My uncle Bob is a botanist. Tonight he told me one small thing I want to remember.
He has multiple plants named for him, but of all those, he said, Kalanchoe fadeniorum holds a special place for him because, unlike the others, it is named for both him and his wife Audrey (Archive). The ones named after my uncle individually are called “fadenii” (singular); “fadeniorum” is plural.
This 2001 article (Archive) has some background on his work:
Faden has performed fieldwork in a large array of countries, much of it with his wife Audrey, including the United States, Mexico, Costa Rica, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and 11 African nations from Cameroon and Ghana to Somalia, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Zambia and beyond. Attesting to his remarkable “eye” for spotting novelties during field collecting trips are 12 Kenyan angiosperm species named in his honor by specialists, including new members of the families Dichapetalaceae, Euphorbiaceae, Rubiaceae (such as Coffea fadenii), Rutaceae, Urticaceae, Amaranthaceae, Capparaceae and Crassulaceae. They are crowned, as it were, by the genus Fadenia Aellen & C.C. Townsend (Chenopodiaceae), although Faden once wrote: “I maintain that Audrey was the best collection that I ever made in Africa!” Kenya-born Audrey Faden is a landscaper, master gardener and Smithsonian volunteer for the intensive cultivation and maintenance of numerous commelinads used for research, growing in the departmental greenhouse in Silver Hill, Maryland. Both people are also intensely involved with the Potomac Valley Chapter of the North American Rock Garden Society.
Here are some photos of Kalanchoe fadeniorum from an April 2018 visit:
It was the 777nd specimen collected on a 1977 trip in Kenya. They hadn’t realized at first that it was something special, but it’s never been seen again in the wild.
We release these photos and the rest of the text of this blog post into the public domain. This work is marked with CC0 1.0, https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/.
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