One Plant of Thousands

February 5, 2020 • by Nicole Elmer
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Maytenus octogona. (Photo: Jason Hollinger, Wikimedia Commons)

Even Darwin’s first impression of the plant life there seemed as if he was not terribly excited. “Although I diligently tried to collect as many plant[s] as possible,” he wrote in his journal, “I succeeded in getting only ten kinds; and such wretched-looking little weeds would have better become an arctic, than an equatorial Flora.” However, upon closer inspection, he would see there was more than meets the eye. “It was some time before I discovered, that not only almost every plant was in full leaf, but that the greater number were now in flower.”           

Amongst these plants Darwin collected was a specimen of the shrub he would send back to the UK. It was described twelve years later in 1847 by the British botanist, Joseph Dalton Hooker, as a new species, Maytenus obovata. Part of this specimen currently is on the UT campus, in the Billie L. Turner Plant Resources Center.

How did UT get such a specimen from one of the most scientifically-important explorations of the Pacific in the 19th century? In the 1970s, the director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, removed a small part of Darwin’s type specimen and presented this as a gift to Texas botanist, Cyrus L. Lundell. In the 1990s, Lundell would give his personal herbarium to the University of Texas.

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The route of the HMS Beagle.

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