INTRIGUING plants in Dundee Botanic Garden include the lipstick tree which is best known as the source of anatto, one of the most widely used natural dyes to colour food, cosmetics and pharmaceutical products.
It is used commonly in foods because it does not alter the flavour and is not toxic. Cosmetic products include lipstick, hair dyes, nail polish, soaps, lacquers and paints.
The lipstick tree is known by many names by indigenous people, indicating its various uses.
In Western botany, however, it is known as Bixa orellana, after Francisco de Orellana, a Spanish conquistador associated with the colonial “discovery” of the Amazon.
However the Western way of naming plants, although useful for classification purposes, often unhelpfully severs them from their ecological importance, according to the former curator of Dundee Botanic Garden, Kevin Frediani.
He said the indigenous people’s names for plants were not arbitrary but “mnemonic devices for survival, stewardship and identity”.
“The imposition of a single Latin name therefore represents more than a linguistic substitution – it constitutes a form of epistemic narrowing,” he said.
“The plant becomes abstracted from the human practices that enabled its spread and repositioned within a framework that foregrounds discovery rather than relationship.”
He said that from an ecological standpoint this had consequences beyond language.
“When plants are abstracted into universal categories, there is a risk that local management practices are ignored, biocultural diversity is flattened and conservation approaches fail to recognise human-plant co-evolution.
“A plant like Bixa orellana cannot be fully understood without recognising the people who carried it, the fires that created the conditions for its growth, the knowledge systems that shaped its propagation and the meanings that give it life beyond its physical form.
“Rather than replacing one name with another, the challenge may be to hold multiple names and ways of knowing in parallel, allowing plants to be understood not just as specimens but as participants in living systems of knowledge, movement and care,” said Frediani.
