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The Cutting Edge
Volume VIII, Number 4, October 2001
News and Notes | Recent Treatments | Leaps and Bounds | Germane Literature | Season's Pick
SEASON'S PICK: Plocosperma buxifolium
This season's pick is thanks to Manual co-editor Nelson Zamora and his
participation in the summer OTS Systematics course (led once more by the undaunted
ecologist/taxonomist team of Brad Boyle and Robbin Moran) on their stay
at Palo Verde. We first laid eyes on this perplexing and little known species almost
11 years ago, when Nelson brought in a sterile specimen (Zamora 1563--to our
knowledge, the first Costa Rican collection), also from Palo Verde--all of the five
currently known Costa Rican collections are from dry forest, limestone bluffs of Palo
Verde and the nearby Lomas Barbudal. Nelson informs that knowledge of the existence
of this species in Costa Rica goes back much further, at least to ca. 1984 when
contemporary dean of Costa Rican dendrologists, Luis Poveda, pointed the plant out
to him on a field trip to Palo Verde. Still, in 1990, we were intrigued, could not
place it to family. A few weeks later parataxonomist Ulisis Chavarría
brought in a fruiting specimen (Chavarrķa 193), which, for its comose seeds,
made Apocynaceae or Asclepiadaceae seem more likely than our first estimates of
Verbenaceae or related. Back then, before we were hooked on Internet, scan and
digital camara technology, we eventually got a blurry, black and white fax of it
to Asclepiadaceae and Nicaragua specialist, MO colleague Doug Stevens, who
readily identified it as the problematic Plocosperma buxifolium Benth. of the
problematic Loganiaceae. The species, relatively common and abundantly collected in
Nicaragua, is now known from Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Costa Rica.
Recently, with the break-up of Loganiaceae s. l. by way of molecular and other phylogenetic studies, (see, e.g., Backlund et al. [2000], as reported in the
Edge 7(3): 4, July 2000) the species is generally considered, once again, to belong in its own monotypic family, Plocospermataceae. Currently its ordenal affinities are either undefined (see Backlund et al., loc. cit.) or somewhere within the Lamiales (see
Stevens, P. F. 2001 and references therein). Flora of Nicaragua and our current Manual lists treat it in the Loganiaceae, s. l.
Photo credits go to Nelson Zamora.
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