Talk:Picea breweriana

Please Correct Origin Information!!!
I have a problem with William Henry Brewer being credited with collecting and discovering Picea breweriana. The source from 1995, listing Brewer as having first collected the spruce is false. William Henry Brewer visited the happy camp area in 1863 but failed to recognize the rare spruce which would later bear his name. Watson, who named the species, named it after Brewer for his, “especial interest in the trees of the coast.”

"Thomas Howell’s second major discovery was made in 1884, when he collected a new species of spruce along Happy Camp Trail in Siskiyou County, California. The following year this “most remarkable species...singularly different from... any other conifer” (Jepson 1909) was described by Sereno Watson, who named it Picea breweriana, after William Henry Brewer (1828-1910) with the California State Geological Survey, co-author with Watson of the Botany of California (1876-1880). Watson (1885) wrote that he named this conifer to “compliment” Brewer, who had an “especial interest in the trees of the coast.” Ironically, in the fall of 1863 Brewer had visited Happy Camp and the surrounding region (Farquhar 1949), where he almost certainly encountered, but did not recognize as new, the spruce that was later to be named after him and not after its discoverer".1 - Thomas Jefferson Howell and the First Pacific Northwest Flora by Robert Ornduff - University of California, Berkeley - Kalmiopsis Volume 15, 2008  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.115.15.103 (talk) 15:50, 4 March 2012 (UTC)


 * This has now been corrected and the information properly sourced. Peter coxhead (talk) 13:21, 5 March 2012 (UTC)