In January 2012, botanists formally named a new South American nightshade species, Solanum baretiae, in honor of Jeanne Baret.
In a paper published in the journal PhytoKeys around January 2012, botanist Eric Tepe and collaborators formally described and named a newly identified species of South American nightshade as Solanum baretiae, honoring Jeanne Baret's pioneering contributions to botany. This act of scientific naming served as a long-overdue formal recognition within the very discipline to which she had contributed so substantially, yet from which she had been excluded during her own lifetime due to her gender and social status.
The naming was deliberately symbolic: Solanum is the genus that includes economically and scientifically significant plants such as potatoes, tomatoes, and eggplants, and the choice to honor Baret with a species in this genus reflected recognition of her extensive, if historically uncredited, fieldwork collecting and cataloguing plant specimens across South America, the Pacific, and the Indian Ocean during the Bougainville expedition.
This modern honor is significant because it represents one of the first formal scientific commemorations of Baret's legacy, occurring more than 240 years after her voyage. It reflects a broader movement within the scientific and historical communities to acknowledge the overlooked contributions of women like Baret, whose labor was essential to major scientific undertakings but who were systematically denied credit, formal titles, or the professional recognition granted to their male counterparts, such as Philibert Commerson.