The genus
Alexgeorgea was first discovered by
Sherwin Carlquist on 2 September 1974 when he found a population of
A. subterranea on the Cockleshell Gully road north of
Jurien Bay in
Western Australia. At first, Carlquist, an American botanist and professor at
Claremont Graduate University doing
field work in Western Australia, could only locate male plants of what he immediately identified as a
restionaceous species. In order to identify species in the Restionaceae, it is important to gather material of both male and female flowers, so Carlquist continued to search and only then noticed "purple thread-like structures emerging from the sand," which were the ephemeral
styles of the mostly subterranean female flowers. In his original description of the new genus in a 1976 volume of the
Australian Journal of Botany, Carlquist notes his discovery may have not occurred if he had not seen the female flowers at
anthesis due to the short-lived nature of the thread-like styles. Carlquist originally described two species in the genus,
A. subterranea and
A. arenicola (the species epithet
arenicola means "a dweller on sand"). Ten years later in April 1986, Australian botanists
Lawrence Alexander Sidney Johnson and
Barbara G. Briggs, both of the
Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney, published a short article in the journal
Telopea that recognized a species previously known as
Restio nitens as a species better fitting the description of
Alexgeorgea.
Restio nitens was originally described by
Christian Gottfried Daniel Nees von Esenbeck in 1848 as having above-ground
dehiscent fruits, unlike the below-ground flowers and fruit of
Alexgeorgea, though Carlquist had noted that
R. nitens and his newly described
A. arenicola were otherwise identical. Johnson examined the herbarium specimens labeled as
R. nitens and discovered that the alleged above ground fruits were actually malformations possibly resulting from
smut fungus. Both Johnson & Briggs and Carlquist independently published the
new combination, moving the species
R. nitens to the genus
Alexgeorgea as
A. nitens. In Carlquist's proposal, he identified
A. arenicola a
synonym of the older name
A. nitens, which had priority. Johnson and Briggs published their description of
A. nitens in the journal
Telopea on April 24, preceding Carlquist's publication in the journal
Aliso by only 5 days, thus making Carlquist's combination (
A. nitens (Nees) Carlquist) an isonym of Johnson and Briggs's combination (
A. nitens (Nees) L.A.S.Johnson & B.G.Briggs). The third species,
A. ganopoda, was described by Johnson and Briggs in 1990. ==References==