The flowers of the large genus of small plants known as Scaevola, native to Australia, Polynesia and Hawaii, look like tiny daisies of ten petals cut in two. If the flowers are not damaged, each ‘half’ of the imagined daisy ‘hand’ consists of five fingers (including a thumb), all of which are left handed. Some imagination is required!
Various legends account for the left-handed ‘half flower’ of each of the 130 or so species of Scaevola, including the four illustrated in the excellent field guide to the native plants of South East Queensland: Mangroves to Mountains.
This particular legend comes from Hawaii:
The Scaevola flowers were once complete, circular like a daisy. They represented the oneness of the entwined left and right hands of a woman and her lover walking together. But the lovers quarreled and the woman wrenched her hand away, tearing the flower in half. The gods were angered by her tantrum, and decreed that all Naupaka (their word for the plant) would forever bear flowers shaped like a circle cut in two. So the lovers would remain separated and would never rejoin as one. Her left hand would remain on the plant, and his right hand would wander the earth looking for her. But their hands would never entwine again to walk the way together.
“I am looking for my other half,” he calls plaintively, even today, and “Please, someone give me a hand.” If only he had asked me, I could have told him where she is now, in a pot of sandy soil, by our garage, all her left handed half-flowers reaching out to no one and everyone. Today she bears flowers of white, blue, purple and mauve from early Spring to the end of Summer, and is known by various names: the half-flowered one, the mysterious small fairy fan-flower, and Scaevola - meaning left-handed.
Carl Linnaeus, (1707 – 1778) was a Swedish botanist and zoologist. His father Nils Linnaeus was a Lutheran Pastor and avid gardener. Nils passed on to his son a deep love of plants, a fascination with their names, and a belief in a creator, and in the creator’s presence in his creation.
To his parents’ dismay, Carl showed no interest in following his father as a pastor, but enrolled in university in 1727 to become a doctor.
While undertaking the course in medicine, which involved knowing how to recognise, prepare, and prescribe drugs from medical plants, Carl discovered his true love – botany.
He invented a system of classifying and naming plants and animals using Latin and Greek terms. Each living creature and plant was assigned a genus and a species name, hence binomial. The Linnaean system developed into the system still used by scientists today to classify and name plants as they are “discovered.”
Sometimes a great deal of imagination was applied to the naming of certain plants, often based on particular visible characteristics.
Carl Linnaeus didn’t know the Hawaiian legend of the half-flowers found on certain Pacific islands. But it is thought that when Linneaus first saw a look-alike group of plants whose flowers were shaped like little five-fingered left hands, he named the genus Scaevola, meaning ‘left handed’, after a legendary Roman hero of the same name.
Nobody knows if the legend of Scaevola is true. It may have been a story told to explain the noble origin of a prominent Roman family of that name. The story goes like this: Around 508 BC, during a war between Rome and Etrusca, the Etruscan king Lars Porsena laid siege to Rome. A Roman youth called Gaius Mucius Cordus sneaked into the Etruscan camp with the intent of murdering the king. However in the chaos the lad mistakenly killed one of the king’s officials, and was captured.
Brought before the king to be tortured and executed, Gaius Mucius defied the king by thrusting his own right hand into a fire and holding it there while it burnt away, looking the king in the eye.
The enemy king was so impressed with the courage of Gaius Mucius, and with the lad’s assertion that there were 300 others prepared to do exactly the same for Rome, that he set the lad free and called off the siege.
Gaius Mucius became known as Scaevola, the left-handed one. He was granted land as his reward and the Scaevola family after him became highly esteemed citizens of Rome.
Today, a little incongruently, the Scaevola name is perpetuated in a genus of plants of over 130 species, found mostly in four Australian states, and across the Pacific islands to Hawaii.
In Australia they are commonly known as Fan Flowers, and are becoming popular as ground covers of around one metre in diameter, and in rockery plantings.
Here in the Scenic Rim, away from the southern states where most of the species grow, Scaevola does well in pots in well-drained sandy mixes. It does not like to be overwatered and if left waterlogged can suddenly die.
It is good to keep a few replacement “spares” coming along in a plant house. It grows readily from half matured cuttings. Small butterflies and insects love it, and so do we.
There is a different Latin word for left-handed as well, one than bears negative connotations arising from ancient superstition that left handedness derives from the devil – sinister.
But the good, courageous, desirable left-handedness is the one displayed by the Fan Flowers, our brave little Australians in the Scaevola genus.