Forest hyacinths with setting sun on Texel.

About "Forest hyacinths with setting sun on Texel."

by Justin Sinner Photography (Photographer on Texel)

About the artwork

At the end of April the wood hyacinths bloom in the Texel forest. A purple blanket with the new fresh green spring leaves above it.

The plant received its scientific name from Carl Linnaeus, who placed it in the genus Hyacinthus as Hyacinthus non-scriptus.[1] Linnaeus referred for previously published descriptions and for synonyms to his own Hortus Cliffortianus (1738),[2] to Florae leydensis prodromus (1740) by Adriaan van Royen,[3] and to Gaspard Bauhin's Pinax theatri botanici (1623).[4] The references have in common that they refer to "Hyacinthus non-scriptus" in Stirpium historiae pemptades sex (1583) by Rembert Dodoens. Bauhin additionally mentions Joachim Camerarius junior and the much older Dioscorides as references for the species designation "non-scriptus".

Dodoens indicates that two species of "Hyacinthus" can be found in classical literature.[5] The species called "scriptus" he mentions in the introduction to his second book.[6] Here he tells of the youth Hyakinthos, from whose blood the hyacinth is said to have sprung, and on which the tears of Apollo weeping for him are said to have formed the letters "ai ai". The other species was smaller, and could be called (to indicate that it was a different species from the first) non-scriptus.[7]

The species was placed in the genus Scilla by Johann Centurius von Hoffmannsegg and Johann Heinrich Friedrich Link in 1803. The placement in the genus Hyacinthoides, which is now mostly followed, was first done in 1934 by Pierre Chouard and was formally published in 1944 by Werner Hugo Paul Rothmaler.