Nobody was entirely sure what to call orchids for two millennia after Theophrastus first wrote down their name, and by the end of the eighteenth century, it was imperative to settle the dispute once and for all. We must examine the history of plant categorization, which charts the progressive discovery by Europeans of the sheer number of orchid species, in order to comprehend why. Only two of the approximately 500 plant species that Dioscorides had named were orchids; after 1500 years, Europeans had been collecting and identifying orchids for generations, but they had only managed to name 13 species in total.
However, as we saw in the last chapter, there were already far too many names for even this small group. The few species of orchids that are known to exist were known by dozens of common names in Britain alone, including Adder Grasse, Dog’s Stones, Dead Man’s Fingers, and Goat’s Stones. The same plants were given many more names by each nation in Europe.
For example, one orchid was known as Uomo nudo (Naked man) in Italy, Italienisches Knabenkraut (Italian Lad’s weed) in Germany, and Orchis ondulé (Wavy orchid) in France. Furthermore, as if the image weren’t already confusing enough, the original Orchis was joined by a number of Latin and Greek names, including Satyrion, Cynosorchis, Serapias, and Tragorchis. However, there was no standard way to refer to these names in Europe. The true issue, though, was the ambiguity of all these names: a single species may go by several names (frequently within the borders of a single nation), but even more perplexingly, numerous species may share a single name.
There was perpetual uncertainty whenever herbalists, botanists, alchemists, explorers, apothecaries, and merchants in Europe wrote or conversed about plants. But the disarray of plant names in Europe was nothing compared to what would occur centuries after Columbus and Vespucci; the Náhuatl name for vanilla, tlilxóchitl, represented a grave danger to the stability and utility of European names for all plants, not just orchids. At most 1% of the world’s orchids are found in Europe, but as we’ve seen, naturalists have become entangled in nomenclatural tangles over a mere dozen species.
Numerous new orchid species would progressively be discovered as Europeans traded, explored, and conquered an increasing amount of the world beyond their borders; however, these discoveries accounted for only a small portion of the ever-increasing number of alien plants for which Europe lacked both classical and colloquial names.
Every ship that arrived from the tropics must have occasionally given Europe’s naturalists a new set of problems; every new species of bird, animal, insect, or plant, whether it originated in Africa, the East Indies, the New World, or the far East, required a new name. The treasures of the globe were piling up in anonymous mounds, threatening to topple Europe’s two-thousand-year-old natural history legacy. Europe’s botanists began devising new classification and naming schemes to make sense of this deluge of novelties. As we’ve seen, the first botanical categories were founded on human usage beliefs about the potential applications of plants.
While Theophrastus and a few others had started researching plants for their own purposes, the medieval and early modern herbals’ entirely practical approach was far more prevalent. Oswald Croll followed a long-standing custom that put humans at the center of the cosmos when he decided to arrange plants in the same way that Dioscorides had done: according to the parts of the human body they were believed to heal. During the scientific revolution, the Earth was reduced to the status of one planet among others, orbiting in empty spaces that grew ever larger with each passing century.
The ancient astronomers had assumed that the Earth was the still point at the center of a closed cosmos, which evolved into the Christian idea that it had been created by God as a habitat for humanity. As a result, naturally, everything revolved around us. Naturalists in Europe started to view their continent’s wildlife and flora similarly as their understanding of the globe grew, viewing the lush, tropical regions as the real centers of diversity in life and as peripheral to the continent’s abundant and novel discoveries.