Stokesia laevis Greene Asteraceae. Stoke's Aster, Cornflower Aster. Distribution: South-eastern USA. Named by Charles Louis L’Héritier in 1789 for Dr Jonathan Stokes (1755-1831), a member of the Lunar Society and Linnean Society, botanist and physician. Stokes dedicated his thesis on dephlogisticated air [later realised to be oxygen] to Dr William Withering and wrote the preface to Withering’s iconic work On the Foxglove (1785). He also contributed histories on six patients he had treated for heart failure (‘dropsy’) with foxglove leaf, Digitalis, in his medical practice in Stourbridge. He continued at the Lunar Society until 1788

became a founding associate of the Linnean Society (1790) helped Withering with the latter’s botanical works, adding a bibliography of 264 titles to the second edition of Withering’s A Botanical Arrangement of British Plants (1792), which much impressed Sir J.E. Smith the President of the Linnean Society. He added an account of the medical uses of the plants which Withering resented and they fell out. Stokes published A botanical materia medica (1812), and Botanical commentaries (1830). He corresponded with Linnaeus the younger, and Dr William Wright sent plants back to him from Jamaica (Oakeley, 2012). It has no medicinal properties. Photographed in the Medicinal Garden of the Royal College of Physicians, London.