Question
What is the difference between Pinus resinosa Ait. and Pinus resinosa Soland.? Are there two people who first described this species? What is Soland. an abreviation for?  

Answer
This is a real interesting question. There is no difference between the two, both are Red Pine. The diiference is the names of the people who identified the species--I could not determone who IDed the species first but most people think William Aiton. Here is some back ground on Aiton and Solander (Soland.)
AITON, WILLIAM (1731-1793), Scottish botanist, was born near Hamilton in 1731. Having been regularly trained to the profession of a gardener, he travelled to London in 1754, and became assistant to Philip Miller, then superintendent of the Physic Garden at Chelsea. In 1759 he was appointed director of the newly established botanical garden at Kew, where he remained until his death on the 2nd of February 1793. He effected many improvements at the gardens, and in 1789 he published Hortus Kewensis, a catalogue of the plants there cultivated. A second and enlarged edition of the Hortus was brought out in 1810-1813 by his eldest son, WILLIAM TOWNSEND AITON (1766-1849), who succeeded him at Kew and was commissioned by George IV. to lay out the gardens at the Pavilion, Brighton.

Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) was a Swedish naturalist and doctor who provided biology with a descriptive procedure, a standardized terminology and nomenclature and ways to handle and organize systematic information.(26) He introduced the BINOMIAL NOMENCLATURE system. Before, as mentioned above, you had a Latin or Greek generic name followed by descriptive terms. These differed greatly from person to person and created a great chaos. He produced his Speciesplantarum in 1753. In this work he gave a classification of the genera defined on the basis of an internally consistent set of criteria. He based this on the number of stamen or structure of the ovaries. He introduced a fixed descriptive terminology for botany and zoology and named the genus Nerium in 1737.(12) We know the oleander to this day as Nerium oleander L. which stands for Linnaeus. He studied medicine and natural science.(26) In 1735 he went to Harderwijk University to become acquainted with Dutch botanists and to find a publisher. He published his Systema naturae and met George Clifford, a wealthy banker who hired him to describe his collections of plants and animals on his estate. Here he produced the Hortus Cliffortianus and also Fundamenta botanica and Genera plantarum. He became a Professor of Botany at the University of Upsala.

A pupil of Linnaeus, Daniel Solander (1736-1782) sailed with Joseph Banks as Botanist on Capt. Cooks first voyage of exploration in The Endeavor from 1768-1771.(16) He named the oleanders he found in India as Nerium odorum and in earlier times you will find those he named as Nerium odorum Soland, a second species. He became keeper of the Natural History Department of the British Museum, London.



Pinus resinosa Ait., Hort. Kew. 3: 367. 1789.
Common names: Norway pine, hard pine. Red Pine