Main | Family List (MO) | Family List (INBio) | Cutting Edge Draft Treatments | Guidelines | Checklist | Citing | Editors The Cutting Edge Volume XXV, Number 3, July 2018 News and Notes | Leaps and Bounds | Germane Literature | Season's Pick | Annotate your copy COMBRETACEAE. Does anyone but us ever look at the Manual? While perusing the Combretaceae treatment (2010) by our colleague Quírico Jiménez, co-PI Barry Hammel chanced to notice the absurd length ("300–800 mm") ascribed (in the genus discussion of Combretum) to the "parte superior del hipanto" of the cultivated Combretum indicum (L.) Jongkind. Those would be some honking flowers! Obviously, we were off by an order of magnitude (no reflection on Quírico; the paragraph in question was surely inserted by your "editors"). The miracle is that nearly eight years passed before this spectacular error was noticed and, as usual, it was first seen by one of us. MYRISTICACEAE. In the course of his work on this family for a future Flora mesoamericana volume, Daniel Santamaría (LSU) has made yet another breakthrough: he informs us that the name Virola laevigata Standl., consigned to synonymy under V. guatemalensis (Hemsl.) Warb. in earlier floras, is actually a correct name (indeed, as far as he knows at present, the correct name) for the sp. treated in Manual Vol. 6 (2007) as "Virola sp. A." The name Virola laevigata was nowhere included in the Manual Myrsiticaceae account, though we ought to have cited it somewhere (and investigated it more closely), because the type is from westernmost Prov. Chiriquí, Panama, within just a few kilometers from the Costa Rican border! Perhaps we did not consider it in the context of Virola sp. A because all the Costa Rican material of the latter had been determined previously as V. nobilis A. C. Sm. and/or V. surinamensis (Rol. ex Rottb.) Warb. (rather than V. guatemalensis). VERBENACEAE (or LAMIACEAE). Co-PI Barry Hammel, while pondering one of his recent collections that he thought must be long-needed flowering material of the sp. treated as Vitex cymosa Bertero ex Spreng. in his (with Ricardo Rueda) Manual account of the genus in question, experienced an epiphany: the collection proved to be something entirely different, Godmania aesculifolia (Kunth) Standl. (Bignoniaceae)! This prompted Barry to reconsider the Manual diagnostic statement for Vitex, which distinguished that genus from Handroanthus and Tabebuia (Bignoniaceae) on the basis of its simple trichomes (vs. branched tricomes or scales in the last-mentioned genera). He now suggests that Vitex should have been distinguished also from Godmania, which itself has only simple trichomes. The linear, cylindrical, capsular fruits of Godmania are very different from the ellipsoidal to globose, drupaceous fruits of Vitex, but flowering material is more problematic; it helps that the stamens are included in the corolla tube in Godmania, but well exserted in our Vitex. Perhaps the number of leaflets (5–9 in Godmania, vs. 1–5 in Vitex) offers the best clue. For more on Godmania aesculifolia, see under "Season's Pick." TOP