Native Plants, Foreign Names: Botanical Nomenclature and Memory of Landscape in Imperial Herbaria

• In Event: Botanical Histories of Tsarist Central Asia and the Caucasus

Abstract

Russian botanical expeditions to Central Asia in the late 19th-early 20th centuries collected many different plants, naming and cataloging them, exploring natural resources and mapping new imperial territories. Uprooted and dried plants were shipped from the empire’s borderlands to the centers of knowledge production to be preserved in the herbaria in Tomsk, St. Petersburg, Hamburg, Berlin, Paris and other places around the world. In this paper herbaria are examined as imperial natural archives which documented the changing landscape of Central Asia (this paper is focused on the Semirechie region) but also reflect choices, values, connections and gaps in the knowledge production. Collected plants were published under new given Latin names which made them a part of Linnaeus universal botanical nomenclature; plants’ names also have names of botanists who found or introduced these plants (Bunge, Schrenk, Ledebour, Semenov, etc) and could include plants’ regional marker (turkestanica, thianschanica). So, examining herbaria one can see a natural landscape and its transformation, a history of botanical exploration and networks, and a history of colonization and “botanical imperialism”, changing identities and memories of people and plants.

Author

• Tatiana Saburova, Indiana U Bloomington