Macadamia

The tree is native to the rainforests of northeastern Australia, where Aboriginal Australians — particularly the Bundjalung and Yugambeh peoples — had been eating the nuts for thousands of years. They called them kindal kindal or jindilli, depending on the language group. The trees grew wild along rivers in what is now Queensland and northern New South Wales. Europeans did not encounter them until the 1820s.

Ferdinand von Mueller, the German-born government botanist of Victoria, formally described the genus in 1857 and named it Macadamia after his colleague John Macadam. Macadam was a Scottish-born physician and chemist who had become secretary of the Philosophical Institute of Victoria. He was well-connected, well-liked, and useful — exactly the kind of person a colonial botanist named things after. Mueller named dozens of Australian plants after friends and patrons.

The first commercial macadamia orchard was planted not in Australia but in Hawaii. In the 1880s, William Purvis brought seeds from Australia to the Big Island, and by the early 1900s, Hawaii had become the world's largest macadamia producer. Australia did not develop its own macadamia industry until the 1960s — a century after Mueller named the genus. The nut that had grown wild in Queensland for millennia was commercialized on the other side of the Pacific.

John Macadam himself had no particular connection to the nut, the tree, or even botany. He was a chemist and political figure who died in 1865, just eight years after Mueller honored him. He never saw a macadamia plantation, never tasted a commercially processed macadamia nut, and left no writings about the tree that bears his name. His immortality is entirely accidental — the side effect of having a well-placed friend with a genus to name.