Any name will do!

Spent a while this morning getting ready for my usual Tuesday afternoon visit to Dunollie. I had to check out the substitute shrubs that the garden centre had supplied as my planting plan had been done for my original list, quite a few of which appeared not to be available, or not on their list at least.

I checked three weather forecasts as it's not the sort of job I really want to do when it's raining, paper lists and the like. They all said 'thunderstorms this afternoon and then light showers'. I went anyway, which was just as well as it was dry, windless and thunderproof!

My Blip today is of the first flower on the bottlebrush, one of the shrubs to be planted at Dunollie - Callistemon citrinus 'Splendens', a compact selection from a species native to eastern Australia. As long as I've known this plant this has been its name, but I've just learnt that Australian botanists are now saying it should be Melaleuca citrina. Apparently at some point it was known as Metrosideros citrina! Just to make things even more annoying, last year I bought a plant in a garden centre labelled Callistemon lanceolatus, only to find when I got home that this was an older name for the same plant! Is it any wonder that it's usually simply called a bottlebrush!

I think that taxonomists must lead such a boring life that they have to keep on suggesting new names for plants, hoping to stir up some good arguments!