Leycesteria formosa, the pheasant berry, is a deciduous shrub in the family Caprifoliaceae, native to the Himalayas and southwestern China. It is considered a noxious invasive species in Australia, New Zealand, the neighbouring islands of Micronesia, and some other places. In its native Himalaya the shrub is frequently used in the traditional medicine of the various countries and peoples encompassed within the region.
Names
The genus name Leycesteria was coined by Nathaniel Wallich (one time director of Royal Botanic Garden, Calcutta) in honour of his friend William Leycester, Chief justice and noted amateur horticulturist, in Bengal in about 1820; while the Latin specific name formosa (feminine form of formosus) signifies 'beautiful' or 'handsome' (literally: 'shapely') - in reference to the curious, pendent inflorescences with their richly wine-coloured bracts. There is a popular misconception, however, that the specific name derives from the place name 'Formosa', which is an abbreviation of the original Portuguese name for the island of Taiwan: Ilha Formosa "beautiful island". Portuguese is a romance language (i.e. derived from Latin) and the adjective formosa has passed into it unchanged in spelling and meaning from the original Latin. Leycesteria formosa is so named in recognition of its beauty, not in acknowledgment of an origin on the island now known as Taiwan. The Latin specific names of certain plants, given to indicate that they were native to Taiwan at a time when it was known as Formosa take such forms as formosae, formosana and formosensis, not the Latin adjective/Portuguese adjective-used-as-a-proper-noun formosa.
Other common names include Himalayan honeysuckle, pheasant-eye, Elisha's tears, flowering nutmeg, spiderwort, Cape fuchsia, whistle stick, Himalaya nutmeg, granny's curls,partridge berry, chocolate berry, shrimp plant/flower and treacle tree/berry It is also recorded as Symphoricarpos rivularis Suksdorf. Contrary to the impression given by the respective common names, the plant is completely unrelated either to the nutmeg tree or to the fuchsia. Further contrary to the name "Cape fuchsia", it is not native to South Africa - the name being especially inappropriate, given that the family Caprifoliaceae as a whole is absent from Sub-Saharan Africa.
Wallich was Danish by birth and perhaps could hardly be expected to forsee that within fifty years or so the name of the worthy Justice [Leycester(ia)] would be corrupted into 'Elisha's tears' - which yet seems strangely to suit the plant, with its pendent white flowers and its persistent bracts which darken to a sombre blood red as the season advances.Garden Shrubs and their HistoriesAlice M. Coats It is apparent from the above that the common name Elisha's tears falls into the same category (of jocular corruptions of the scientific names of plants into common names more congenial to rural British taste) as Aunt Eliza (for Antholyza) and Sally-my-handsome for Mesembryanthemum. It is also testament to a greater familiarity with the names of biblical figures - such as the Old Testament prophets - on the part of Britons of the nineteenth century, when compared to their counterparts in the twenty-first.
Affiliation within Caprifoliaceae
The results of the genetic testing undertaken by Zhang et al. have revealed that Leycesteria is most closely related to the genera Triosteum (common name - "horse gentians" / Chinese 莛子藨属 tíng zi biāo shǔ) and Heptacodium (Chinese common name 七子花 qī zi huā = "seven son flower"). Of these, only Triosteum has fruits that are berries, the fruits of Heptacodium being dry capsules. These three genera belong to the subfamily Caprifolioideae of the honeysuckle family Caprifoliaceae, the other two genera in the subfamily being Lonicera, the (true) honeysuckles and Symphoricarpos, the snowberries.