The History Of Shortia And What Is It?

I claim the right of a discoverer to affix the name, and since this is a good North American genus and comes from near Kentucky, it shall be christened Shortie, to which we will stand as godfathers. So Shortia galacifolia, Torr. and Gr. it shall be. I beg you to inform Dr. Short’, and to say we will lay on him no greater penalty than this necessary thing – that he make a pilgrimage to the mountains of Carolina this coming summer and procure the flowers. Please lay an injunction upon Nuttall, that he publish no other Shortie, and I will do the same in a letter to Hooker’ I am now writing.”

It would seem that Dr. Short was not able to follow out this plan, for in spite of repeated search by a number of collectors it was not until May of 1877, almost 90 years after it was first collected by Michaux and 38 years after Gray wrote this letter that Shortia was next discovered by G. M. Hyams, son of a local herb collector, on a hillside by the Catawba River, near Marion, in McDowell County, North Carolina.

Sargent to the Rescue

In 1879, two years later, Gray himself searched for it in vain, but at last, in 1886, Charles Sprague Sargent, later of Arnold Arboretum fame, organized an expedition to search for this and other rare plants and found it growing in abundance below the point where the Toxaway and Horse-Pasture streams join to form the Keowee River, in Oconee County, South Carolina. In his party was the youthful nurseryman, Harlan P. Kelsey, who was starting on a long career of introducing native American plants to gardeners all over the world, and who was the first to make this new treasure available to gardeners. Many years later, in the first edition of Standardized Plant Names (1923) he gave it the English name it now bears, “Oconee-bells.”

Through the subsequent explorations of F. H. Boynton, also of Highlands, Shortia was later found to be abundant in a number of locations in that general area.

Shortia is an evergreen stemless herb, with almost round or slightly heart-shaped leaves up to three inches in diameter, and it spreads by creeping rootstocks to form a compact ground cover from which the solitary one-inch white flowers rise in profusion. A pink or rose-colored form is also known. There is only one other member of the genus, Shortia uniflora, Nippon-bells, a Japanese species of similar characteristics, but with more heart-shaped and wavy-margined leaves.

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