Drimys winteri J.R.Forst. & G.Forst.

Though now a darling of gardeners for its floral and foliar attractions, Drimys winteri first became known to European botany as bark. It arrived in England by the hand of Captain John Wynter (or Winter), who had sailed with Sir Francis Drake in 1577 on what was to be a circumnavigation of the world. The expedition had been reduced from five ships to two by the time it reached the southern tip of South America, and Winter’s ship was separated from Drake’s in a storm after they had crossed the Straits of Magellan, between the island of Tierra del Fuego and continental South America. Failing to encounter Drake’s ship, Winter decided to turn back for home. The decision might have been influenced by the fact that a short time before Drake had had a falling out with the third co-commander of the expedition, Thomas Doughty, and had him summarily tried for mutiny and decapitated on a Patagonian beach (Coote 2003). Aside from the undeniable health benefits of keeping his head on his shoulders, Winter’s decision paid an additional medicinal dividend. While tarrying in the Straits, Winter went ashore and was shown a tree whose bitter bark the indigenous people used to ward off sickness during winter when fresh fruits and vegetables were scarce. It proved to work wonders on Winter’s scurvy-riddled crew, and he collected an ample store of it to take back to England, where he arrived in 1579 (Taylor 1930). There it was adopted as a powerful medicine and became known as Winter’s bark. Drake would go on to sail around the world and loot not a few Spanish galleons on the way, but Winter’s name would be immortalized in the nomenclature of this plant.

Drimys winteri was not introduced to cultivation till two and a half centuries later, by which stage the taxonomic travails of this plant and its relatives were well under way. Though well known under its medicinal moniker of Winter’s bark, which was even rendered in Latin as Cortex winteranus, the plant would not be formally described till J.R. Forster and his son Georg published in 1776 an account of plants found on Cook’s second voyage of discovery (1772–1775). They described it together with a shrub they had found in New Zealand and which they considered to be congeneric with Winter’s Patagonian plant. They placed the plants in a genus they named Drimys. The Forsters honoured John Winter in the epithet they chose for the South American plant, and they named the New Zealand plant Drimys axillaris. Linnaeus had already misguidedly tipped his hat to Winter with the genus Winterana, which he applied to what he thought was a close relative of Winter’s bark but turned out to be the quite different Canella (wild cinnamon). In 1784, Johan Andreas Murray felt that Winter had been hard done by in not having a genus named after him, so he took matters into his own hand and published a new name for Drimys winteri, Wintera aromatica, stating in a footnote that the genus was ennobled by Winter’s bark and he thus preferred to call it Wintera rather than Drimys. The rules of nomenclature take a dim view of this type of bevaviour, and Murray’s name is judged to be a nomen superfluum and thus illegitimate.

This was not the last attempt to perpetuate Captain Winter’s memory in the name of a genus of plants. Van Thiegem in 1900 correctly separated out a section of New Zealand plants previously in Drimys into their own genus, for which he resuscitated Murray’s illegitimate Wintera, incorrectly claiming it had been validly applied by G. Forster (Jr.) in moving Drimys axillaris into Wintera in 1786. This flaw was fixed by Dandy in 1933 when he proposed a new name for this genus, Pseudowintera, thus maintaining at least a memento of the Captain’s name. Drimys was first lectotypified by De Candolle in 1817, who based his section Drimys on Forster & Forster’s Drimys axillaris, so Dandy’s new genus had perforce to retain the name Drymis, and the other species in Drimys would need to be renamed. To avoid what would have been a nomenclatural mess, Vink in 1969 proposed to conserve Drimys winteri as the lectotype of Drimys over D. axillaris, permitting the continued use of the widely accepted generic name. The cultural weight of Winter’s bark is reflected in the fact that the Captain is still remembered in the name of the family to which Drimys and other related genera belong: Winteraceae R.Br. ex Lindl. This was based on the type genus while it was still called Wintera, and though the genus name is illegitimate, the family name was conserved. The grouping under this name was first proposed (as Wintereae) by Robert Brown in a letter to De Candolle, and included in an addendum to De Candolle’s Regni vegetabilis systema naturale (1817).

The first appearance of Drimys winteri in plant form in England was in 1827 (Coats 1992, Edwards & Marshall 2019). By several accounts, the plants in cultivation in the UK and Europe seem to be var. chilensis (see below) rather than the typical variety. A.C. Smith (1943) distinguished the varieties as much by distribution as by morphological features. ‘The morphological tendencies within each of these varieties are not emphatic,’ he wrote, ‘but each variety is geographically restricted and shows a certain amount of incipient differentiation.’ The type is found south of parallel 42° south, i.e. southern Chile (from about Chiloé to Cape Horn) and adjacent Argentina. It would thus have been what Captain Winter found in Tierra del Fuego. Var. chilensis is found further north, but with a region of overlap: Smith defines the range to the minute, between 30°30’ and 44°40’, corresponding to central Chile from Coquimbo to Aysen. The variety was first described as a species by de Candolle in 1817. Asa Gray reduced it to a variety in 1854, but he was essentially following the opinion of J.D. Hooker, who in Flora Antarctica (1845) wrote of Drimys: ‘After a careful examination of a very extensive suite of examples, I have come to the conclusion that there is but one South American species of this genus. There is a dissimilarity in the form of the foliage, even between the North and South Fuegian states, the former having longer and more membranous leaves, differing in no respect from specimens gathered near Valparaiso…, which generally pass under the name of D. chilensis DC.’ Gray saw ‘little to militate against Dr. Hooker’s conclusion respecting the species,’ though he was sceptical of Hooker’s claim that Drimys comprised one species extending over 86° of latitude from Cape Horn to Mexico.

The typical variety tends to be taller, but with inflorescences of fewer flowers bearing fewer petals, so in horticultural terms it is the plainer sibling of var. chilensis. For Bean (1976) it is a horticultural non-entity: ‘Unless the typical variety comes into cultivation the distinction [with var. chilensis] is scarcely worth recognising in garden nomenclature.’ Hogan (2008) writes at length about the virtues of Drimys winteri (before devoting a paragraph to var. chilensis), but based on the locations he names he is referring to var. chilensis rather than the type variety. He mentions the plants reach their ornamental peak in prime habitat on damp west-facing slopes in central and southern Chile. And he describes plants he saw in Altos de Lircay National Reserve, which is at about 35° south, so clearly in the range of var. chilensis. He adds, however, that ‘[t]he more one observes the genus Drimys in nature, specifically D. winteri, throughout its range in Chile, the more one is likely to doubt exacting, presently accepted subspecies [sic] and/or varieties.’

Locally, the two varieties are recognized by botanists and reference texts (e.g., Dimitri 1959; Flora Argentina y del Cono Sur 2025; Fundación R.A. Philippi 2025), following A.C. Smith’s geographical and morphological demarcations. According to Martin Gardner (pers. comm. 2025), ‘the differences are minor and they represent the sort of variation one would expect with a species with such a huge north-south distribution.’ There seems to be scant evidence that the type variety is in cultivation, and Drimys winteri of gardens and horticultural literature is almost always var. chilensis. We describe both varieties here, in the traditional sense, covering cultivated plants under var. chilensis. We would be extremely interested to learn of cultivated material of var. winteri in the northern hemisphere.

The species is sacred to the Mapuche people of southern Chile and Argentina, who gather under their canopies to celebrate their assemblies and rites (Dimitri 1959). It is also gaining popularity as a niche spice, marketed as Patagonian pepper (Farina et al. 2023).

Though the perpetuation of John Winter’s name in botanical nomenclature survived the vicissitudes summarised above, it was almost shipwrecked on the shoals of mistaken identity. Starting with Clusius (1582) and continuing through Coombes (2012), several authors have attributed the name to Admiral Sir William Winter, John’s uncle. It is true that John’s appointment as commander of a ship in Drake’s expedition may have been due to nepotism (sensu stricto): Sir William was Surveyor and Rigger of the Navy, Master of Navy Ordnance, and one of the sponsors of the expedition. However, the credit for retrieving the medicinal bark from the uttermost part of the Earth is John’s alone.