On 17/08/2020 16:58, jeff Layman wrote:

One other thing which I find strange (and one for SRH, maybe). All the
books I have, published before about 1960 (including a scanned copy of
"The Illustrated Dictionary of Gardening", published 1884 - 1888), refer
to the genus as /Clerodendron/. After that, it is /Clerodendrum/. When
did it change? There is nothing at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clerodendrum#History about the name
change. The RHS Dictionary of Gardening says the origin of the name is
from the Greek "kleros" and "dendron".


Linnaeus used the latinised form Clerodendrum (Species Plantarum of
1753). There was an earlier usage of Clerodendron in Burman's Thesaurus
Zeylanica of 1737, but that's too early to qualify for priority
according to the botanical code. [IPNI]

Both variants have been in use since the 18th century. Usage of
Clerodendron took off about 1840, and took a deep dive a century later.
Clerodendrum became the commoner of the two about 1970, and usage of
Clerodendron has been tailing off since then. [Google ngrams]

IPNI has several times more generic names used -dendron than using
-dendrum, and the ratio may well be higher for accepted names (several
of the -dendrum names are orthographic variants), but there is at least
Epidendrum (and hybrids) and Oxydendrum in addition to Clerodendrum.

My guess is that the switch back to Clerodendrum is related to
tightening up the rules on when spellings of botanical names can/should
be corrected, requiring the use of Linnaeus' spelling, but I suspect
that I would have to look at a lot of literature to find a verifiable
answer.

--
SRH