Flesh colored. It comes from the latin word incarnatus which means "to make flesh." Its English transliteration (incarnate) is used in several translations of the bible.

Ryan

Thanks for answering. But I need more explanation concerning "flesh colored". Why botanist have choosen this word for asclepias that are white and pink? I understand the religious meaning.

yvan roux

You would need to go back 250 years and ask Linnaeus, as it was he who named this species.

When you think of it, the color of flesh is variable, from the very pale pink of veal to the red of beef. But the more religious meaning of incarnata (or the English incarnate) is 'made flesh', implying the living flesh, complete with skin.

Definitely botanists are strange when they name a plant. I read that asclepias syriaca (common milkweed) is exclusively an american plant.

yvan

Oops,

thanks Tony. I meant skin, but evidently got distracted by the last thing I read :-)

Ryan

Yvan,

Under the rules of nomenclature, botanical names may not be rejected just because they are inappropriate. They are names, not descriptions! If a man has the surname Little, he does not usually change it just because he is 2 metres tall and weighs 120 kilograms.

Asclepias syriaca is another name published by Linnaeus in 1753, and as it is clearly typified we must continue to use it. You should realise that, on the information available to Linnaeus at that period, he may well have honestly believed it came from Syria. He did not have Google (and even if he did he would have got plenty of inaccurate information!).

Perhaps you do not appreciate that in earlier ages peoples' understanding of the world, not to mention their use of language, was often very different from ours.

One example is Tigridia. The flowers are spotted but the name means "tiger". It was named during the victorian era and at that time people were still confusing the spotted South American jaguar with the striped Indian tiger. The name was, indeed intended to denote a spotted flower. But I still dont understand why passiflora incarnata has that name, there is nothing flesh-colored about it.

Some more . . .

Scilla peruviana (from Spain; the specimens were delivered to Linnaeus on board the ship MS 'Peru', but that detail got muddled in the delivery)

Cupressus lusitanica (from Mexico; introduced to Portugal [Lusitania] in the 15th century, info which had become part-forgotten when Miller gave it its scientific name 300 years later in the late 18th century)

Simmondsia chinensis (from California, but Nuttall's handwriting was famously illegible, and the herbarium note 'Calif' was mis-read by Johann Link as 'China')

Resin