ABSTRACT
The enthusiastic and energetic British gardener Philip Miller (1691-1771) created the genus Alnus in the fourth edition of his The Gardeners Dictionary in 1754. Although this book went through four subsequent editions, his rendition of the Roman name for the alder tree stuck (de Cleene and Lejeune 2002). As exploration of the New World
continued, Royal Gardener at Kew William Townsend Aiton (1731-1793) described plants from Pennsylvania as Betula serrulata in 1789. It took the director of the Berlin Botanical Garden, Carl Ludwig Willdenow, to realize that these were really Alnus and to create the modern name in 1805.
