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1983 AROIDEANA Volume 6, number
4, page 133
The
Origin of Anthurium leuconeurum
Dr. Thomas B. Croat
Missouri Botanical Garden
P. O. Box 299
St. Louis, Missouri 63166
The name Anthurium
leuconeurumhas been in use by
horticulturists since 1862
when a plant, believed to have been collected in southern Mexico by
Auguste
Boniface Ghiesbrecht, was described by the French botanist
Charles
Lemaire. The plant apparently flourished in European botanical garden
hothouse collections for a period of about seven decades. A number of
herbarium collections were prepared and placed in herbaria at Kew
Gardens,
Geneva, Paris and elsewhere; most of these collections were made before
1895. The last such herbarium collection I've seen was prepared in 1935
at the
University of Coimbra, Portugal, by L. W. Carrisso and
deposited
at the Kew Herbarium. It is important to note that either Ghiesbrecht
prepared no voucher in the field or if he did it has not survived.
Certainly when
A. leuconeurum
was
described in 1862 no mention was made of
any herbarium collection and a painting published at that time (Plate
314 in
Vol. 9 of L'illustration
Horticole, 1862) serves
as the type. In addition, no
collections have been made of the plant since the time of Ghiesbrecht,
despite more than a century of collecting by many botanists
in southern
Mexico. (I, myself, have made trips to many parts of southern Mexico in
search of it.)
For some of
our readers perhaps the first introduction to this name was in the
first issue
of Aroideana
(Vol. 1,
No.1) when
Madison, in an article entitled "The
Anthurium
leuconeurum
confusion;'
introduced
the name as synonymous with A. clarinervium
Matuda,
another distinctly different species also restricted to southern
Mexico. That A.
clarinervium
and
A. leuconeurum
are
distinct can be seen from a
reproduction of Lemaire's Plate (Fig. 1; see also cover of Aroideana,
Vol.
5, No.3) and a photograph of A. clarinervium
in its
native habitat in
Chiapas (Fig. 2). The chief differences are the more open sinus and a
fusion
of the basal veins in A. leuconeurum
and a
closed
sinus and free basal
veins in A. clarinervium.
In
addition,
the midrib and primary lateral veins
in A. clarinervium
are
distinctly
paler than the surface; this distinction, although present, is not as
sharp in
A. leuconeurum.
During my
trips to European plant collections I was surprised not to find any
live
material of A. leuconeurum
and
concluded that it must have
been obliterated
during the destructive period of World War II. It was not until I
visited
Australia in 1981 that I came across collections of plants I was
reasonably
certain were A. leuconeurum.
In
Australia
they were called A. cordatum,
Fig. 3 a
species which is also illustrated in Exotica
III, p.
133. This
photo represents a plant that, despite slightly more spreading
posterior lobes,
compares relatively well with the type plate (Fig. 1) of A. leuconeurum.
The really interesting
thing about
this discourse is that A. leuconeurum
is
almost
certainly of hybrid origin which explains why it has never been
recollected.
What brought this to my attention was the article by Banta (1983) in a
recent
issue of Aroideana.
The
article described a cross
between A. clarinervium
Matuda
(Fig.
2) and A. berriozabalense
Matuda
(Fig.
4) that he repeateerafter first seeing similar results conducted by Bob
McColley of Bamboo Nursery. The hybrid, illustrated
in
Figure 3 of Banta's paper is,
I
believe,
a
close match for the type figure for A. leuconeurum
(Fig.
1).
Both
of the parent
plants are native to
northern
Chiapas
State in Mexico and both have been collected, for example, north of the
town of Berriozabal. That A. ciarinervium
is
a species capable of hybridizing in the wild is
documented by the fact that I
have
seen hybrids of
it with A.
pedaloradiatum
Schott
in
the same region. John Banta (personal communication) reports that A. berriozabalense
will
also readily hybridize with A. pedatoradiatum;
this
is
further confirmed by Dr. Richard
Sheffer's
observations (Croat
&
Sheffer,
1983) that members of Anthurium
section
Cardiolonchium
may
hybridize
with members of section Schizoplacium.
The
article
by John Banta which has led to the conclusion that A.
Fig.
3.
Anthurium
"cordatum,"
cultivated
in Australia (Fleetwood Nursery). leuconeurum
is
probably of hybrid origin is an example of how
important it is for horticulturists to make accurate records of their
crosses
and to publish similar articles.
Literature
Cited
Banta,
J.,
1983. What's in a Name? Aroideana
6(1):26-27.
Croat,
T.
B. & R.
D.
Sheffer,
1983.
The sectional groupings of Anlhurium
(Araceae),
Aroideana
6(3):85-123.
Madison,
M.,
1978.
The
Anthurium
leuconeurum confusion,
Aroideana1
(1):
17-19.
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