Grafia Golaka

Balthasar Hacquet, physician, natural historian and ethnologist, lived in Carniola from 1776 to 1787. He also studied plants, though he remained overshadowed by his famous predecessor, Scopoli. Hacquet's most important botanical work, entitle Plantae alpinae Carniolicae (Carniolan Alpine Plants) was published in 1782 in Vienna. He described 12 plants in it which grow in the Carniolan Alps and in Istria and which were in his opinion new, still undescribed plants. He named them all by places, by habitats and also drew them.

One of the newly described plants was Athamantha golaka. Hacquet noted that it grows in the Julian Alps on Veliki and Mali Golak and in other mountains in the vicinity. After later renaming, this well-shaped umbellifer received the genus name Grafia, after the Ljubljana apothecary and botanist Žiga Graf, but retained its species name after Golak in the Trnovo forest.

Grafia golaka is 50 to 100 cm high, has a bare, slightly striped stem which is slightly branched at the top. The leaves are pinnatisect, shining, triangular in silhouette. The white flowers are in an umbel.

It is distributed in the south-east Alps, in the central Appenines and in the western part of the Balkan peninsular, where it reaches to Prokletij in Albania. In Slovenia it grows on rocky meadows and among shrubs in the mountain belt in the Kamnik and Julian Alps, in the Polhovgradec hills, on Šmarna gora, in Notranjska and Kočevje. However, it does not grow on Golak, after which it was named.