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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 XXVIII, Number 4, October 2021

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

APIACEAE. This one leaps from last season's "pick"—Centella erecta (L. f.) Fernald [see under "Season's Pick" in The Cutting Edge 28(3), Jul. 2021]—to a new country record, Centella asiatica (L.) Urb. We get two blurbs out of one plant! That situation came about, at least in part, by a poorly sleuthed (at the time) origin of the plant found growing in the yard of Manual co-PI Barry Hammel. We are now certain that it came from the yard of his friend and neighbor, landscape architect Maria Elena Chinchilla, who has it (perhaps most commonly known as "Gotu kola") in various parts of her garden, and from which she often forages for greens to add to the invariably delicious salad concoctions she throws together. Hammel has also subsequently seen the plant abundantly displayed (at the entrance to a terrace of culinary herbs) at the "Green Ark Botanical Garden," just up the hill from him. Mind you, we have still not seen any published treatment where C. asiatica and C. erecta are distinguished, so we are flying blind here. For more details, see the Manual online treatment of Centella.

EUPHORBIACEAE. Manual collaborator Mario Blanco (USJ) reports the recent appearance in Costa Rica of the Mediterranean weed Euphorbia peplus L., a sp. that has become widely naturalized. Plants were first noticed in Costa Rica some three or four years ago, as greenhouse weeds at the Universidad de Costa Rica; Mario states that they have now spread to his own garden in Cartago (M. Blanco 5239, USJ), where they are propagating aggressively, and may have become naturalized locally in disturbed sites (despite Mario’s best efforts to keep them in check!). Euphorbia peplus was treated hypothetically in Flora costaricensis but, oddly, not even mentioned in the Manual, despite the fact that it had already been recorded from both Guatemala and western Panama. The known New World distribution of E. peplus would now be expressed (in Manualese) as follows: “SE Can.–Guat., CR–Chile y Ven., SE Bras., Uru., Arg., Antillas Mayores, Bermudas” (see also the recently updated Manual online treatment of Euphorbia). N.B.: Euphorbia peplus is not to be confused with E. peplis L., a very different sp. (referable to the segregate genus Chamaesyce); the two were described in the same work, on successive pages, by Linnaeus (what could the old boy have been thinking?).

 

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