Alliaceae vs. Amaryllidaceae Was: Brunsvigia
J.E. Shields (Thu, 13 Dec 2007 09:26:08 PST)

Hi all,

Brunsvigia do not seem to do well under my growing conditions, or perhaps
under my style of care. So I can't really comment on them.

I have not read any really recent scientific papers on the justification
for submerging Amaryllidaceae into Alliaceae, so I'm just going to share my
personal prejudices here, and some older references.

The molecular phylogenetic trees I have looked at seem to put the two plant
groups very close together. However, from my perspective, it will always
remain useful to refer to a plant family composed just of the
Amaryllidaceae. I'm not much interested in Allium!

The clades in phylogenetic trees do not smoothly fit into a hierarchy of
Order - Family - Tribe - Genus with associated super- and sub- groups. How
we take various clades is therefore going to be subjective matter, and one
that various committees will no doubt pontificate on from time to
time. That is how the system works. Nevertheless there seem to be few if
any legal penalties for ignoring the committees.

Professional taxonomists, whose career advancement depends on getting along
with their prominent colleagues on those committees will clearly need to
pay attention. The rest of us can pick and choose what we like from this.

In 1996, in TAXON, Michael Fay and Mark Chase redefined Amaryllidaceae but
still kept it as a family separate from Alliaceae. [Fay & Chase, TAXON 45 :
441ff, (1996)]

In 1999, Ito et al. published some work on the matK gene that supported
Amaryllidaceae as monophyletic, but (in the abstract at least) did not
address relationship to Alliaceae. [Ito et al., J. Plant Research, vol.
112 : pp. 207-216 (1999)]

Also in 1999, Meerow et al. published a paper on Amaryllidaceae and its
relation to other groups. They found that Agapanthaceae was a sister group
to Amaryllidaceae, and that Alliaceae was the sister group to the
Agapanthaceae-Amaryllidaceae clade. [Meerow, Fay, Guy, Li, Zaman, and
Chase, AMER. J. BOTANY 86 : 1325-1345 (1999)]

Since both these families are now considered to be in the order Asparagales
(and I heartily agree!), and the two "families" are pretty certain to be
very closely related (again I definitely agree), we just need a superfamily
to include Alliaceae and Amaryllidaceae and a suborder just below
Asparagales, to include the Alliaceae-superfamily with some of the other
related clades in Asparagales.

Then again, in October of 2007 (about 2 months ago) Alan Meerow, James
Reveal, Dee Snijman, and Julie Dutilh posted a proposal to "superconserve"
the name Amaryllidaceae (1805) over the name Alliaceae (1797) for a merged
family to contain both groups. The proposal has been accepted for
publication in TAXON, and the abstract is on-line at:
http://ars.usda.gov/research/publications/…

Based on Alan's 1999 paper, the Agapanthaceae would have to be included
along with Amaryllidaceae in the new enlarged family, be it called
Alliaceae or Amaryllidaceae.

Interesting, isn't it?

Jim Shields

Searches done using Google Scholar at:
http://scholar.google.com/scholar/…

*************************************************
Jim Shields USDA Zone 5 Shields Gardens, Ltd.
P.O. Box 92 WWW: http://www.shieldsgardens.com/
Westfield, Indiana 46074, USA
Tel. ++1-317-867-3344 or toll-free 1-866-449-3344 in USA