Alice? Oh! THAT Alice! Flashed Drosera aliciae (Alice Sundew), Fernkloof, Hermanus, South Africa
Not yet with flower, but beautiful in its own right because of its bright-red anthocyanin pigmentation persumably useful for attracting insects. This was one in a little cluster of sundews shadowed by bright yellow featherbushes on the edge of the Limoenkop Path of the Fernkloof Nature Reserve at Hermanus, South Africa. It's only 1,5 -2,5 cm in diameter, and defined by Fernkloof as Drosera aliciae.
Names are intriguing, of course. Drosera is easy enough: a Greek word having to do with dew; but I wondered who that Aliciae (= Alice) might be. In fact, the plant is called 'Alice sundew' in English.
My search was more complicated than I might have wished, but to make a longer story short enough for flickr: In 1905 the precocious 15-year old Raymond Hamet (1890-1972) published the first description of this sundew in the "Journal de Botanique", giving it its Latin name. In a footnote - appropriately in those days in Latin - he writes that he's named it in honor of Dr Alice Rasse, who had encouraged him to study this 'section' of the sundew family; presumably when he was but fourteen! Apparently the young man had something with Alices, because five years later he named a Kalanchoe (of Madagascar) aliciae after another Alice, namely someone he collaborated with in botanical work later: Alice Leblanc.
Hamet is something of a mysterious botanist. Today - after 1935, when he subtly changed his name - he is known not as R. Hamet but as Raymond-Hamet, botanically written as Raym.-Hamet. He remained fiercely independent his entire life, refusing university tutelage and funding his labs privately. But his memorialist Léo Marion writes (1973): 'Cependant, s'il aimait travailler seul, il était loin d'être un misanthrope. Au contraire, il aimait recevoir', and he and his wife were charming hosts whom visitors were loathe to quit.
Alice? Oh! THAT Alice! Flashed Drosera aliciae (Alice Sundew), Fernkloof, Hermanus, South Africa
Not yet with flower, but beautiful in its own right because of its bright-red anthocyanin pigmentation persumably useful for attracting insects. This was one in a little cluster of sundews shadowed by bright yellow featherbushes on the edge of the Limoenkop Path of the Fernkloof Nature Reserve at Hermanus, South Africa. It's only 1,5 -2,5 cm in diameter, and defined by Fernkloof as Drosera aliciae.
Names are intriguing, of course. Drosera is easy enough: a Greek word having to do with dew; but I wondered who that Aliciae (= Alice) might be. In fact, the plant is called 'Alice sundew' in English.
My search was more complicated than I might have wished, but to make a longer story short enough for flickr: In 1905 the precocious 15-year old Raymond Hamet (1890-1972) published the first description of this sundew in the "Journal de Botanique", giving it its Latin name. In a footnote - appropriately in those days in Latin - he writes that he's named it in honor of Dr Alice Rasse, who had encouraged him to study this 'section' of the sundew family; presumably when he was but fourteen! Apparently the young man had something with Alices, because five years later he named a Kalanchoe (of Madagascar) aliciae after another Alice, namely someone he collaborated with in botanical work later: Alice Leblanc.
Hamet is something of a mysterious botanist. Today - after 1935, when he subtly changed his name - he is known not as R. Hamet but as Raymond-Hamet, botanically written as Raym.-Hamet. He remained fiercely independent his entire life, refusing university tutelage and funding his labs privately. But his memorialist Léo Marion writes (1973): 'Cependant, s'il aimait travailler seul, il était loin d'être un misanthrope. Au contraire, il aimait recevoir', and he and his wife were charming hosts whom visitors were loathe to quit.