Cleome ornithopodioides
Cleome ornithopodioides or bird spiderflower is the type species of the genus Cleome which is part of the family Cleomaceae or Brassicaceae. The species epithet means "birds-foot like".
Description
Cleome ornithopodioides is an annual plant growing to a height of.3 m.Flowers possess both male and female reproductive organs.
Taxonomy
The first samples of bird spiderflower to arrive in Europe came from explorations of the area called the Levant and were successfully cultivated by James Sherard in 1732.Joseph Pitton de Tournefort named the Claude Aubriet illustration of C. ornithopodioides ''Sinapistrum Orientale in the 1700 Institutiones rei herbariæ. Being named before the 1753 Species plantarum disqualifies the name from being considered to be a synonym.
When Carl Linnaeus first published this species with its current name in his 1753 Species plantarum he referenced descriptions of Sinapistrum Ornithopodiisiliquis found in Johann Christian Buxbaum's herbarium Plantarum minus cognitarum centuria, that was published posthumously by Johann Georg Gmelin in 1728, Johann Jacob Dillenius's 1732 Hortus Ethamensis. a collection whose list was published in 1907 by George Claridge Druce and also the description he wrote of Cleome ornithopodioides in his own Hortus Cliffortianus from 1737 and of Sinapestrum orientale triphyllum from his 1748 Hortus Upsaliensis.
In 1754 when Philip Miller described the genus Sinapistrum in The Gardeners Dictionary, he described the species with English words "Three-leav'd Eastern Sinapistrum, with Birds-foot-pods" and called it by the Latin name Sinapistrum Oriental triphyllum'' as it had been assigned by Tournefort who had described it before him.