Understanding Plant Parasitism: Hydnora Africana and European Scientific Practice in the Early Nineteenth Century*

This article will analyze the uncertainties around collecting and classifying Hydnora africana in the first half of the nineteenth century. Emerging from the distinctive dryland ecologies of South Africa, Hydnora was interpreted as strange and cryptic by Europeans primarily because it is a root parasite-a complex floral trait that was little understood. Its unique timescale, dramatic structural change in drying, and resistance to travel made collection extremely difficult,and an inability to collect such plants informed debates on how naturalists could make classifications without seeing them in situ and what characteristics should be prioritized when ordering flowering plants. Attempts at understanding parasitism, therefore, became possible only through global comparisons to other parasitic plants in places like Sumatra, Spain, and the Mediterranean. This created anxieties around authority between the lab and the field, and amateur and professional, testing European scientific methods at the crucial moment in which natural history was fragmenting into disciplines and Linnaean taxonomy became increasingly ineffective. This article thus uses Hydnora africana as a boundary object between shifting geographies, institutions, and epistemologies, demonstrating how the parasitism debate embodied all sorts of questions related to control-over people, places, the natural world-but especially the limits of European knowledge systems.