Please help ID this

Jim McKenney jamesamckenney@verizon.net
Thu, 04 Oct 2012 09:09:03 PDT
As I recall, the events in question took place about a century and a half before the time of Linnaeus' best work. 

It was Clusius, not Linnaeus,  who traveled to Bristol to get information about this plant. He was told that it came in a ship named Peru but the ship itself had come from the Levant.  The nane antedates Linnaeus, and thus modern nomenclature,  by about 150 years.

And is the plant in question actually S. peruviana (Oncostema peruviana) or is it one of the South African species, such as Merwilla plumbea (Scilla natalensis)? The foliage, what we can see of it, suggests this plant rather than S. peruviana.

Jim McKenney



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