Nature lovers and scientific enthusiasts alike often look up to the botanists who have discovered new plants and coined the names we use today. For some, the greatest achievement is to one day be able to name their own species through discovery.

Just because someone has managed to make scientific or exploratory breakthrough in the botanical world, however, doesn’t mean they did not have a sense of humor to go along with it. Underneath some of the most poetic names lie a crude joke.

Would you be surprised to learn that the Venus Flytrap does not have such an innocent name? Unlike what many people have been led to believe…

In celebration of this Valentine’s Day, HerbSpeak dives into the sheepishly dirty and downright lewd origin of the Venus Flytrap’s name.

The Innocent Myth

There is an innocent and comfortable story for why the Venus flytrap is named as such, and the first record of this story came out in an edition of the London Magazine published in 1768 (1) titled “A New Sensitive Plant Discovered.”

The man who wrote this article, John Ellis, was a notable British naturalist who specialized in the study of corals. Like others of his time and class, he had correspondence with many botanists of the day. This included the infamous Carl Linnaeus, who is now coined ‘the father of modern taxonomy’, having formalized the modern two-part naming system for biologists and botanists alike.

In addition to his studies in corals, Ellis also exported many native plants and native seeds from North America to England, which may have had much to do with his renown as an expert on these plants; despite the fact that the royal botanist William Young first imported the flytrap to England and showed John Ellis the specimen.

Ellis is credited for initially giving the Venus Flytrap, or Dionaea muscipula, its Latin name.

In the 1768 London Magazine article, Ellis went on to talk about the struggles of naming the plant and how Dionaea muscipula may be translated into either Venus flytrap or Venus mousetrap, though he much preferred to call it by the flytrap’s name.

There is one thing that is missing from this story, however…

This account of the flytrap was first published in 1768, yet the first written correspondence regarding the flytrap’s discovery was found in April of 1759 – a whole nine years earlier – between North Carolina colonial governor Arthur Dobbs and English botanist Peter Collinson.

What happened in those nine years between its discovery and its publicized naming?

The Dirty Secret

In the nine years from when John Ellis published his article naming the flytrap and the initial discovery of the plant, a dirty joke was had by several naturalists.

On April 2^nd, 1759, North Carolina governor Arthur Dobbs penned a letter to his friend, an English naturalist by the name of Peter Collinson, about the discovery of the flytrap. (2)

These were the first words written about the flytrap on record. Dobbs wrote the following:

Soon after seeing the flytrap, the Englishman, Peter Collinson, wrote Philadelphia naturalist John Bartram about the plant, informing him of the new discovery.

Bartram was so enthused about the discovery that he sent his son William to North Carolina to retrieve a plant and bring it back for further study.

William Bartram was welcomed into Dobbs’ home in Wilmington, North Carolina and the two went on an expedition to find a suitable specimen of this plant to bring back. The father-and-son Bartram duo would go on to be the first to cultivate the flytrap outside of its native habitat range – which only extends about 70 miles – and begin growing specimens for study.

The first study specimens were dried as herbarium specimens and sent to Peter Collinson for study. Peter then sent samples to John Ellis and Carl Linnaeus; however, no one was able to keep the sensitive plant alive well enough to send a live specimen, nor were they able to collect seeds to send across the pond.

Throughout the group’s correspondence about the discovery, this naturalists would begin referring to this plant as a “tipitiwitchet” or “tippity twitchet.”

These terms were, during their time, slang for a woman’s genitalia.

On one hand, really, could you blame them?

While there is no clear evidence of who exactly in the group first came up with the term, many assume that it was one of the Bartrams. At least, he was the one who humorously presented the name that, to the mind’s eye, reduced these grown men to giggling little kids on occasion.

In August of 1962, John Bartram wrote a letter to Collinson which included the following line:

So, the man was describing this plant and showing it off in a humorous way.

But why would grown men laugh at such a plant?

Simply because we all have a bit of a lewd sense of humor at heart. There’s no way around that one.

Unfortunately, not all of their correspondence can be documented, especially that which was done in person, so how can modern historians be so certain that this name was created on purpose for perverted jokes?

Further Lewd Correspondence

While the name Venus flytrap was a joke of the plant’s gaping structure, the playful giggles between grown men did not end there. (3)

Up until this point in history, you could argue that a lot of their correspondence has a different meaning. After all, the English language has evolved so much in the last two hundred years that, as a society, culture itself has shifted. Their meaning could have just been misinterpreted by modern historians, right?

Not so much.

There was further correspondence between Arthur Dobbs and Peter Collinson in June of 1762 which revealed that these botanists and naturalists were, indeed, making one very long, historically noted sex joke:

Lewd? Definitely. Gross? Even more so.

The North Carolina governor had found himself infatuated with a girl who would later become his second wife. (4) He married the girl, Justina Davis, when he was seventy-three and she was fifteen. She would later go on to bear three children with him.

There is a cultivar of flytrap today that is named after the young wife. This cultivar is pure green in coloration, never producing a shade of pink or red inside the lobes even well into maturity, giving it a youthful appearance.

Look… Everyone wants a plant named after them, but no one wants a plant named after them for that.

It is assumed that the Latin name Dionaea muscipula is, while able to be easily covered by a PG-13 veil, also a nod to the plant’s lewd naming schemes thus far. Dionaea is the Greek goddess of love and beauty, a direct counterpart to the roman Venus who was the goddess of love, sex, beauty, and fertility.

Likewise, the Latin muscipula can be translated into either flytrap or mousetrap. Your imagination can do the rest for the latter translation – it’s no wonder why John Ellis established a known preference for the flytrap translation in his poetic origin story that was meant for the public eye.