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 of the New World like Columbus (1492). Clusius also tells us the plant was at that time generally cultivated in pots by ‘rei herbariae studiosis’
(people interested in botany), that it had been cultivated for many years in Austria and in Belgium, and that it had to be sheltered in a warm place for the European winter. As an illustration he uses the same woodcut as published by De Lobel.