Habenaria erichmichaelii / rhodocheila / roblenii / xanthocheila
 

Hello,

I've been struggling with the nomenclature of the Habenaria rhodocheila complex.

Kew lists Hab. erichmichaelii, robelenii, and xanthocheila as synonyms of Hab. rhodocheila. I believe this to be wrong.

The RHS accepts all 4 taxa as distinct.

Hab. erichmichaelii is fairly easy to distinguish. The others other than color not so easy.


I guess my questions are:

Is there a dichotomous key to distinguish these 4 taxa?

In lieu of said key what are the distinguishing characters?

What are the distributional records for each taxa?

Thank you.

Tim


ps. I'm posting this in a second forum on this board. If this is in violation of protocol I will gladly delete one of the threads.

Just saw this. You would have to look up the original descriptions of each plant. The botanist who names a plant must provide, in the description, an explanation of how it differs from at least the most related species. Sometimes they describe how it differs from multiple relatives. There mus also be a description of where the type specimen was found.

If you go to sites like Missouri Botanical Garden Tropicos you can sometimes look up multiple herbarium specimens of a given species, and thereby figure out at least part of the natural range.

Dichotomous keys tend to appear in review articles and books. I don't know what exists for Habenaria. I do know flower color is rarely enough to differentiate between species.

In addition to academic papers, keys also appear in regional floras and monographs. I'm pretty sure there are no relevant monographs published otherwise they'd be on my wishlist, but it might be worth trying to find a flora. If you don't want to buy one yourself, a university library would be a good place to start looking.

Writing and publishing your own key is also an option since none are readily available, but it would entail reviewing herbarium specimens if you wanted credibility. In fact, it's possible that Haberia is so poorly studied a lot of the information you're looking for might not even be available online.