Rebecca Rice

In this oft-quoted phrase Juliet, the tragic heroine, declares her love for Romeo despite him bearing the name ‘Montague’. The implication is that names do not change the essential qualities of a person, or a thing. But names do matter. They carry meaning, sometimes metaphorical, sometimes poetic, almost always cultural. In the world of botany, naming has increasingly become a site of interest and debate. For while binomial nomenclature provides a unique, stable and economical means to communicate exactly what plant is being talked about, the universalising impulse underpinning taxonomic science has been perceived as complicit with colonisation, often ignoring, over-riding or making invisible the indigenous and culturally inscribed ways plants are known.

In my research, and based in Aotearoa New Zealand in the Pacific, I have been seeking to better account for the contributions of women to histories of botany and art during the colonial period. They too participated in picturing and describing the natural world, but, in contrast to their professional, often male, counterparts, their work registers the intimacy of their encounters with the natural world. They noticed and documented the perspectives, uses, meanings and names given to plants within indigenous knowledge systems. 

Take, for example, Isabella Sinclair’s Indigenous flowers of the Hawaiian Islands, 1885. Sinclair talked with Hawai’ians about the plants she encountered, learning their vernacular names, the stories associated with them, and their medicinal properties and uses, both functional and aesthetic. In 1954, Harold St John, Professor of Botany, condescended that, in the absence of previously published indigenous names, Sinclair must have recorded them through her own research.  Likewise, Sarah Featon’s The Art Album of New Zealand Flora, 1889, prioritised the Māori names in her captions, listing first, for example, Pohutukawa, followed by the binomial, and the extended text detailed their use, describing how ‘the juice of the inner bark is said to possess a medicinal virtue, and the Maoris [sic] are accustomed to use it to allay inflammation’. Featon’s work has been little acknowledged in histories of science in Aotearoa, although this publication is the first to document indigenous knowledge of the plant world in a comprehensive way. 

As a participant in the plants on paper workshop hosted by the Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh in October 2024, I was curious to see whether similar examples might be found in the Scottish archives. In Charlotte Cowan Pearson’s exquisite album of watercolours, I found a connection to Featon and Sinclair’s work. For her composite bouquets of Scottish wildflowers made in the 1860s and 1870s bear the scientific name of each species written in elaborate gothic calligraphic script, but beneath each in cursive, less formal text Pearson lists the common name, ‘dog violet’, ‘cowslip’ or ‘prickly shield fern’, as well as the location and date of her encounter with the original specimen from which she made her drawing. Working through the album, one gains a sense of Pearson’s movement through the landscape. Her work provides a reminder of the ways people described the botanical world – while she prioritises the latin binomial, her informal annotations signal both her knowledge of common names as well as her bodily connection to place, through plants. 

Every rose has its thorn

As humans have become increasingly disconnected from the natural world, the drawings and writings from our past such as those by Sinclair, Featon, and Pearson provide traces of the common and indigenous names of plants. These traces can act as prompts for those working in the present to recover knowledge, or mātauranga, but they can also offer something to push against – thornlike, prickling at history, at the narratives we’ve inherited, both about these women and their work. At the ‘botanics’ I pored over Pearson’s album with artist Amanda Thomson. In the short time we spent together marveling over her drawings – their vibrant colour and complex compositions – questions flowed. Who was Charlotte Cowan Pearson? How was she educated both in art and botany? What enabled her travel to the locations the specimens were sourced from? What logic underpinned the species she brought together in pictorial form? Were there original sketches that she drew upon to create her ‘bouquets’? 

For Thomson, Pearson’s watercolours and inscriptions offered a record of place, a snapshot of an environment she knows intimately, and engages with in her practice. But how would that compare with the natural world known to Pearson? If one was to re-visit a site where Pearson observed and drew, for example, ‘prickly shield fern’, what would one find? An environment rendered precarious, over-written with human impact and environmental destruction? In her work, such as Mainly in sinuosities, Thomson created a map of Edinburgh’s Union Canal with botanist Greg Kenicer that recovers botanical knowledge of place, foregrounding…    

In the archive, I also reflected upon the imperial nature of the collections we were being given such privileged access to. We had been brought together as a group from the margins of Empire, to connect and reflect collectively, sharing responses and reactions to the botanical material unearthed. I found myself thinking of people I wanted to share the experience with, such as Ayesha Green (Ngāti Kahungungu, Kai Tahu iwi/tribes), whose paintings navigate the histories of power and taxonomy in effective, and often disarmingly simple ways. In works such as Wild Flowers (Things that grow) Green draws attention to the ubiquity of the Linnaean naming system in settler colonial lives. 

A rose is a rose is a rose

It’s a small thing, but recovering knowledge of the names of things that carry cultural meaning takes us one step closer to understanding the deep relationships with nature that lie behind them. Names, it seems, do matter.