Which naturalist is honored by the carnivorous plant genus name Sarracenia?

The carnivorous plant genus Sarracenia honors Michel Sarrazin, a French-Canadian naturalist and physician.

Sarrazin is often called the father of Canadian botany. In the late seventeenth century, he sent live specimens of the purple pitcher plant, Sarracenia purpurea, to the Parisian botanist Joseph Pitton de Tournefort. Tournefort used the name Sarracenia, and Carl Linnaeus later adopted it in Species Plantarum in 1753.

The name is therefore not an honor for Joseph Banks, Charles Darwin, or Carl Linnaeus, although all three are important figures in botanical history. Linnaeus standardized and published the name, but Sarrazin is the person commemorated by it. The genus belongs to Sarraceniaceae, a family of North and South American pitcher plants that also includes Darlingtonia and Heliamphora.

Sarracenia’s botanical history predates the modern understanding of carnivory. European botanists had seen or received specimens by the sixteenth century, but the plant’s insect-eating function was not scientifically demonstrated until much later. Research in the nineteenth century helped establish that its tubular leaves are traps rather than ordinary hollow foliage.