Taxonomy
Mary Sue Ittner (Fri, 23 Mar 2018 08:54:15 PDT)

Taxonomic changes are being made all the time. There are still a few
that are based on morphology, but the majority seem to be based on dna.
And there are variations of how elaborate or carefully done that may be.
Sometimes proposed changes are accepted by botanists in the countries
where the plants occur, sometimes not. And sometimes the proposed
changes in names are not widely accepted. When we had the topic of the
week on Scilla in 2003, Julian Slade reported on the proposed changes.
https://pacificbulbsociety.org/pbslist/…
Some of them were adopted. Others were not.

Our wiki now has been in existence a number of years. There are only a
few volunteers who are actively involved. There is no one checking
whether material added in the past conforms with the most recent data
bases and if they differ, how do you decide? Discussions in the past
have made the point that as long as you add the name of the person who
published the name of the plant the name is considered correct. We
didn't do that in the beginning, but I'm slowly adding them if a page
I'm working on is changed. And I also add synonyms (but with some plants
it is hard to decide how many to add as there have been so many changes
and it can be time consuming to find them). Synonyms are important as a
lot of people will be growing plants under old names or have reference
books published before the name changes. Many years ago those of us
working on the wiki at the time made the informal decision (after
changing Ornithogalum and Albuca back and forth more than once) to wait
when new names were proposed to see if they were broadly accepted.

When Graham Duncan wrote his book on Lachenalia in 2012 none of us
wanted to tackle all the changes he proposed, especially since his book
did not make it very easy to do so. Some things that looked very
different were lumped together and some things that looked the same were
split and there wasn't a page listing all these changes. Recently I made
the unwise (in terms of my time) decision to update Lachenalia since
we are now in 2018 and Plants of the World Online which is replacing the
Plant List has accepted most of the changes. I found it tough going
reading his book as a gardener, not a taxonomist or a botanist. Some of
the differences seemed subtle and based on small morphological
differences and location of the plant which made figuring out what photo
someone had added of a plant in cultivation belonged to what new species
very difficult. Even the photos in the book of different species
sometimes looked the same to me After spending many hours many days in
frustration I decided I had done enough and a few of them I didn't
change. I made references to and added all the names of the people who
had published the names for some of those. For example:
Lachenalia pallida Aiton is found on clay flats in large colonies in the
Northwest and Southwest Cape. In Graham Duncan's 2012 book he proposed
including Lachenalia gillettii W.F.Barker, Lachenalia pustulata Jacq.,
and Lachenalia unicolor Jacq. in this species.

One day when I am feeling more charitable I may change Lachenalia
violacea as some of our photos of it probably represent Lachenalia
glauca, a new species Duncan elevated from a variety. I suspect it will
be awhile before I tackle another one of those name changes (like
changing Spiloxene to Pauridia) which would also take a lot of time.

The PBS wiki was originally created as a place for members of the PBS
list to add photos of the plants they were growing or seeing. I guess
I'm to blame for making it more than that as I wanted to be able to find
the photos later and to know a bit about them. Remember it just
represents whatever a volunteer added to the page and there are not
enough of those to keep it up to date. Plants of the World Online I
suspect one day will be the reference people go to. They are constantly
uploading more information to it:
http://www.plantsoftheworldonline.org/
But you will still find people who are using old names or who do not agree.

Mary Sue

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