These prunings of
Veronica arenaria, or
Cottage Blue,
from the Australian Garden at Cranbourne livened up our home for a few weeks. I can see why it has been given this common name,
sometimes mistakenly used as a cultivar name - it would not look out of place in an English cottage garden.
The scientific name may be a little less obvious, although it resembles what many home gardeners will known as a speedwell, also a Veronica. What it looks a little less like, particularly when not in flower, is Veronica speciosa, better know as a hebe or the New Zealand Hebe, which looks like this:
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| Veronica speciosa |
While this is what the leaf of our Cottage Blue looks like:
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| Veronica arenaria |
Although applying the name Veronica to my vased flowers might grate with some readers, this Australian native plant, from northern New South Wales and south-eastern Queensland, was originally described in 1846 as Veronica arenaria.
Nearly 150 years later (in 1992), Barbara Briggs and Friedrich Ehrendorfer resurrected an old (1836) genus Derwentia for eight south-eastern Australian species of Veronica, separating them from the mostly New Zealand and New Guinean genus (with one Australian species), Parahebe.
However within two years (1994), Michael Heads in New Zealand had expanded the definition of Parahebe to include the Australian Derwentia (the name Parahebe, although only described in 1944, had already been conserved for use instead of Derwentia should the two genera be combined - at least I think I have that more or less correct!), and the reunification began.
Next, from molecular studies
published in the first years of the 21st century, it became clear that these segregate genera (including the original
Hebe, from which
Parahebe was separated)
could not be recognised alongside
Veronica without the latter genus becoming what we call 'paraphyletic' (not including all descendants of a shared ancestor). So once again, we had
Veronica arenaria.
As to its higher classification, all these genera used to be part of the figwort family, Scrophulariaceae. Today they are included in an expanded plantain family, the Plantaginaceae, which unfortunately
can be only 'vaguely described' in terms of what its constituents have in common. While the family is well supported by molecular data, that diversity in form may mean it is reimagined at some stage.
The genus Vernonica also remains volatile, and its 300 or so species may be eventually split again, but into slightly different groupings that better reflect their evolutionary origin. While that may be irritating, it will reflect our increased understanding of how the speedwells and their relatives evolved (and hence allow us to predict more about what they have in common).
In any case, you can still call this Cottage Blue.
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