Scottish plant hunters were a fearless lot

Forrest M. Mims III

When the Romans ruled the southern half of England, they viewed the unconquered tribes of the north as barbarians. These included the Scots, who some seventeen centuries later produced some of the world's most famous exploring naturalists, all of whom visited what is now the United States.

Scottish botanist and surgeon Archibald Menzies accompanied Captain George Vancouver during his historic voyage around the world that left England in 1791. Menzies became the first European to climb Hawaii's giant Mauna Loa and measure its height.

In the Pacific Northwest, Menzies became the first European to describe the large fir trees that were later named after him by another Scottish naturalist. This was the great David Douglas, who preferred to travel alone and who in 1825 rediscovered the same firs that Menzies had described.

Douglas honored Menzies by naming the tree Pseudotsuga menziesii, the Latin name by which botanists know it. Its common name is the Douglas fir, and today it's raised on tree farms for poles, construction wood, paper and Christmas trees.

Both Menzies and Douglas gained considerable fame from their hundreds of discoveries of plants, samples of which they sent back to England.

While Menzies survived his explorations, Douglas did not. In 1834, the famous naturalist died after falling into a pit while exploring Hawaii. One account claims he was murdered for his money.

Figure 1. This rain lily (Cooperia drummondii) was photographed in the woods on the Mims place in rural South-Central Texas. Photograph by Forrest M. Mims III.

While Douglas was in Hawaii, still another Scottish naturalist was exploring an untamed territory a quarter of a world away. He was Thomas Drummond, and his field of exploration was the state of the Republic of Mexico known as Coahuila y Tejas.

According S. W. Geiser in “Naturalists of the Frontier” (Southern Methodist University, 1937), Drummond learned about collecting opportunities in Texas while he was in Missouri. After traveling to Texas by boat from New Orleans, he nearly died from cholera. He later suffered from infections and near starvation.

Drummond eventually recovered his health and collected plants between the Edwards Plateau and the Gulf of Mexico along the Brazos, Colorado and Guadalupe Rivers. Unknown to Drummond, the land he explored for flowers was about to become the Republic of Texas.

Geiser reported that Drummond sent to Europe some 750 species of plants and 150 species of birds. While returning to Scotland to bring his family to Texas, the fearless naturalist died of unknown causes while passing through Cuba in 1835.

Drummond's name lives on in the names of some of the plants he was first to study in the name of science. The best known is Phlox drummondii, commonly known as Drummond's phlox. Drummond sent some phlox seeds to the famous English botanist Joseph Hooker, who named the plant after Drummond and introduced it to English gardeners.

Other Texas wild flowers that bear Drummond's name include the delicate pleated-leaf iris (Alophia drummondii), the snow white rain lily (Cooperia drummondii) and the and the scarlet Turk's cap (Malvaviscus arboreus var. Drummondii). The latter two grow wild on our place and remind us of the pioneering flower hunter who explored Texas shortly before Texas became an independent republic.

For more about Thomas Drummond, see Explorers, The Scottish Plant Hunter's Garden. For much more about Drummond's phlox, see James P . Kelly, A Genetical Study of Flower Form and Flower Color in Phlox Drummondii, Genetics, pp. 189-248, March 1920. (Accessed at http://www.genetics.org/cgi/reprint/5/2/189.pdf.

"World of Science" columns are selected and sometimes revised from columns published in the San Antonio Express-News or the Seguin Gazette-Enterprise. The columns are intended for a general audience. Forrest M. Mims III and his science are featured online at www.forrestmims.org and www.sunandsky.org .