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Manual de Plantas de Costa Rica

Main | Family List (MO) | Family List (INBio) | Cutting Edge
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The Cutting Edge

Volume XXVI, Number 2, April, 2019

News and Notes | Leaps and Bounds | Germane Literature | Season's Pick | Annotate your copy

FABACEAE. Like the following entry, this one is more of an oversight on our part than a new country record; we, at least, should have mentioned in the family discussion the caesalpinioid tree Acrocarpus fraxinifolius Arn. (Cedro rojo; native of India), occasionally planted for ornament or coffee shade in the Valle Central (and elsewhere in Central America). In this case, we missed a couple of conspicuous literature reports (e.g., Holdridge & Poveda Á., 1975; Léon & Poveda Á., 2000), but until now (Hammel 27656, CR—still in the plant press at this writing!) we knew of no Costa Rican voucher for this sp. The trees can grow to at least ca. 30 m in height, have huge, bipinnately compound leaves, and flowers and inflorescences that look very much like those of Combretum cacoucia Exell (Combretaceae). Thanks and a tip o’ the hat to our bookworm-buddy (and manual collaborator) Daniel Santamaría for helping us with the identification....and then embarrassing us with the literature oversights! As such things go, once Hammel had collected and learned the name of this plant, he immediately saw it growing in two additional places, even closer to home! For plenty of photos of this sp., see Hammel’s Flickr site.

POACEAE. In a roundabout manner, we recently became aware of two Costa Rican records for the cosmopolitan grass Aristida adscensionis L., never before reported (as far as we can determine) from the country. These are: Grayum et al. 12209 (CR, MO) and Pohl & Davidse 10611 (MO), both from the llanuras de Guanacaste, at ca. 150–300 m elevation. The former was determined as A. adscensionis rather recently (2010), but the latter was collected in 1968, and so determined in 1973! Thus the omission of this sp. from Flora costaricensis (1980) and the lack of a Costa Rican record in Flora mesoamericana (1994) are inexplicable, especially as the Poaceae treatments in both works were authored (or co-authored) by the late Richard W. Pohl himself. We must also ask ourselves how we missed this for the Manual grass treatment (2003)!

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