ABSTRACT
Anyone with an allergy to the pollen of Ambrosia will wonder why Linnaeus used the Greek word for immortality to name the genus. He kept quiet about that topic, but he was following the lead of previous authors including Gaspar Bauhin (1560-1624) and Rembert Dodoens (1516-1585) who had used the name for A. maritima, a seaside plant growing around the Mediterranean. By the time Linnaeus described A. artemisiifolia and
A. trifida, both were well-established weeds in Europe (Linnaeus [1753] 1957, Clapham et al. 1987).
