2009 Was a Bountiful Year for Botanical Discovery

2009 was an especially good year for adding to the body of known botanical species. In a given year, scientists will discover approximately 200 previously unknown species. According to BBC, this year witnessed just shy of 300 new entries to our catalog of known plant species.

It might have been one fewer, had one employee of Royal Botanical Gardens Kew not been particularly attentive. As The Guardian informs us, one of 2009's newly discovered species had actually been nurtured and maintained for the past decade as a tropical bedding cover plant in one of the world-famous botanical research center's conservatories. The previously uncatalogued flowering plant is reportedly native to Tanzania and made its way to Kew Gardens following a 1998 expedition.

Iain Darbyshire, a botanist who specializes in African botany, tells The Guardian of his happenstance finding at what might have been just another day at work:

"I just happened to take a different route through the glasshouse that lunchtime and stumbled across it, I knew instantly that it was a new species. It was just sat there waiting for someone to study it."

The BBC indicates that among this past year's 292 new finds are some impressively large relatives of favored foodstuffs. In Cameroon's rainforest, a 140-foot-tall member of the pea family, replete with foot-long seed pods, was discovered. It's almost hard to imagine that that impressive customer has gone unnoticed until now. Also — get those French presses and travel mugs ready, folks — this year's crop of discoveries includes seven species of wild coffee, most of which were found in Madagascar.

Photo courtesy of Patche99z, via Wikimedia Commons