''Suksdorfia'' is a genus in the family

Saxifragaceae Saxifragaceae is a family of herbaceous perennial flowering plants, within the core eudicot order Saxifragales. The taxonomy of the family has been greatly revised and the scope much reduced in the era of molecular phylogenetic analysis. The fa ...

. It has only two accepted species, ''

Suksdorfia alchemilloides ''Suksdorfia'' is a genus in the family Saxifragaceae. It has only two accepted species, '' Suksdorfia alchemilloides'' and ''Suksdorfia violacea'', native to central South America and northwestern North America, respectively. Asa Gray named th ...

'' and ''

Suksdorfia violacea ''Suksdorfia violacea'' is an uncommon species of herbaceous flowering plant in the saxifrage family known by the common name violet suksdorfia. In 1879 Asa Gray named the genus ''Suksdorfia'' after Wilhelm Nikolaus Suksdorf who had first collec ...

'', native to central South America and northwestern North America, respectively. Asa Gray named the genus ''Suksdorfia'' after

Wilhelm Nikolaus Suksdorf Wilhelm Nikolaus Suksdorf (September 15, 1850 – October 3, 1932) was a German–American botanist who specialized in the flora of the Pacific Northwest. He was largely self-taught and is considered one of the top three self-taught botanists ...

, a mostly self-taught German botanist who came to the United States at age eight and found the species ''S. violacea'' in the northwestern United States. ''S. violacea'' is the

type species In zoological nomenclature, a type species (''species typica'') is the species name with which the name of a genus or subgenus is considered to be permanently taxonomically associated, i.e., the species that contains the biological type specime ...

for this genus. Since the

International Rules of Botanical Nomenclature The ''International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants'' (ICN) is the set of rules and recommendations dealing with the formal botanical names that are given to plants, fungi and a few other groups of organisms, all those "trad ...

of 1906, the genus name ''Suksdorfia'' Gray, published in 1879, has been conserved against the earlier name ''Hemieva'' Raf., which had been published in 1837 with the type species ''Hemieva ranunculifolia'' (Hook.) Raf. (based on ''Saxifraga ranunculifolia'' Hook., published in 1832).

References

Saxifragaceae Saxifragaceae genera Flora of the Americas Taxa named by Asa Gray {{Saxifragaceae-stub