BX names
Mary Sue Ittner (Sun, 27 Jan 2013 15:53:46 PST)

Eugene Zielinski's has just posted to the list about something
misnamed in the BX. Jim Waddick's recently posted trying to find
information out about a plant that when you search for it on the
Internet seems mostly just to appear in seed exchange lists. Also
recently there was also a question about what Angelo was offering
which he suspected was just that Dell couldn't read his writing and
guessed what it was. Dell spends a lot of time on the BX and just
accepts the names that people give him for the seeds and bulbs they
offer. I don't think we could expect him to check to see if the names
he lists are accurate, accepted, spelled correctly (I'm not sure
what word to use here since there isn't always agreement about
names.) When I look through BX offerings I often see old names or
names that are not spelled correctly, but have refrained from
pointing this out. But since our BX offerings are listed on our
website each time we get to 100 or more and since they are picked up
in Google searches, we may be contributing to the confusion about
what to call something when something is offered under a name that is
misspelled. If it is corrected after the fact, this may be missed in
a Google Search or when the list of the most recent 100 is compiled.
I'm not sure how to solve this. I don't know if someone volunteered
to check the names before Dell sends them out, if this would be an
extra step that made his very difficult job more work. Perhaps the
donors could check their names carefully before notifying Dell. We
try to keep up to date on the wiki on names and list synonyms if we
change names we are all familiar with. The Plant List is a good
resource for accepted names and synonyms since it uses several data
bases in deciding what is accepted. Including synonyms would also no
doubt be helpful.

For instance the accepted name these days is Freesia laxa, but it is
still often referred to by old names. So a BX listing could be
Freesia laxa (syn. Anomatheca laxa, Anomatheca cruenta, Lapeirousia laxa)

Mary Sue