One of the things that almost never ceases to amaze me is how many plants have been named after people who had little or no connections with them, and often wouldn’t even have known they existed let alone seen them. I was reminded of that this morning when looking at a glorious stand of red-hot pokers in my garden. It’s a family of plants that I’ve grown to love over the years, especially once I’d discovered there was more to them than the bog-standard orange variety.
But why on earth is their botanical name Kniphofia? Was there a Mr Kniphof? and who decided he should have his name attached to this extraordinary group of African plants? It turned out to be a bit of a confusing roller-coaster of names and classifications in the days before the internet and not helped by the fact that red-hot pokers are really rather promiscuous…
As usual the photos are my own unless otherwise acknowldged, and are mainly from my own garden
There was indeed a Mr Kniphof, or rather a Dr Kniphof. He was born in Erfurt in Germany in 1704, and stayed there all his life. He trained as a physician, and at the age of 33 became professor of medicine and in 1761 rector of the university there. However, none of that of explains what he has to do with red-hot pokers.
We’ll return to Dr Kniphof after we’ve had a look at the red-hot pokers themselves. There are about 70 recognised species and hundreds of cultivars, but although they do all a family resemblance there is much more variety even in garden-worthy sorts than you might at first imagine.
The shape of their flower spikes, and their strong colouring explain their comm0n names – red-hot pokers or torch lilies – but while the commonest “cottage garden” sort are orangey-red pokers can be found in every shade of the red/yellow spectrum with more in the yellow/green range and even some which are brown.
Pokers are perennials, usually evergreen and part of the wider Asphodel family, along with eremurus, aloes, hemerocallis and phormiums. There are about 70 species, all of which are native to mainland Africa, apart from one each fromMadagascar and Yemen, with about two thirds coming from South Africa.
Until about 1800, only one species was known in Europe. Now known as Kniphofia uvaria it comes from the Cape region and seed was obviously collected and sent back, probably to the Netherlands, in the early 17thc before there was any permanent European settlement at the Cape. When plants eventually flowered in Europe their vibrant colouring and unusual form must have caused something of a sensation and given early botanists a bit of a headache to be able to classify and describe them scientifically. The usual way of doing this before Linnaeus invented the binomial system in the mid-18thc was use a long Latin phrase which usually picked up some of a plant’s key characteristics.
The first known published reference and image [on the left] comes in 1644 in Theophrasti Eresii de Historia Plantarum by Johannes Van Stapel, (or Stapelius), published in Amsterdam. He thought thought the plant was an unusual kind of iris and called it Iris uvaria promont. honae spei (“ uvaria ” means it looks a bit like a bunch of grapes, and rest refers to the Promontory of Hope ie the Cape).
After that it was almost a free-for-all in terms of names with different ones being given by virtually every botanical author.
I’ve found such names as Aloe africana folio triangulo longissimo etc.[which translates as the African Aloe with very long triangular leaves] from 1687. The following. year someone else called it Iris uvariaflore luteo etc.[the yellow-flowered grape-shaped Iris].
Two years later the same plant was described as Aloe africana foetida, folio triangulari longissimo et angustissimo, radice lutea. [the stinking African aloe with long triangular leaves and yellow roots]. It was even called a Squilla by Christian Mentzel in 1696
Luckily by the early 18thc there was a bit more consistency with an acceptance that the plant was in the aloe family, so for example the Hortus Cliffortianus compiled by Linnaeus in 1737 names it Aloe foliis linearibus triangularis etc, but Burman’s Catalogue of African Plants in the same year year described it as Aloe africana foetida folio triangulari etc., while Weinmann also in 1737 simply called it Aloe uvaria. All very confusing!
The last name, Aloe uvaria, stuck for a while and Linnaeus uses it in Species Plantarum in 1753 with others following including, somewhat to my surprise, a certain Dr Kniphof in 1762.
As part of his teaching Kniphof assembled a herbarium and in 1733 published an extraordinary book about it. Actually Kniphof’s book wasn’t really a book in the modern sense. It was issued as a series of unbound pages, known as centuries because each contained 100 plates. This meant that the purchaser could assemble the plates in any order they liked and then, if they wanted, have them bound into a book again in anyway they liked. This was not common but it was far from unique – others who had published like this were Basileus Besler, James Petiver and more recently Anna Atkins. One consequence was that these centuries of prints often got split up or lost and so it’s now extremely rare to find a complete edition.
The first edition illustrated 300 different plants but had no text but over the next 3 years a further edition was produced this time containing 400 plants with texts about the medicinal plants written by Kniphof, and for the garden plants written a horticultural friend of his. Work then stopped suddenly because of a devastating fire across Erfurt that destroyed Kniphof’s home, library and herbarium. It wasn’t until 1757 about twenty years later before he was able to produce a new edition and even then it was published slowly over the course of the next eight years and eventually contained prints and text relating to 1200 different plants.
One of them was the red-hot poker.
I can hear you saying that’s all very interesting but so what. Perhaps the title of the book will help explain. It was Botanica in originali, seu Herbarium vivum which translates as Botany in the original, or a living herbarium”
Kniphof meant that literally. His book was unlike any others at the time because he used a technique called Nature Printing. To do this, real plants were painted with ink or sometimes a mix of oil and soot and then pressed onto paper. This means that there must have been red-hot pokers growing in Erfurt for Kniphof to be able to literally print from its leaves and flowers.
The book is unique not just for the scale of its contents , but also for the quality of the images, especially in the coloured versions like the one now in the library at Harvard where the images in this post were sourced.
The technique works well with leaves because they have flatter surfaces although it’s less effective with flowers as you can see if you check through the edition linked above. It’s amazing to think of the skill required to work with a delicate fern, a prickly thistle or a wiry plant like goose grass. Not many prints could be made from one leaf or other plant part – probably a maximum of 4 or 5 – before it disintegrated so many individual specimens were required for a long printing run and that meant Kniphof must have had a team of trained helpers to collect them for him.
Of course Kniphof didn’t invent Nature printing. Leonardo da Vinci had already tried it and described the process in detail. It’s also true that during the 16th and early 17th centuries, individual herbaria were produced like this as an alternative to creating a herbarium of dried specimen plants. But Nature printing came into its own in the 18thc when there was a growing demand for more accurate scientific illustrations, anatomical atlases and botanical imagery. In this context, nature printing became popular as a method for representing nature absolutely true to detail and as my earlier post about Anna Atkins showed the technique continued to be used right through the 19th century. However it was Kniphof’s work that pioneered large scale use of the technique in book illustration.
However the fact that Kniphof had red-hot pokers growing in his garden doesn’t alter the fact that he called them Aloe uvaria, and it doesn’t explain how his name became attached to an African plant family. For that we have to thank another German botany professor, Conrad Moench. He wasn’t from Erfurt and was only 19 when Kniphof died in 1763 so it’s unlikely the two ever met but, like Kniphof and many others he compiled a herbarium and wrote about it. His was about the plants in the gardens and countryside in and around his home town of Marburg and came out in 1794. In it he wrote the first scientific descriptions of about 1,500 plants, including about 150 genera, in the process classifying hitherto unknown plants and reclassifying many others. As I’m sure readers will know, the name given to a plant by the person who publishes its first scientific description is the name that sticks under the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants so Moench is probably responsible for more plants than any other early botanist apart fromCarl Linnaeus. You can find a full list of the plants he named at the International Plant Names Index.
One of the plants Moench reclassified was Aloe uvaria, declaring it to be sufficiently distinct from other aloes to be a separate genus, and it was he who chose the name Kniphofia. Unfortunately, and I’m sorry this is a bit of a damp squib, we simply don’t know why he chose Johannes Kniphof for Kniphofia, or indeed Karl August von Bergen, for Bergenia [elephants ears], or Friedrich von Wangenheim for a type of grass, except all 3 were German botanists alive when he was growing up and presumably whose work he had read and admired.
Later on there were even more name changes.Linnaeus himself changed his mind and in 1771 transferred Aloe uvaria to the genus Aletris. If this wasn’t confusing enough, there was worse to come as more and more species were discovered with European exploration of southern Africa. Francis Masson, Kew’s first plant hunter , introduced a second species from the Cape- Kniphofia ensifolia – on his first trip in the 1780s.
A third species was introduced from the Cape around 1789, and illustrated in 1797 in Andrews’ Botanists Repository under the name Aletris sarmentosa or the Creeping-rooted Bastard Aloe. It was drawn from a specimen growing at Lee and Kennedy’s Nursery in Hammersmith and just goes to show that not everyone had heard about Moench’s reclassification or choice of names. .
Another who hadn’t heard was Carl Willdenow, the Berlin-based botany professor who in 1799 transferred two of the three then known species of pokers to the genus Veltheimia. This designation was followed by others, including Nikolaus Jacquin, the Vienna-based botany professor in his Fragmenta, a series of prints published between 1801 to 1809.
Meanwhile back in Britain in 1804 Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, described the genus as Tritoma, and included plates of each of the three species. Indeed Tritoma was the usual name in Britain right through the 19thc and even still crops up in the early 20thc. Curtis’s lead was followed by Pierre-Joseph Redoute’s Liliacees (1810 -1811) who also called them Tritoma which explains why the French today still call red-hot pokers tritomes.
After that the classification, and reclassification becomes so complicated with confusion arising not just because of the discovery and introduction of more species but the way that the names are mistakenly interchanged. This continued right through the rest of the 19th century. Since then there have been several attempts to sort it all out.
The main studies have been by Alwin Berger, a German horticulturalist and botanist in 1908, and then sixty years later by L.E. Codd of Kew who wrote a very lengthy revision of the genus in The South African Species of Kniphofia Trying to read that made me realise very quickly why I’m not and never could be a taxonomist. But if you want to follow the intricacies and probably give yourself a headache then have a go reading it for yourself.
At least I thought when I’d almost finished reading that account I could breathe a sigh of relief and get back to talking about red-hot pokers and gardens. But not quite because I’d overlooked two things. First the work of nurserymen, who from the 1870s have been hybridising them for potential garden use.
What was realised very early on in this process was that kniphofia are promiscuous. Planted near each other different species interbreed with ease creating a range of natural crosses or intermediates. With nurserymen now also deliberately creating crosses confusion reigned, especially as early catalogues just had short descriptions and no photographs. This situation is made infinitely worse because kniphofias don’t come true from seed and so named cultivars have to be produced by division. 
The second fact I’d overlooked was that is that Codd’s coverage is now over 50 years out of date and the taxonomy is still being revised. The person doing most towards that has been Christopher Whitehouse, author of the RHS monograph on Kniphofias. He also authored the very readable report of the RHS trials at Wisley between 2007 and 2009. Over 90 cultivars were trialled and the report points out some of the problems over naming them, showing how even reputable nurseries can get caught out. For example, one particular clone was offered under four different names:‘C.M. Prichard’, ‘Ernest Mitchell’,‘H.E. Beale’ and ‘Star of Baden Baden’.
Whitehouse who now works in South Africa has also compiled a massive and presumably fairly comprehensive list of cultivars which is freely available on-line. He doesn’t say how many in total but the list runs to over 60 pages and from a rough count of random pages I’d say there were well over 600 plus all their alternative names and synonyms.
The best place to see kniphofias in Britain is probably at the Eden Project in Cornwall, which holds the National Collection. This was founded about 10′ years ago and now contains more than 100 cultivars and 20 species. However that means there are about 500 or so cultivars missing and as Julie Kendall who is charge of the collection said “This kind of loss, not just of old cultivars, but good ones, is a problem that Plant Heritage, and its network of national collections, was set up to avoid.” Maybe you have one of them in your garden – but I’d guess, given the ability of pokers to hybridise easily, it would be difficult to prove!
For more information the obvious place to look would be the 
The Garden History Blog 
That was fascinating!! Loved the pictures from your garden too.