Species Schefflera actinophylla

For Johann Peter Ernst von Scheffler (1739–c 1808) German physician and botanist of Gdańsk, and later of Warsaw, who contributed plants to Gottfried Reyger (1704–1788) for his book Tentamen Florae Gedanensis Methodo Sexuali Adcommodatae (1764), the first book in Germany that tried to describe local flora according to Linnaeus’s ‘sexual system’ of classification. Linnaeus became convinced that all organisms reproduce sexually. He reasoned that each plant possessed male and female sexual organs (stamens and pistils) or ‘husbands and wives’, as he also put it. On this basis, he designed a simple system of distinctive characteristics to classify each plant.