The last plant my dad named he named after me: Shorea kathleeniana.

The plant is a species of dipterocarp, one of the many towering trees that can be found in the Philippines. He devised the name to include a Latinized version of “Kathleen,” the old Irish name given to me, his Filipina daughter. Shorea, on the other hand, honors John Shore, a British colonial official of the East India Company.

What uncomfortable nomenclatural bedfellows we are.

I spend many professional hours thinking about the history of botany. I write on the politics of taxonomy, the possibilities of vegetal worldmaking in the plant sciences, and the imperial forces that have facilitated research. Giving a plant a Latin name is never an ahistorical, apolitical act. It is a human-motivated conceit and a charging ambition to identify and dub every living thing on this planet.

Yet, I propose we complicate the artifice that sets Latin nomenclature against all other ways by which we know plant life. The history of Latin plant names can read like assaultive colonialism. At the same time, colonial records often diminish histories of collaboration, and within those records can be found partial narratives of negotiation, friendship, and devotion that challenge moralized accounts of the science. Philippine-born thinkers, surveyors, and illustrators willingly contributed their labor to the very science upon which my dad’s own perception of success would be built. I may cast a scrutinizing lens on the botanists of history, but the image of my father (see Figure 1) proudly organizing specimens, handfuls of which he gave Latin names, tempers any reflex-revulsion I might feel.

A “vegetal apathy,” as I term it, informs my proposal. If we shift perspectives to that of plant species—the ones receiving names, as it were—Latin naming becomes quite dull. Save for the incessant collecting of plants for herbaria and for study, the realm of taxonomy meanders without plants giving it a second thought. While there exists a vegetal responsability—evincing capacities for destruction (Chao) or the sullying of human endeavors (Chapman)—I see a type of apathy, a pay-no-mind for the preoccupation of the human kind.

Among vegetal species and ageing scientists (my father included), I commit to a practice of care that sustains curiosity for what Maria Puig de la Bellacasa phrases as the “inescapable troubles of interdependent existences” (2012, 198–199). Such care recognizes the areas of analysis made hazy by compassion colliding with critique; by human encounters with plants, irreducible to simply good or bad. For in the intra-action (Barad 2007) between human and plant, names emerge, and Latin ones in particular reflect a care for precision, relation, and prestige.

Before my father coined Shorea kathleeniana, communities had been referring to the dipterocarp as malaanonang, a two-part name that translates to “like the anonang [a different species] but not quite.” Where a conventional systematist may determine malaanonang and anonang to be distant in evolutionary relation, native language speakers in the Philippines may see a point of similarity that those systematists overlook. In an era when gene mapping offers a way to determine relation, scientists acknowledge that plant life is genetically evolving so rapidly, human naming schemes cannot keep up: the genetic lines differentiating species from subspecies and varieties are ever moving (L. Taiz, personal communication, July 7, 2024). I have elsewhere characterized this unending race to name an “asymptotic taxonomy,” or botany’s “loftily far—but never complete—hold of varied ways of distinguishing plants” (2025, 33). No matter mala- or Shorea, it seems as though plants are in processes of becoming that outpace the standards by which we might consider them unique.

My dad wrote of the species as Shorea malaanonan (see Figure 2), a name given by a different scientist, in a dissertation on the Dipterocarpaceae family my dad completed in 1983. This Latin determination, in his view, was somewhat fuzzy but an impending departure to the United States in 1985 prevented him from scrutinizing the identification further.

After thirty years of a quiet yet materially difficult life abroad, my dad returned to Manila at the age of 82, eager to revive his past. Now retired, he longed for his colleagues, his purpose, and his goal to see published every suspected new species he had encountered in his doctoral research. He developed a routine from his Quezon City apartment to his desk in the botany division of the National Museum where he had once worked for many years. He ironed his shirts and slacks, packed a backpack with chocolates for kids on his light-rail commute, and had a badge to brandish at the museum’s staff entrance. At his desk, piles of herbarium specimens, loose plant material, and photocopied pages evoked a scientist back at work.

In 2016, he gave me a manuscript copy of a plant description in which he was naming a species after me. He resurrected the malaanonang and renamed it Shorea kathleeniana. Drawing on all the specimens he had first inspected and returning to the original Spanish-language publications on the plant, he declared the species altogether new from any past determinations. 

It was the last thing he published. After a couple of years back at his desk, dementia took his ability to sift through his old research. The disease hasn’t, however, taken all his stories. These, most especially over the last few years, I have been determined to write down.

I pen this “care-full” (van Dooren 2014) reflection to highlight the contradictions that remind us of the lived realities that go into a single scientific name. Doing so has the power to dethrone the idea of Latin binomials as omnipotent, long taught as an objective system above all other ways we might come to know the botanical life-worlds surrounding us. For my father, botany’s Latin is supreme. For me, and for future stories to come, Latin is but one way to indulge in collective knowledge of a plant while also recognizing the vegetal apathy surrounding it.