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From: "Greg Kindall" <gregkindall@earthlink.net>
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Subject: Re: Lotus trees
Date: Sun, 26 Aug 2001 02:31:16 -0700
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David Meadows wrote:
>And now the confession: the thing I was actually thinking of is a lilac (I
told you I was having a brain cramp!).<

Do you mean the plant introduced by "some French guy" in the 15th or 16th
century?  That would get us out of one conundrum!  I don't find
lilac/syringa in the index to the Loeb Theophrastus or in a list I have of
plants in Pliny, which is surprising given they are native to the Balkans
and have been so long a workhorse of gardens.

Lorenzo Smerillo wrote:
>Just a wild guess here, but the lotus which JB describes below sounds to
me as if they might be what are called in Italian *loti* or *cacchi*
(really they are called that!) known in English as persimons<

I didn't catch this earlier: the Japanese for persimmon is "kaki" (and the
scientific name for Japanese persimmon is Diospyros kaki).  And at the
website given by David Meadows in his last "Lotus trees" posting
(http://www.scs.leeds.ac.uk/cgi-bin/pfaf/arr_html?Diospyros+lotus) they give
"False Lote" as a common name for Diospyros lotus (the unpersimmony 1/2"
yellow persimmon).  False in relation to Celtis australis? (Lote Tree,
Nettle Tree).  Is Lote the Italian common name for either of these trees?

and finally in re: Arbutus
JLPB wrote:
>The ones that I nibbled in Rome were not so flagrantly red as these but
they do look to be the same thing.<

I wrote earlier that they almost always have some fruit.  You can often
observe fruit in various stages of maturity, ie., yellow to red, even
flowering while fruiting.

I also wrote hastily:
>There is a Greek species (SE Europe and Asia Minor), Arbutus andrachne,
that keeps its classical moniker in the specific epithet.  (The two species
are very similar.)<

Actually the Greek name for Arbutus was "andrachle"; "andrachne" was salad
purslane, Portulaca oleracea, a totally unrelated plant.  Linnaeus applied
"andrachne" as a specific epithet to the Greek Arbutus, A. andrachne, and as
a generic name to a third unrelated genus in the Euphorbia family.  Such
wilful transpositions of established names have provoked comment and
controversy since the great Swede's own lifetime, I'm told.

.