Cinchona Botanical Gardens

Cinchona is a genus of flowering plants in the family Rubiaceae containing at least 23 species of trees and shrubs. They are native to the tropical Andean forests of western South America. A few species are reportedly naturalized in Central America, Jamaica, French Polynesia, Sulawesi, Saint Helena in the South Atlantic, and São Tomé and Príncipe off the coast of tropical Africa. Several species were sought after for their medicinal value and cultivated in India and Java where they also formed hybrids. The barks of several species yield quinine and other alkaloids that were the only effective treatments against malaria during the height of colonialism which made them of great economic and political importance. The synthesis of quinine in 1944, an increase in resistant forms of malaria, and alternate therapies ended the large-scale economic interest in their cultivation. Academic interest continues as cinchona alkaloids show promise in treating falciparum malaria which has evolved resistance to synthetic drugs. Carl Linnaeus named the genus in 1742 based on a claim, first recorded by the Italian physician Sebastiano Bado in 1663, that the plant had cured the wife of the Luis Jerónimo de Cabrera, 4th Count of Chinchón, Count of Chinchón, a viceroy in Lima. While the veracity of the claims and the details are highly debated leaving it best treated as a legend, the curative properties were known even earlier. The history of the plant, their extracts, and the cures are however highly confused and controversial. Suggestions that the plant went by the native name of Quina Quina which yielded Quina bark have been questioned. Other fever cures from South America were known as Jesuit's Bark and Jesuit's Powder in Europe earlier but although they have been traced to Cinchona, there is evidence of materials being derived from other species such as Myroxylon. The species that Linnaeus used to describe the genus was Cinchona officinalis which is found only in a small region in Ecuador and specimens of which were obtained by Charles Marie de La Condamine around 1735. This species is however of little medicinal significance. In the course of the quest for species yielding effective remedies, numerous species were described, some now considered invalid or synonyms of others. Linnaeus used the Italian spelling used by Bado but the name Chinchón led to Clements Markham and others proposing a correction of the spelling to Chinchona and some prefer the pronunciation for the common name of the plant. The national tree of Peru is in the genus Cinchona.
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