Talk:Synaphea spinulosa

Some major changes based on Mabberley

David Mabberley (Botanical Revelations,2019, p7) tells a far more likely story:

"The surviving specimen said to be from such 'herborisings' is held in the Conservatoire et Jardin botaniques in Geneva, Switzerland, and represents one of the the two species notable for being the first plants restricted to Australia to be named according to the Linnaean binomial convention in the 'sexual system' of the Swedish doctor and naturalist Carl Linnaeus (1707-78), a classification of plants based on the numbers of sexual parts (stamens and pistils) in the flowers.... They were named and illustrated in the Flora Indica (1768) of Nikolaas Burman (1733-93), a Dutch doctor and botanist, at least one of them coming from surgeon-botanist Christiaan Kleijnhoff (d. 1777), who established the first botanic garden in the tropics, in what is now called Jakarta, Indonesia. It is not known whether they were young plants from Kleijnhoff's garden (though neither is obvious from the names in his 'Descriptio plantarum'). However, if they had been raised from seeds collected on the voyage, this would perhaps help explain the absence of flowers, though Vlamingh was too late for the flowers of both species in any case. Indeed, as they have no flowers, the scraps were at first taken to be from ferns. The first is a wattle, Acacia truncata (Leguminosae), ..... The second, his 'Polypodium spinulosum', of which a specimen survives in Geneva, is a Synaphea (Proteaceae). Although these are technical 'firsts', no-one at the time knew where they had come from, and they therefore had no contemporary effect in revealing the flora of Australia to Europeans".

Among the key words in this quote are "no-one at the time knew where they had come from". Additionally, APNI gives the Burman reference as: Burman, N.L. (1768), Flora Indica: cui accedit series zoophytorum indicorum, nec non Prodromus Florae Capensis: 233, t. 67, fig. 1 in which Burman describes the type as "ex Java" (from Java). Heence I am making changes in the text which are consonant with the above. MargaretRDonald (talk) 18:39, 16 April 2020 (UTC)