Pierre Cusson

Pierre Cusson
Bust of botanist Pierre Cusson in the Montpellier plant garden

Pierre Cusson (1727–1783), anglicised as Peter Cusson, was a French botanist who specialised in Umbelliferae. As a young man, he travelled through Majorca, Spain and the Pyrenees, building up an excellent specimen collection of the flora of those regions. Shortly after his return to his home in Montpellier, an elderly female relative with whom he lived cleaned his study in his absence, discarding his entire collection.[1]

In 1967, botanist John Hutchinson published Neocussonia, a genus of flowering plants from southern Africa, belonging to the family Araliaceae and named in Pierre Cusson's honour.[2]


The standard author abbreviation Cusson is used to indicate this person as the author when citing a botanical name.[3]
  1. ^ John Gorton (1838). "Cusson (Peter)". A General Biographical Dictionary. Vol. 1.

    This anecdote has been misrepresented by James Edward Smith as "the mortifying stupidity, of his wife, who, on his absence from home, is recorded to have destroyed his whole herbarium, scraping off the dried specimens, for the sake of the paper on which they were pasted!"—Smith, James Edward (1807). An introduction to physiological and systematical botany  (2nd ed.). p. 417.
  2. ^ "Neocussonia Hutch. | Plants of the World Online | Kew Science". Plants of the World Online. Retrieved 2 November 2021.
  3. ^ International Plant Names Index.  Cusson.