SPIDER PLANT

SPIDER PLANT / RIBBON FLOWER

LATIN NAME: CLOROPHYTUM VITTATUM

MOTHERLAND: SOUTH AFRICA

Our story begins on a research trip in South Africa by Carl Peter Thunberg, a curious student of Carl Linnaeus, who is considered the father of Taxonomy, the science of classifying living things according to their species.

Before moving on to the main story, we think it is important to honor Carl Linnaeus by briefly mentioning him, because he is someone everyone interested in botany should definitely know. Linnaeus, who was actually a poet, began his life with the amateur naming of flowers during a trip to Lapland and evolved into a life that would earn him the praises of “the prince of botanists” and “the Pliny of the north”. He is also referred to as the founder of modern ecology. He earned the praises of many philosophers of the period, most notably Jean Jacques Rousseau and Johan Wolfgang von Goethe. Jean Jacques Rousseau sent him a greeting and said; “Tell him that I know no man in the world greater than him.” Johan Wolfgang Goethe, on the other hand, said of him, “With the exception of Shakespeare and Spinoza, I know no one who has affected me more strongly among those who are no longer alive.”

Linnaeus, who never left the European continent, encouraged his students to travel in order to make new discoveries.

The most well-known of these students is Carl Peter Thunberg.

Thunberg, who encountered and tried to get to know the Khoe Khoe Tribe during an expedition in South Africa, noticed the traditions of plants that gave meaning to their daily lives, and here he came across the Hen-en-Kuikens plant, the main character of our story. It is believed that this plant protects pregnant women and their babies from evil spirits in the Khoe Khoe Tribe.

Alongside Thunderber is Francis Masson, whom he met during this expedition. Francis Masson is on an expedition just like Thunderberg, but there is a difference between them. Masson is a botanist who is tasked with finding and bringing plant species to the KewGarden Royal Botanical Gardens with the support of Queen Charlotte of England.

The Hen-en-Kuikens plant soon becomes very popular among the English Victorian society under the name of spider plant. Although Thunderberg is considered the person who introduced the spider plant to Europe, it is thought that Masson provided its popularity in England.

The studies carried out in the Skylab space station project launched by NASA in 1973 to find a solution to the problem of oxygen requirement revealed that the best solution to the problem was some plants growing on Earth. This study was published in the academic world under the name NASA HappyPlants in 1989. 12 plants discovered with this study and growing on Earth have the ability to convert carbon dioxide into oxygen in closed environments without needing oxygen and light. The spider plant is the most powerful of these.