1648 Willem Piso book

In 1648 a book on medicinal plants of Brazil was published by Willem Piso, physician of the Dutch settlement in Recife (Brazil), then Dutch property and governed by Johan Maurits van Nassau. He provided the first description and illustration of both the wild Canna indica (as ‘Meeru, sive Canna Indica’)...

1601 Clusius and Canna indica

Clusius writes in his famous herbal of 1601 that a plant named ‘Canna indica or Flos Cancri’ (because the closed flowers resemble the claw of a lobster) had already been cultivated for a long time in cloister gardens in Portugal where it may well have arrived with the early discoverers...

1576 De Lobel & Indica florida

In 1576 De Lobel described and illustrated a plant cultivated in Belgium as ‘Indica florida’, the seeds of which he had received from friends from the West Indies (‘Indiae Occiduae’). According to him the species was very rare, but already in cultivation in France, England, Italy, and Portugal. He did...

1536 First canna illustration

The plate in Leonhart Fuchs’s unpublished book ‘The Vienna Codex’ (compiled between 1536 and 1566) representing Canna indica may well be the first illustration of the genus in botanical literature. The plate is annotated as ‘Gladiolus indicus or Indischer Schwertel’, and numbered ‘Cod. 11122, p. 321’. This plate has been...

1753 Official taxonomy of Cannaceae starts

Following the international rules of botanical nomenclature, the official taxonomy of Cannaceae starts in 1753 when Linnaeus published ‘Species Plantarum’. In this book Linnaeus arranged the plants according to his new binominal system.