A certain Chr. Pinard travelled twice to the region of
Caria in the
Ottoman Empire, first in 1842 and again in 1843. He
collected plant specimens and sent them to Swiss botanist
Alphonse de Candolle, who duly passed them on to the greatest expert of the flora of the
Near and
Middle East at the time,
Pierre Edmond Boissier, also a Swiss botanist. As such Pinard collected the first scientific samples of the species
Digitalis cariensis, as Boissier provisionally named it, in this region. Pinard sent a number of duplicates (especially in 1843), which could then be used to trade with other botanists to complete the knowledge of the region. He was, however, unconvinced that
D. cariensis was a distinct species, and
synonymised it with
D. orientalis, and as such did not provide a description of the
taxon.
Digitalis cariensis was again published as a synonym of
D. orientalis by the Frenchmen
Hippolyte François Jaubert and
Édouard Spach in their 1853 fifth volume of the
Illustrationes Plantarum Orientalium, but unlike Bentham, they included a description of the taxon. This is thus the first valid publication of the name.
Digitalis orientalis, however, was a confused mess. It had first been described by the French biologist
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, but had also been used by the British botanist
Philip Miller for another species. By the time of Jaubert and Spach, four different species had become lumped together under this name, and it was only in 1955 that the Russian botanist
Lyudmila Ivanovna Ivanina finally teased apart the confusion. ==Description==