Species name for British plant hunter Robert Fortune (1812–89), Scottish botanist and collector, in China, who smuggled 100,000 tea plants and seedlings out of China to Darjeeling, India, accompanied by Chinese tea growers, for the East India Company, and set up the Indian tea plantations. Fortune not only used the Wardian cases – watertight boxes with glass tops – for shipping plants, but also sowed seed into earth in the cases and these germinated in transit, ready for planting out on arrival (Cox, 1945).

The following notes refer to the related species S. stolonifera and its uses in Traditional Chinese Medicine. Leaf: Juice dropped into aching ear, onto abscesses, inflammations. Plant: Febrifuge, suppurative. Whole plant is crushed and the juice applied to abscesses, boils, chilblains, cholera, convulsions, cough, fever, hematemesis, otitis media, and snakebite. Dried plant burned to fumigate hemorrhoids.