Snapdragon history
Snapdragons are an old decorative flower, which was already known to the
Romans. From genetic center around southern Spain the cultivated form
was spread throughout the whole Roman empire. Nowadays remnants of these
original population which all belong to the species Antirrhinum
majus are found among Roman remains like temples, stadia etc in
southern France, Malta, Israel and so on.
The scientific name of the genus Antirrhinum was first defined by
Carl
von Linné (also Carl Linnaeus) in the year 1753. Here we present
copies of the descriptions of the Antirrhinum species taken from the
original first edition of "Species Plantarum", 1753, pages 612 to 619.
The text is in Latin of course.
In the year 1914 Prof. Erwin Baur the founder of the Max-Planck-Institut
für Züchtungsforschung in Cologne published a volume called
"Einführung in die experimentelle Vererbungslehre" (Introduction
to experimental genetics) 2. Edition. This book contained several
plates with reproductions of water color paintings of snapdragons as
examples. For instance he crossed a white line with a red line resulting
in a pink flower. This pink flower then was selfed and the offspring
showed the typical distribution of 1 white, 2 pink and 1 red as a
demonstration of Mendelian inheritance.
Here are reproductions taken from color plate II (Tafel II). They are
reproduced with kind permission of the Gebr. Borntraeger Verlag, the
holder of the copyright for this book:
This page is part of the
Snapdragon Home Page.
The URL of this page is
http://www.mpiz-koeln.mpg.de/~stueber/snapdragon/snapdragon_history.html
If you have any comments, additions or corrections to this page of general
interest you are invited to use the
Snapdragon Guest Book.
For personal comments please write to the author(s) of this page or to
Kurt Stueber.
This page has last been modified on August 27, 1997.
