History
The Monterey Peninsula, discovery site of Potentilla hickmanii is in a native grassland opening within the Monterey pine forest. The Monterey Peninsula is influenced by a marine climate that is pronounced due to the upwelling of cool water from the Monterey submarine canyon. Rainfall is 40 to 50 centimeters per year, but summer fog drip is a primary source of moisture for plants that would otherwise not be able to persist with such low precipitation. Some taxa, such as the coastal closed-cone pines and cypresses are relict stands, e.g. species that once extended more widely in the mesic climate of the late Pleistocene period, but then retreated to small pockets of cooler and wetter conditions along the coast ranges during the hotter, drier early Holocene period between 6000 and 2000 BC.
Alice Eastwood discovered P. hickmanii in the year 1900 on the Monterey Peninsula, a region then considered the fringe of civilization. The Big Sur wilderness lay just beyond, unpenetrated by any roads at that time. Eastwood, Curator of Botany at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco was a pioneer biologist in exploring this remote area. On an expedition to amass specimens of rare plants from this southern reach of Monterey County, she retrieved a specimen of this previously unrecorded plant and named this species after J. B. Hickman. Hickman was her brother and guide on that collecting trip, and was the Horticultural Commissioner of Monterey County.
Read more about this topic: Potentilla Hickmanii
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Bias, point of view, fury—are they ... so dangerous and must they be ironed out of history, the hills flattened and the contours leveled? The professors talk ... about passion and point of view in history as a Calvinist talks about sin in the bedroom.”
—Catherine Drinker Bowen (1897–1973)
“We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?”
—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“Well, for us, in history where goodness is a rare pearl, he who was good almost takes precedence over he who was great.”
—Victor Hugo (1802–1885)