100 Flowers
And How They Got Their Names By Diana Wells
The name "astilbe" probably refers to a lack of showiness in the original Chinese flowers, as it comes from the Greek a (without) and stilbe (brilliance). It is sometimes "spirea" because it looks like Aruncus spirea (or Aruncus dioicus), commonly called "goatsbeard." Modern hybrids of red, ink, and white flowers bloom even in deep shade and are not dull at all—and neither was the life of Pére Armand David, who discovered the astilbe in China.
In 1860 French and British gunboats secured a treaty from the Chinese allowing exploration of the interior and admission to Christian missionaries. Pére David, a Lazarist monk, was sent to China to set up a school for a hundred boys in Peking. He was such an ardent and sucessful botanist that he was released from his duties so that he could collect plants. He sent thousands back to Paris, although only about one-third of his specimens survived. He cheerfully recorded his hardships in his diary: the danger of wolves obliged him to share his tent with his donkey, "though its presence there is not without inconvenience" (one wonders who got to lie down first), and the local food defied "all but the most ravenous hunger" and "must be eaten with courge," but "one man can live wherever another can."
Pére David was once so ill that he was given the last sacraments, but he lived to return to Paris, where he died at age 74.
