The Kochia saxiloca is a rare botanical species which has linked its name to Ischia since its discovery, 166 years ago.
The first botanist of the Bourbon court Giovanni Gussone discovered it in 1850. He was the father of Ischia pine forests, who strolled far and wide around the island in order to classify the botanical species. We know the exact date of its discovery of the Kochia: 28th of may. It was then that on the first of the Rocks in bay of Sant’Anna he identified different examples of a small drooping and woody plant. Some time later, in 1854, Gussone inserted the Kochia in his volume entitled “Enumeratio plantarum vascularum in Insula Inarime…”.
And that are plant took the name of its discoverer, Kochia saxicola Guss. Only twenty years later, in 1877 this plant was also identified in Capri and other years passed before it was also found in Strombolicchio in the Aeolian islands.
The Kochia of Ischia was not found in other areas of the island apart from the Rocks of Sant’Anna. Therefore, when it disappeared from there, it was considered extinct in Ischia. And in 1922 due to a landslide, the site where it grew in Capri also disappeared, where it was reported to have disappeared, until other seedlings were found by chance in an inaccessible area, which remained the only evidences in addition to the Strombolicchio examples.
It was on the Sicilian islet that several decades later seeds were taken and planted in the Botanical Garden of Naples in order to reinsert the Kochia where it had disappeared. On the 2nd of July 2004, three new were brought back to the original rock of Sant’Anna, and they grew luxuriantly, until when ten years later a pair of rabbits was freed, which was about to extinguish the Kochia again.
Fortunately, the small plants left on a rock at the base of the Aragonese Castle were moved.Where their new story on the island of Ischia began.
