It is April and the Northern Hemisphere is enjoying the sight and smell of blooming magnolias. Fittingly, today is the birthday of the man who described and named the genus. Charles Plumier (20 April 1646 – 20 November 1704) was a French botanist known for describing many plant genera and for preceding Linnaeus in botanical taxonomy. His (Plumier’s) taxonomy was later incorporated by Linnaeus and is still in use today.
Plumier traveled a lot as part of his job as Royal Botanist at the court of Louis XIV. Don’t envy him too much though because the monk order to which he belonged, the Minims, forced him to be a vegan, living mostly on lentil.
Among thousands of other plants described was the magnolia, a genus of gorgeous ornamental flowering trees that put out spectacularly big flowers in the Spring, usually before the leaves come out. Plumier found it on the island of Martinique and named it after Pierre Magnol, a contemporary botanist who invented the concept of family as a distinct taxonomical category.
Interestingly enough, Plumier named other plants either after famous botanists like fuchsia (Leonhard Fuchs) and lobelia (Mathias Obel) or people who helped his career as in begonia (Michel Begon) and suriana (Josephe Donat Surian), but never after himself. I guess he took seriously the humility tenet of his order. Never fear, the botanists Joseph Pitton de Tournefort and the much more renown Carl Linnaeus named an entire genus after him: Plumeria.
Of interest to me, as a neuroscientist, is that the bark of the magnolia tree contains magnolol which is a natural ligand for the GABAA receptor.
REFERENCE: Plumier, C. (1703). Nova Plantarum Americanum Genera, Paris. http://dx.doi.org/10.5962/bhl.title.59135 FULLTEXT courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library
By Neuronicus, 20 April 2017
The Science Portal 
Interesting stuff! I love magnolias, thanks for posting! 🙂
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