David

David Don’s misguided good intentions

Whether or not Burt (and therefore Jones) had been deliberately misled by traders (not an unusual course of events in commerce then or now) into thinking the Valeriana was the true jatamansi is now of only historical interest. However, David Don (in Lambert 1821) sought to remedy things by applying, incorrectly, Jones’s binomial to the true jatamansi (i.e., the Nardostachys ), by dis- missing not only the sole original material (the plate) but also Jones’s description, and therefore making most important the verbal information provided by Harington. This is not acceptable as a ‘lectotypification’ (a practice not formulated in the modern sense in Don’s time in any case) and we cannot therefore concur with Hara (1975), who essentially followed David Don’s setting aside of Jones’s (and Burt’s) work (see below).

In 1825 Don decided (correctly) that the true jatamansi was not a Valeriana after all and therefore coined the name Patrinia jatamansi for it. This name is based on Valeriana jatamansi sensu D.Don (1821) , non Jones (1790), and includes in its synonymy ‘ V. spica Vahl, Enum. 1 [i.e. 2 (1805)]. p. 13’ (a su- perfluous name for Jones’s V. jatamansi , and therefore also not applicable to what is now the Nardostachys ). In other words, Patrinia jatamansi D.Don was in effect a new species for what is now the Nardostachys , its type being the Wallich material from Bhutan cited by Don.

The genus Nardostachys – later 19th-century treatments In 1830 De Candolle erected the genus Nardostachys for the true jatamansi and coined the binomial N. jatamansi , which he clearly based on Patrinia jatamansi (and therefore V. jatamansi sensu D.Don , non Jones). He also added a second species, N. grandiflora DC. , based on other Wallich material from Ku- maon (now in the state of Uttarakhand, India), but this plant is now considered conspecific with N. jatamansi (see below). It should be noted that in the Prodromus (1830) De Candolle referred to a publication that had, in fact, not yet been issued ( De Candolle 1832) in which both species of Nardostachys (and Valeriana wallichii – see below) were illustrated and once again described. Royle (1835: 1: 242-4; 2: t. 54), who had a special interest in materia medica, discovered, while stationed at Saharunpur, and independently of Don, that Jones’s plant was not the true jatamansi , and obtained and grew the correct plant from the mountains of Kedarkantha and/or Shalma in the Western Himalaya ( Uttarakhand, India). By the time that he came to publish his conclusions, accompanied by a handsome plate, he had become aware of Don’s and De Candolle’s work and followed their treatment (though without saying to which species of Valeriana he considered Jones’s illustration to belong). Clarke (1881) also followed Don and De Candolle, but made N. grandiflora DC. a synonym of N. jatamansi DC. Adopting the convention of his day, Clarke stated that “The name V. Jatamansi [of Jones] is hence to be suppressed” and referred Jones’s illustration to Valeriana wallichii DC. In this identification he followed De Candolle, though, in fact, De Candolle had referred the Jones plate to his new species with a query.