Species Sigesbeckia orientalis

For Johann Georg Siegesbeck (1686–1755), Prussian physician, botanist and director of the botanical garden at St Petersburg (1735–1747). He was a fierce critic of Linnaeus’s system for the classification of plants, the so-called sexual system, on ‘moral grounds’ rather than scientific merit, asking, inter alia, whether God really would allow that 20 men or more (i.e. the stamens) have one wife in common (i.e. the pistil). Such was their enmity that Linnaeus named a stinking weed Siegesbeckia, and in a publication on contemporary botanists, ranked Siegesbeck as the last of 33 botanists. So outraged was Siegesbeck at these and other incidents that he stopped Russian and Siberian plant trade with Uppsala, Sweden. The genus name was misspelled by Linnaeus.