Who is David Mabberley?

Who is David Mabberley, and how has he affected UBC Botanical Garden?

Dr. David Mabberley is giving a lecture entitled "Botanical Art of Ferdinand Bauer (click link for information) on September 24 at UBC. For those who don't know Dr. Mabberley, I thought I'd assemble some facts about him and his work (particularly as it relates to UBC Botanical Garden).

Dr. David J. Mabberley is associated with both the Nationaal Herbarium Nederland at University of Leiden in The Netherlands and the Royal Botanic Gardens Sydney in Australia. His botanical interests are wide-ranging, and include economic botany, tropical flora, systematics and botanical art history. As he states on his personal page at the University of Leiden, his aim is:

"to understand and to explain to others the intricate relationships between plants and the human animal in terms of their interactions, biological and cultural, on the one hand, and the human perception of the plant world in terms of classification systems both morphological and systematic, on the other."

Perhaps his most well-known work is his book, "The Plant-Book: A Portable Dictionary of the Vascular Plants." This book is used frequently at UBC Botanical Garden, and particularly so when researchers and staff come across an unfamiliar genus name; "What does Mabberley say?" is often heard in these instances.

His twin interests in economic botany and plant systematics have placed him at the centre of controversial renamings of well-known genera of food plants.

To most people, strawberries are strawberries, but for botanists, they are (or were!) members of the genus Fragaria. With recent molecular evidence, it has now been shown that to recognize strawberries as a separate genus, Fragaria (based on the fleshy fruit) causes our evolutionary understanding of the genus Potentilla to be faulty. Hence, all Fragaria should now be recognized as members of the genus Potentilla.

In taxonomy, it is not enough to say something should be so - it must be formally recognized with a botanical name, which consists of at least three parts - the genus, the specific epithet and the oft-forgotten or dropped authority. The authority is the person who has constructed the first two parts of the name in a combination and has validly published it.

To bring this full circle, Mabberley is the person who has published new names for many former members of the genus Fragaria under the genus Potentilla. For people who dislike the changing of botanical names because of their comfort with the old names, taxonomists such as Mabberley who are willing to replace centuries-old names are sometimes the recipients of ill-feelings. However, we at UBC Botanical Garden welcome name changes that reflect the evolutionary history of the plants involved as it is a long term investment in the broader understanding of plants and their relationships. And we also welcome Dr. David Mabberley.

Link: Potentilla and Fragaria (Rosaceae) Reunited - a PDF version of the paper from Royal Botanic Garden Sydney's publication, Telopea

Posted by Daniel Mosquin at 12:35 AM on September 15, 2003

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