, professor of Hebrew and rhetoric at the Jesuit College in Rome, horticultural advisor to the Pope, and author of many illustrated botanical books, including De Florum Cultura in four volumes (1633), a horticultural book emphasising the planning and planting of gardens, and Hesperides sive de Malorum Aureorum cultura (1646), a ‘citrus encyclopedia’. He also wrote a Latin-Syrian dictionary, a series of Orations – treatises on rhetoric, which emphasised good Latin usage, and a book on Sienese saints. He was the first scientist to provide a complete description of the limes, lemons and pomegranates, and their use in preventing scurvy.