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The Honeysuckle Hybrid Lonicera
morrowii x tatarica =
L. x bella Zabel at Buckhorn Island State Park,
Erie County, New York P. M. Eckel http://www.mobot.org/plantscience/ResBot/index.htm
Originally published in Clintonia: Newsletter of
the Niagara Frontier Botanical Society 14(4): 5. 1999. Republished with permission. |
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THE HONEYSUCKLE
HYBRID LONICERA MORROWII X TATARICA
= L. X BELLA ZABEL
AT BUCKHORN ISLAND STATE PARK, ERIE
COUNTY, NEW YORK by P. M. Eckel The common weedy
shrubs Lonicera tatarica L. and L. morrowii A. Gray are
so familiar to us in the infested woodlands we enjoy exploring around the
semi-urban areas around the city of Buffalo, that it is very easy to dismiss
them. When their flowers are white, they can be readily distinguished by L. morrowii
having pubescent leaves, L. tatarica with glabrous. I had been
collecting for a year at Buckhorn Island State Park. a botanically rich area
that, oddly enough, has escaped systematic exploration by area botanists
since botany attracted its first serious students in Buffalo just before the
Civil War. Lonicera grows freely along all disturbed areas, especially
beside walkways, and in May the path areas are festive with their white, pink
and yellow flowers. The Buckhorn
Island flora is particularly rich in herbaceous species, which I had been
dutifully cataloguing, when I thought I had better get down to deciding
whether I had Lonicera tatarica or its cousin, L. morrowii.
I was surprised to discover I had both in one! That is, I had a hybrid. The
leaves were clearly pubescent beneath (L. morrowii) but that
species does not have deep pink flowers. Of all the alien, shrubby Loniceras
to choose from L. tatarica is our only species with
pink-flowered shrubs as well as white ones. The hybrid has beautiful
uniformly pale to deep pink flowers as well as distinctly pubescent leaves—a
combination that appears hard to miss in the field. Note the curious
fact that all of our alien species, including this hybrid and excepting the
viney Lonicera japonica, have brown (not white) pith. The
hybrid is listed in some manuals as Lonicera bells Zabel. Its
occurrence in the wild is so often associated with horticulture that it may
not appear in many floras or checklists. Voss (1996) documents the
considerable abundance of the hybrid in Michigan. The station at Buckhorn is
not an escape from cultivation nearby, the closest residences being quite some
distance away. This population seems more to derive from birds, and not from
their droppings, as one might expect, but rather from regurgitation of
undigested seeds after eating the berries (Soper & Heimburger, 1982).
Whether these plants derived from spontaneous hybridization of the two
species in the field remains to be seen as I have not yet looked for L. tatarica
in the park. Another good
character for Lonicera x bella is that the
corolla is around 5 mm longer than that of either L. morrowii or L. tatarica.
Some manuals don't specify corolla length of any of these three: L. tatarica
and L. morrowii on average 11 mm (to 16): L. x bella on
average 21 mm (to 25), although Fernald (1950) indicates that the corolla for
L. x bella is shorter than that of L. morrowii. The hybrid
appears to be new to our checklist area for western New York and the Niagara
Peninsular region of Ontario, but until a bibliographic update has been made,
it is only presumed to be an addition. The permission to
collect at Buckhorn Island by the New York State Department of Parks is
gratefully acknowledged. Fernald, M. L. 1950. Gray's Manual of Botany ED. 8. American Book
Company, New York. Soper, J. H. & M. L. Heimburger. 1982. Shrubs of Ontario. Royal
Ontario Museum Publications in Life Sciences, Toronto. Voss, E.G. 1996. Michigan Flora. Part III. Dicots (Pyrolaceae-Compositae). Cranbrook Institute of Science Bulletin 61, and University of Michigan Herbarium |
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