A Botany at Its Most Defined

This chapter covers the earliest years after Spain’s establishment of the Jardín Botánico de Manila in 1858. With pressure from the peninsula to heighten the garden’s work in botany, two of the garden’s most central employees, Zoilo Espejo and Regino García, aimed to demonstrate a commitment to plant systematics. García, the garden’s first Philippine-born employee, began to systematically arrange the garden’s seed bank, which included varieties of rice known to grow locally. Despite the varieties’ morphological similarity to Oryza sativa, the binomial for rice, those most versed in the grains distinguished them upon sensory and cultural parameters outside of botany’s purview. Such a difference in knowledge systems had been annoying European naturalists for over a century. The chapter characterizes the interaction between European botanical taxonomy and modes of distinguishing varieties as an “asymptotic taxonomy” to refer to botany’s far—but never complete—reach to ascertain the varietal plant form.