Gentian
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
jen'shan, an autumn flower. The common European gentian appears to be a prosaic yellow flowered herb in the meadows of the Alps and Pyrenees. Its roots, somewhat like those of the horseradish in length and size, are gathered by the peasants and sold to the drug trade to flavor bitters. Some of the rarer alpine species are blue; but the fringed gentian of America, with its angled and twisted corolla, is the flower of the poets . Thou blossom bright with autumn dew, And colored with the heaven's own blue, That openest when the quiet light Succeeds the keen and frosty night; Thou waitest late and com'st alone, When woods are bare and birds are flown, And frosts and shortening days portend The aged year is near the end. --Bryant, The Fringed Gentian. Genus (pl. Genera), in natural history or biology, a class or kind of either animals or plants. To avoid ambiguity and confusion Latin names are given to genera. Fly, for instance, is applied to so many insects that no one could tell quite what particular insect is meant when we say, "there are flies in the ointment." A number of the more common flies form a genus, to which the name musca has been given. To distinguish the common housefly from the other flies of the genus, it is called musca domestica, the latter word being the name of the species. American bellflower is an ambiguous name. It may denote an apple or any one of two or three wild flowers. Campanula rotundifolia, however, is a particular, delicate bellflower or harebell the world over. The horse, the ass, the zebra, and the quagga belong to the same genus; each belongs to a distinct species. There are about 60,000 genera, averaging five species each, in the animal kingdom. There are about 9,000 genera of flowering plants, including possibly 100,000 species.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's 1910 description still holds: Gentiana lutea roots are dug in the Alps and Pyrenees and sold to flavour bitters, and they remain the backbone of aperitifs such as Suze and of many bitters and vermouths. What has moved is the plant's legal status and the chemistry: wild digging is now restricted in France, Spain and elsewhere because collection outran regrowth on a plant that takes years to reach harvestable size, and the bitterness is credited to amarogentin, one of the most bitter compounds known, tasted at extreme dilution. Botanists have also shifted Bryant's fringed gentian out of Gentiana proper into the genus Gentianopsis, as G. crinita. Aiton's tally under "Genus" has aged less well: roughly 9,000 genera and 100,000 flowering plants have become some 350,000-400,000 described vascular plant species, and the animal count has risen past a million.
Written for this edition, 2026.