Genus named for Bernard M'Mahon (1775-1816), American Horticulturist. 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).

Named for Bernard McMahon (1775-1816) Irish/American horticulturist, by Thomas Nuttal in 1818.