Ferraria/Spelling rules
Mary Sue Ittner (Thu, 11 Dec 2008 07:33:58 PST)

Thanks for the interesting comments about the naming of plants and thanks
Dylan for alerting me to the crispa subspecies that I need to change on the
wiki. The Manning and Goldblatt books rarely include much data about
subspecies and they don't recognize a lot of them so I was using the
spelling in the monograph, but will change it. IPNI lists it this way:
Iridaceae Ferraria crispa Burm. subsp. nortieri M.P.de Vos -- J. S. African
Bot. 45(3): 343 (1979), as 'nortierii'. (IK)

From a practical standpoint it would be nice if someone checked the rules
before accepting the way someone names a plant so it would not have to be
changed down the road. The question I have is at what point does the plant
community decide to change all their labels if someone named a plant and
did not follow the naming rules and countless books have been written in
the meantime using that spelling and everyone knows it by that spelling. In
the case of the species in question as I originally wrote, except for the
Kew checklist, almost all of the other references use the other spelling.

IPNI: Iridaceae Ferraria densepunctulata M.P.de Vos -- J. S. African Bot.
45(3): 346 (1979). (IK)

And Christiaan van Schalkwyk has alerted me to another super reference that
I'm going to find very helpful, an African plants database, and I found
this reference there.
http://ville-ge.ch/musinfo/bd/…

Mary Sue