Worcester Div.

Gk. erion = wool; sperma = seed. The seed is covered with white hairs.

For Paul Hermann (1646–1695), German-born Dutch physician and botanist. He graduated in medicine at the universities of Leiden and Padua, became a ship’s medical officer (1672–1677) for the Dutch East India Company and went to Sri Lanka via the Cape, where he made the first known herbarium collection of local plants, now housed in the Sloane Herbarium, British Museum of Natural History and at Oxford. In 1679 he became professor of botany at the University of Leiden and director of the Hortus Botanicus in Leiden, Europe’s finest botanical garden. His 1687 publication Horti Academici Lugduno-Batavi Catalogus includes 34 Cape plants, and his proposed Prodomus Plantaerum Africanarum was to contain 791 items, but untimely death intervened.

From the Latin pyramidalis = 'pyramid shaped'; frequently referring to the inflorescence 

From the Greek oxys = sharp, sour or acid and (h)als = salt. The plant is frequently consumed for its sour taste caused by the oxalic acid, particularly the flowering stalks of O. pes-caprae. In large quantities the oxalic acid inhibits digestion and in stock leads to the condition 'dikpens' or bloated belly.

For Christoph Carl Friedrich von Wurmb (1742–1782), Saxony-born German naturalist and Dutch colonial administrator, who worked in Indonesia (Java) as a merchant in the service of the United East India Company. Later, in 1778, he moved to Batavia, where he became the first secretary and director of the Bataviaasch Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen (Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences) in charge of its library and small botanical garden, donated by a member. A keen naturalist – he had a special interest in palm trees – Wurmb was the first traveller to publish accurate observations on the Bornean orangutan in its adult state (it had never before been seen at that time and initially thought to be a new species). He called this animal ‘Pongo’, named after the Mpongwe nation.