Saturday, 2 August 2014
Protea is both the
botanical name and the English common name of a genus of South African flowering
plants, sometimes also called sugarbushes.
The genus Protea was named in 1735 by Carl Linnaeus after the Greek god Proteus,
who could change his form at will, because they have such a wide variety of
forms. Linnaeus's genus was formed by merging a number of genera previously
published by Herman Boerhaave, although precisely which of Boerhaave's genera
were included in Linnaeus's Protea
varied with each of Linnaeus's publications. Source
