Tuesday, October 8, 2019

is it time to rename the begonia?


I thought that this post was going to go in a quite different direction.  Seeing all of the begonia-trays waiting to be planted out, and observing newly-sited begonias in the planters on Trousdale Parkway, I was going to berate - indirectly - our new eco-friendly University President for enabling (also, probably, indirectly) the transplanting of thousands of plants that guzzle up water.

But.  Checking on their thirstiness, I found that begonias (native to many moist sub-tropical and tropical climes, which certainly doesn't include Southern California) were first named by Charles Plumier, a French patron of botany, to honor Michel Bégon, a former governor of the French colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti).  The name was then adopted by Linnaeus, in 1753.  Bégon was, to be sure, a huge collector of plants.  He arrived in Saint-Domingue in the mid-1680s, having previously been in the Antilles; he sold an estate on Martinique; he became involved in the spice trade; he went on to become superintendent of Rochefort, on the Atlantic coast, where he started a naval botanic garden.  There's a brief history of his career in, of all places, the Daily Express in 2015.  But this doesn't mention how his overseas properties functioned; what I do know is that his son, Michel Bégon de la Picardière, not only went on to become Intendant of New France - French Canada - but, in order to accelerate that territory's rapid growth, introduced slavery.  Did his father have useful connections?  Maybe not - the appointment happened the same year as his father's death.  And indeed, one biographical source that I found with some hasty googling says that Bégon père was "humaniste et philanthrope," which may mean that these are not Tainted Flowers, after all.  Tell me if there's a family bio of the Bégons out there - if there isn't, there should be.

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