James Reveal, the mapmaker of Eriogonum

Every wild buckwheat name a gardener reads on a label, and every variety a flora splits with confidence, descends in large part from one botanist's working life. James L. Reveal, an American botanist who died in January 2015, spent decades revising the genus Eriogonum, describing new species, sorting the known ones into subgenera and sections, and arguing the fine points of botanical naming at the highest level of the profession. For a genus of roughly two hundred and fifty variable western species, that work was not bookkeeping. It was the map without which the territory stays a blur.

This journal, which writes about botanists as it writes about nurseries and societies, in the third person, tells his story here because the names he settled are the working vocabulary of every page in its field guide.

A botanist of names and deserts

Reveal built his career at the University of Maryland, where he served as a professor and herbarium botanist, and he wore two professional hats at once. The first was the genus: from graduate work onward he collected, described and reorganized Eriogonum across the American West and Mexico, in deserts, mountains and islands. The second was nomenclature, the science and law of plant names: he served the international community that maintains the code governing botanical naming, wrote on its history and practice, and became one of the people other botanists asked when a name question turned difficult. The two hats met in one genus that needed both, since a group that variable cannot be organized, or its species conserved, without a firm grasp of the rules.

The problem Reveal set out to solve

The scale of the problem is easy to state. Eriogonum is one of the largest genera of flowering plants native to North America, with its center of diversity in the arid West, where its species have radiated into every dry habitat from coastal bluff to alpine gravel. Along the way they have become maddeningly variable: widespread species grade from form to form across their ranges, isolated populations diverge, and characters that separate two species cleanly in one mountain range blur in the next. Nineteenth century botanists, collecting fast and naming liberally, left a legacy of hundreds of names of uncertain standing. A flora in that condition defeats both the field botanist, who cannot key a specimen, and the gardener, who cannot know what is being bought. The genus needed what taxonomists call a revision, a genus wide, specimen by specimen reassessment, and that is the work Reveal took up.

The structure he gave the genus

Reveal's revisions organized the genus into subgenera and sections, nesting the species into a hierarchy that reflected their evolution: the tall wispy wild flax buckwheats of the annual plains in one line, the woody shrubs and island trees in others, the cushion plants of the high mountains in their own tight groups. He described many species and varieties new to science, from desert shrubs to island endemics, and he clarified the standing of many old names, which families of plants, and gardens, had carried for a century. The garden felt the work directly: seed lists could name a plant precisely, nurseries could distinguish a hardy montane form from a coastal one, and the field identification of a difficult shrub ended, more often than not, in a name Reveal had settled.

The booklets on the old website

There is a small piece of that story on this very domain. The society website that eriogonum.org carried for years hosted a documents library for its members, and among the papers were Reveal's own contributions: a booklet of his work made available for download, and the society's pages presenting his revisionary studies of the genus. Members downloading those papers were reading the primary literature of their favourite genus, the actual monographic work behind the floras, which is rare generosity in any field. That library moved with the society when it left this domain, and readers who want the primary texts now follow the society at its current home, described in this journal's account of the Eriogonum Society and its seed exchange.

Reveal's legacy in garden names

The legacy is quiet because it is everywhere. When a gardener buys sulfur buckwheat and the label carries a variety name, that name's meaning is Reveal's; when a flora key ends at a species he described from a single desert range, the confidence is his; when the portraits of variable species in this journal speak of forms and origins, they lean on the taxonomy he built. Botanists continue the work, genera are reorganized as molecular data arrives, and names shift at the edges, as names do. But the map of the genus, the mental geography every buckwheat conversation assumes, remains his. The general accounts of his life record the honours; gardeners and hikers, who use his map weekly without reading it, are the larger monument.

Spot a buckwheat on the next dry slope, key it to species, and read the author of the name in the flora's index. Half the time, or more, the name says Reveal.