Prospero
Mary Sue Ittner (Mon, 27 Aug 2012 08:00:35 PDT)

Hi,

I made a wiki page for Prospero.
http://pacificbulbsociety.org/pbswiki/index.php/…
David Fenwick has supplied some photos of
Prospero autumnale and Michael Neumann who grows
a lot of the different forms has offered to share
photos and his observations of variations he has
seen in the wild. Curiously, David's plants were
photographed in January and February, not in autumn.

As I made the page I decided to add the Plant
List, the Kew check list, and the Euro+Med
database "accepted" species in case anyone else
has photos of them. When making this page and
looking up the synonyms I was struck with how
Prospero autumnale has such a broad range and has
been called so many different things and in spite
of the variations that must exist (and Michael
will tell us about) no varieties or subspecies
or forms seem to be "accepted". In contrast there
are a number of different species that are only
found in Crete. I wonder how different they are and how easy to tell apart.

I found this reference:
FLORA OF CRETE: Supplement II, Additions 1997-2008
by Nicholas Turland & Lance Chilton
"All six species are apparently diploids, with
chromosome numbers ranging from 2n = 12 to 2n =
28. They are treated here under P. autumnale
sensu lato until further study of Prospero
throughout its distribution results in a more
satisfactory taxonomic arrangement. Bergmeier &
al. (2001: 351) noted that plants from Ep. Sitia:
Koufonisi island and adjacent islets do not match
any of the following six species and may
represent another, undescribed taxon. Valdés
(2004) transferred the six species to Scilla L."

I checked with Nick Turland and he responded that
he wasn't aware of any more recent work on
Prospero and gave me the reference to the
Euro+Med database which accepts the changes.

If anyone has photos of any of the 11 other
species, we'd be happy to have them for the wiki.

Mary Sue