Editor’s preface: The following are a collection of letters and articles by Bruce Bayer originally published between 1988 and 1998 in Haworthiad, the journal of the Haworthia Society.
CONTENTS
HAWORTHIAS AND THE CAPE CLIMATE
By M. Bruce Bayer
One of the big difficulties people have in understanding the cultivation of many South African succulents, is the question of Mediterranean climate. Most people know that the Cape has a remarkable flora, but there is also a tendency to equate the spectacular flora of the Cape Sandstone Mountains with the concept of Cape Flora. Actually these sandstones are restricted to about 31 degrees South latitude in the west and still farther south in the east. Unfortunately this northern boundary very closely co-incides with reducing winter rainfall. However the true winter rainfall region extends from Luderitz in Namibia to as far as Port Alfred in the east. Behind this there is also the question of climatic history. Although Mediterranean climate is calculated to have been in operation over the Cape for about 25 million years, it is speculated that the last minor ice age some 20.000 years ago was about as far back as to still fall open to speculation. It is suggested that during this time the climate was a lot cooler and dryer and that the zone of winter rainfall was far more extensive. Thus the whole Karoo could, historically speaking, have been winter rainfall.
Nearly all Haworthia species occur within the zone of such an extended winter rainfall region. Only H. limifolia is in fact excluded, and I do not think that Chortolirion needs to be discussed in this context. The summer growing species can fairly easily be identified as those occurring north-east of Port Elizabeth. These are H. cymbiformis, H. cooperi, H. bolusii, H. reinwardtii and H. coarctata. The first two overlap into the winter rainfall area. H. marumiana is a bit problematic as it is primarily in the interior mountains, but nevertheless there are plants in those same areas which are obligatory winter growers whatever the present rainfall season.
The other consideration is severity of climate. My strongest impression following a visit to the USA, was the relative mildness of the South African climate. The following figures are daily temperatures maxima and minima for some of the key towns in the Cape where haworthias occur naturally:–
| Average Daily Temperature, ° C. | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Maximum | Minimum | Rainfall | |||
| Jan | Jul | Jan | Jul | mm | |
| Riversdale | 28 | 16 | 18 | 5 | 470 |
| Oudtshoorn | 31 | 15 | 20 | 3 | 244 |
| Ladismith | 30 | 16 | 18 | 6 | 356 |
| Mossel Bay | 26 | 16 | 19 | 8 | 410 |
| Bredasdorp | 27 | 16 | 18 | 8 | 480 |
| Worcester | 32 | 17 | 19 | 8 | 215 |
| Clanwilliam | 32 | 15 | 18 | 7 | 400 |
| Joubertina | 27 | 14 | 19 | 5 | 398 |
| Figures for 1986 | |||||
Generally there is a reduction in rainfall from east to west and also from south to north. In the extreme west the amount of rainfall falling in the summer is less than 20% of the total. The number of rainy days also decreases from east to west with 18 days with 10mm or more per year in the east and less than 5 days or so in the west. There is a tendency for the autumn months of April and May to be the wettest, followed by the spring months.
Regarding temperatures, in summer there are never more than 90 days with daily maxima above 32 degrees and usually less than 10 days with minima below 0 degrees (Note: maxima and minima). The daily temperature fluctuations are in the order of 10 to 15 degrees.
The effect of temperature seems to be reflected in the growth patterns of Haworthia as also touched by rainfall. Growth is generally reduced by cooler conditions during July and August, and then again by hot dry conditions in January and February. Thus clearly one can expect a bimodal growth reaction for autumn and spring. Not all species are equally sensitive but I am under the impression that one or two of the more difficult cactus genera are very fussy about such a growing regime.
One now has to extrapolate this information to the Northern hemisphere and also to more extreme climates as regards both temperature and rainfall. There are many ways of accommodating the effects of these variables and both the grower and his plants have built-in capacities to venture beyond the normal. I am quite used to people writing in and saying they have quite a different experience.
Pragmatism has to be extended still further when one starts writing about actually cultivating haworthias. Probably a fundamental reason for the tremendous diversity of the Cape flora (in the wider sense to include Karoo and haworthias) is the broken topography and range of geological formations. There is the whole gamut of both igneous and sedimentary rocks. The latter can be highly quartzitic or clay bearing. The sandstone-derived soils are generally poor in nutrients while the dryer area clay soils are rich. However, haworthias are often found in microhabitats highly influenced by shading, aspect, altitude and competition. None of them really occur in the invertedly leached soils typical of very arid areas where calcium sulphate or calcium carbonate is high. They are found in pockets of soil with high humic levels – usually. Direct sunlight is invariably avoided. I would baulk at giving any advice beyond stating that mixtures with slightly below neutral to neutral pH, with reasonable nutritive levels and fair drainage be used. Even something as fundamental as drainage can be accommodated by only regulation of amount of water, if other factors are right. It is difficult for Europeans to understand what skeletal soils are. Even in Europe you write blithely of ‘loam’. Your loams are the products of ages of soil formation under sod and reasonably high precipitation. Technically a loam is just a given proportion of sand to silt to clay, and one modifies this by adding more sand and compost? Our soils under arid conditions are quite different and one is not even sure that say where H. herbacea grows, even under its 200mm plus of rain, that there is ever movement of water through the whole soil profile. On rocky sloping sites it is even more difficult to always follow soil-forming processes. If one considers how generally successful growers are with haworthias, it is unlikely that detailed soil analyses are going to contribute anything. The prime considerations are light and water. Experience with geophytes suggests that for the winter growers – and most Haworthia species are – the plants should be kept reasonably cool and dry in the critical summer months i.e. January, February, mid-March, and by being patient and reducing water during the coldest and wettest winter months. Somehow or other this compromise must be met in the Northern hemisphere.
The Haworthia Society Newsletter,
Volume 2 (Issue 3), April 1988, pp.6-8.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
From Bruce Bayer, South Africa
A comment on Newsletter Vol. 3 No. 2 January ’89. I think it would be useful to consider Bob Swan’s notes and the illustration of H. batteniae in an educational light for your members. For the life of me I cannot figure out on what authority this plant illustrated, is named ‘H. batteniae’. Certainly if people think I worked on this basis I’d suggest you circulate all your members to disregard my work in its totality. Is ‘batteniae’, in the original description, described as dark purplish green? What other details in that description apply to the illustration. Why didn’t someone refer to floral characters as per description.
The plant in question is possibly a form of H. decipiens from the Klipplaat/Jansenville area – in my opinion.
On what reasonable basis can H. woolleyi be described as ‘a possibly extreme form of H. venosa ssp. tessellata’? I have yet to see a plant in the field or in cultivation which any collector would have problems in assigning correctly – or do I have to qualify the discriminatory skills of the collector.
Yes – H. limifolia and practically all its varieties will produce stolons if growing vigorously. It is the one sub-tropical species and real summer grower.
H. smitii is related to H. starkiana rather than H. kingiana – unless your members don’t believe floral characters to be meaningful. It would be useful to just examine the flowers of Robustipendunculares and Hexangulares – rather than depend on my opinion.
For Joyce Cocozza – ‘habdomadis’ is not easily distinguished from ‘inconfluens’. They are ecotypes of one species – if you consider the origins of the von Poellnitz material. H. lockwoodii if grown ‘soft’, cannot be distinguished from ‘inconfluens’. I made the reciprocal hybrids and the leaf-tip necrosis of H. lockwoodii is partially lost. There is at least one population (K. Venter coll.) which suggests intergradation between lockwoodii, inconfluens and decipiens – as I would have anticipated.
Kind regards and keep up the good work.
Haworthiad,
Volume 3 (Issue 3), April 1989, pp.14-15.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
From Bruce Bayer, South Africa
I enjoyed your April issue, and there are a few comments which I can make.
Allan Roberts: No, the species, and varieties of, Haworthia cymbiformis and H. reticulata are geographically very widely separated and there is no chance of a natural hybrid between these two elements. H. reticulata is closely allied with the retuse haworthias with the fish-tail flower buds and I am not surprised at the low fertility you find in your seed of the cross you made. H. lepida of Smith was collected at a farm near Fort Brown on the mid-section of the Fish River and despite an accurate description of the locality, I could not find anything there. I did however, find something very similar some way down river, and this is probably available as a Fort Brown collection. More interesting is a collection from the Klipplaat Dam north-east of Cathcart which lies geographically and appearance-wise, between H. batesiana and H. cymbiformis.
Steve Stringer: I was glad to meet you and Derek after your trip to Springbokvlakte. Yes, I do know the bolusii/translucens intermediate you refer to (see Introduction, New Haworthia Handbook). I also collected this some way to the north but I cannot solve what appears to be an insoluble problem. It is one of many skeletons in the cupboard which blur distinctions between species and prompt my view that there could be considerably fewer species. Yes, H. viscosa var. viridissima was described from east of Steytlerville.
Ron Evans: H. cymbiformis var. transiens could not have come from Riversdale, but I am ashamed to confess that I have seen specimens of H. turgida from the Heidelberg area which I found difficult to distinguish from H. cymbiformis. H. habdomadis var. inconfluens is often indistinguishable from the more translucent forms of H. cymbiformis. Note the confusion in von Poellnitz’ work regarding the allocation of varieties to H. cooperi, H. bolusii, H. cymbiformis and H. habdomadis.
Robert Kent: Also comments on H. archeri and var. dimorpha. Yes you are right about the distinctive capsule and this is shared with H. pulchella. Jan Vlok, a very competent observer at the Saasveld Forest Station at George, also expresses the view that capsule characters could be very important in Haworthia. Of course they are, but I am not so confident that they will give any better resolution of species than we currently enjoy. Even if dimorpha has apparently a different capsule to the eastern marumiana, this does not mean they are distinct species. Discernible within species differences may be greater than between species; which is why I do not attach too much importance to the enlarged perianth of globosiflora either. My experience of this kind of problem is by no means limited to Haworthia. Distinction between the elements is determined by the total degree of discontinuity between them and by cultivation and distribution. If there is a solution it is going to lie in something like DNA analysis which will allow quantification of differences, and the measurement of genetic distance between elements. (Species, varieties, forms or whatever, will then be defined in terms of this quantity.) The flower of dimorpha should be different with the upper petals standing straight forward and not upcurved. I find your articles a little frustrating. I feel a bit like a deceased poet may feel on being aware that more is being read into his crude works than he could possibly have put in himself; or alternatively, that the true intent is misrepresented. The three points made about H. archeri and H. marumiana were considered at the time of writing (not subsequently) and this is actually critical to the evaluation of the decisions I made as opposed to others – more later. My work did not pretend to resolve any difference between H. magnifica and H. mirabilis and if the problem of separating them is not clear from anything I wrote, then I was remiss. I would also change my views a little if necessary – actually it is just degree of expression – to agree with Col. Scott about meaningless sub-division of H. mirabilis. I often wrote to make a specific point because I was aware that an alternative explanation was being threatened. In this particular case (read the revision of the Retusae in Aloe) the role of geographic distribution was in balance. I did the same thing with an article on leaf spirals to deliberately circumvent some misconceptions about the counting of leaf-tiers. Wryly – I was not very successful.
In a revision, the type of the species would have to be cited which, in the case of H. mirabilis, would be chosen from one of the illustrations at the Kew Herbarium dating from Haworth. I would equate the probable choice with Smith’s H. mundula. My work suffers from the fact that I did not typify species, and the specimen I quote to represent H. mirabilis is actually the var. beukmannii (a poor choice). This with var. badia, represents two of several populations which are really distinctive. The De Hoop, Bredasdorp N. and the Greyton N. populations are also quite divergent. H. magnifica is probably even more variable than H. mirabilis and you are going to get the horrors when you try to come to terms with that lot. The problem with describing a variety is that automatically it creates another variety which now represents the species. This does not make a lot of sense to me because the circumscription of the species should include all the varieties. In Haworthia we have the situation that we recognise some varieties, but often disregard a larger degree of residual variability in the species. H. magnifica and its variants are just not well represented in collections. Hopefully, most mirabilis available is from my collecting (hopefully, because then I know that illegal and excessive collection has been minimal) and then probably not more than 7 populations are represented in collections. I have not, I think, introduced any collections of H. magnifica to collectors, other than identified varieties.
This brings me to a point which is at the core of my feelings about haworthias and the often senseless debate about their classification. My background was laid in insect morphology and classification and certainly this must have given me a point of view unique in the plant world. I say this because even peer-accepted top-botanists have pooh-poohed my view that a classification can be right at point A, but invalid at point B. Also, insect morphology with all its complexities of homologies and phylogenies, still does not make classification easier. Botanists with far less evidence at their disposal make far more heated claims – if their taxonomic views are come to be seriously tested – and are far more confident of their views. I enjoyed my work with Oxalis for the specific reason that with so much ‘character’ to work with, it was no easier to recognise species than in Haworthia. However, the same geographic approach I adopted there seemed to work very well indeed with Oxalis, or indeed with many other groups I had anything to do with. I have always been very sensitive to Smith’s conflict with Resende and his subsequent ‘retirement’. I was always very aware of the feelings of J. Dodson, J.R. Brown, J. Uitewaal and von Poellnitz with regard to difference of opinion, so I worked very hard not to make the same mistakes. Certainly I do not like the view (I have heard expressed) that I followed the same route out as Smith did – that is a gross misunderstanding of my work and life situation.
Subjective opinion plays very little role in my work in the sense that I am always aware that I am in pursuit of truth, however elusive it may be. If there is opinion, it is best defended in the book in the section on the species concept. Few people who argue about species names and classification, get around to sorting out in their own minds what they mean by ‘species’. A definition has to include the concept of time and any understanding of my work will have to go hand-in-hand with the view that species arise from a common genetic source, moulded by time and space. In some genera, time has played its part and the species are clearly discrete, in others the process is partly complete and in yet others change is beginning again. Hybridisation is commonly blamed for variability, and time and time again I find myself having to repeat the view that you cannot have a hybrid until you have two elements from which it can be constituted. Conversely you can have variability from which two elements are projected. The most obvious causes of transfer and movement of variability in geographic space are those affecting pollination, and movement of seed. With even a weak conception of the role of chance, one should be able to formulate a picture of how species gradually emerge from ‘the troubled clay’. It would avoid alot of mental gymnastics if we could agree on all this as a starting point for classification.
With kind regards and best wishes.
Haworthiad,
Volume 4 (Issue 4), July 1990, pp.17-21.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
From Bruce Bayer, South Africa
I hope Bob Kent followed my comments on Haworthia mirabilis f. beukmannii and why it was not given separate status. I enjoyed meeting him recently when he was at Worcester together with Steven Hammer. Bob says he still does not understand why I put the Uniondale forms of H. emelyae together with those from further west. I can’t answer that satisfactorily in one sentence. It falls within my idea of what constitutes a species, and taking the Uniondale form out of H. emelyae would not necessarily be any more sensible than rather adding H. comptoniana. It was also nice to read John Pilbeam’s article and know that he favours H. reinwardtii. My first and most impressionable encounter with an haworthia was with one of the slender compact forms of H. coarctata.
H. venosa ssp. tessellata: This species is very widespread and I would be surprised if your readers came up with a common strategy to grow these species. It is common on the Richtersveld with very low winter rain and is usually in the crevices of white quartz. It also occurs in southern Namibia, the Northern Cape, southern Orange Free State and as far north-east as New England – a high altitude summer rainfall area. At this latter locality it must be under snow in winter. Here it forms dense mats up to 0.5m diam. At Jamestown, also north-east Cape, it occurs at 2000m above sea-level on the mountain top, obscurely hidden away under rock edges. It is usually semi-shaded. Reproduction is also variable. It can be highly proliferous by offsets or by distinct long stolons.
H. limifolia: My one uncle was a health inspector in Northern Natal and also an enthusiastic naturalist. On one trip in about 1952, his Zulu assistant came out of the woods with a plant which was subsequently given to my father. It was grown in a wooden box on the back verandah where it split into two forming eventually two huge rosettes nearly 150mm diam. I only became really again interested in haworthias in about 1962 when I wrote around to try and get more information on what this strange fascinating giant was. No one could help and G.G. Smith wrote a polite letter to say that he was no longer interested either. Prof. Compton, then in Swaziland, and Capt. Keith at Stegi, were more helpful and I eventually undertook a very long excursion into N. Natal and Swaziland to try and find out more about H. limifolia and the huge plants my uncle had appeared with. Unfortunately I could never determine exactly where he had obtained his plants and the rest of the trip was in this respect a failure although highly eventful in many other ways. The only success was in collecting north of Stegi where I was directed to a dense sward of a highly stoloniferous form of H. limifolia on a forest floor. There was a lot of evidence for a diversity of forms over a very wide area, but no one could give me much detail. It was suggested to me that gigantea-like plants occurred in the Louwsburg area of N. Natal. The plants are apparently used in the herbal trade but there is no measure of how this may affect their survival in nature. Dr. Dyer dissuaded me from describing the giant form as a new species and hence it became the var. gigantea. I have nursed it ever since. I have now seen many odd plants from as many localities and while it seems fairly obvious that H. limifolia is a very variable species, I would really like to see more of it in habitat. Certainly I am not convinced that H. mcmurtryi and H. koelmaniorum are discrete. My father often used to tell me that he had as a young man collected an haworthia at Naboomspruit north of Pretoria. I was lucky enough to see the var. striata near Pongola in 1985, a good collection from Ndumu and another from Barberton. My experience suggests that South African succulent collectors are a close community when it comes to sharing information and the scientific record remains very sparse. I note in your exchange note that you refer to H. ubomboensis. I have never seen anything but the single clone I received from Capt. Keith and it would be interesting to know if there are other clones about. It is odd in that it offsets furiously, but I cannot recall if it also produces stolons or not. Possibly it has been re-collected. Capt. Keith said it was just east of Stegi.
Like H. tessellata, H. limifolia may or may not be highly stoloniferous. My original plants of H. limifolia var. gigantea very seldom have made any offsets and I have always had to propagate from leaf. However, I must add that I have never been able to grow them to their previous magnificence either. Neither species seems to grow very well here in Worcester and I am inclined to blame the soils we have i.e. either high levels of soluble salts or nutrient poor sands. Here we do not have leached soils with high cation exchange capacities as occur in Natal. I have never made much use of artificial mixes based on peat or bark. At Stegi, H. limifolia was growing in a thick layer of leaf litter on a valley floor, while at Pongola the plants were also under a low overhead leaf canopy but in among grass tufts on a granitic eroded slope. Shade does seem to be necessary but I think this species may need more warmth being from a sub-tropical area. I agree with Margaret Lee: quite the most attractive plant I ever saw was a specimen of H. limifolia grown my Mrs. Mairn Hulme at Thornhills south of Pietermaritzburg. It was very dark, lustrous-green with very well-defined, symmetrical transverse ridges on the leaves, and no tubercles of any kind. The Stegi form can be a rather dirty uninteresting green.
Interestingly when I was speculating about the possible and apparent incapacity of people to make sensible comparisons of illustrations, I was surprised to find a photograph of H. limifolia (from Natal) in the Compton Herbarium labelled as H. minima. There was also a manuscript name for H. natalensis from the Natal Drakensberg, which in reality was only Aloe aristata. So I am also fairly confident that von Poellnitz’ H. ferox was probably either A. humilis or perhaps A. longistyla.
Haworthiad,
Volume 5 (Issue 1), October 1990, pp.15-18.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
From Bruce Bayer, South Africa
Some comments arising from Haworthiad 5/1 :
John Pilbeam. I think the problem of tangled growth of your H. radula is probably peculiar to the clone you have but I have no idea what causes it. I have seen this phenomenon several times mostly in H. limifolia, when it appears as though the leaves are given conflicting messages about which way to spiral. Sometimes the leaves are deformed or partially fused. H. radula is anyway a bit of a mystery. I have only seen it once in the field where it was growing with H. attenuata, and there must be cause to consider that they are conspecific.
Les Pearcy. I referred to ‘H. ubomboensis’ as listed in your seed exchange and I wonder if Les Pearcy had this in mind when he writes that it is now accepted as a separate species. I have not even heard of this element ever having been re-collected, let alone seen any evidence or comment to suggest that it has variation and a distribution on which one could separate it from H. limifolia.
Bill Keen. I have very seldom seen variegation in Haworthia. I was told that M. Hayashi had recently collected a variegated H. truncata at Oudtshoorn and then as a surprise found a variegated H. maughanii in a tray of seedlings of mine.
John Collins. I first visited a locality for H. retusa near Riversdale in 1970 after Mr. Malherbe, the founder of Sheilam, directed me there. The reason for the particular interest was a very large form of H. retusa, which was then being sold as ‘H. mirabilis’. In fact my parents had bought one of these giants a long time previously, in about 1958. I had some trouble finding the locality as it is on town commonage and cultivated for wheat production. However, I did eventually find a few plants growing along a shaly uncultivated strip. None looked like Malherbe’s giant. They were all level with the soil surface apart from one lightish green coloured clone growing in loose rocks collected off the lands. I revisited the site with Hayashi in 1986 and could not believe my eyes at the huge plants we saw. There were huge monsters as much as 7″ diam. and about 3″ high. I have a number of seedlings from these monsters and it will be interesting to see what they do. They do offset. John Pilbeam writes that the name retusa is often misapplied and well it might be. I have no doubt that it varies continuously with H. turgida and surely with H. mutica and H. pygmaea as well. I can assure you all that there is a range of variation out there which will console anyone who may be feeling guilty about abusing the name.
Haworthiad,
Volume 5 (Issue 2), January 1991, pp.3-4.
PLANT OF THE QUARTER
HAWORTHIA SCABRA
From Bruce Bayer, South Africa
Haworthia scabra:– I hope the conflict about the use of names will not be dragged up here. As in other species there is a real problem in determining how best to treat it taxonomically. It is quite widespread – from the upper end of the Baviaanskloof (east of Uniondale), it is abundant in the Prince Alfred’s Pass (an ostensible hybrid with cymbiformis var. transiens was once sent to me from there, which looked exactly like H. tessellata!) to just south-west of Ladismith. The only definite natural hybrid I know is with H. viscosa from south-east of Oudtshoorn (‘H. tauteae’). Its growth forms are interesting because these vary from clearly spiralled to apparently non-spiralled forms. The leaves may be erect or very strongly inncurved. Generally the plants are scabrid, tuberculate and dark-green to nearly black in colour. The problem is in the Schoemanspoort north of Oudtshoorn where H. starkiana occurs. This is a smoother, larger and light green to almost yellow coloured species. The range of growth forms in the two species is absolutely identical. In Schoemanspoort one finds the relatively non-tuberculate forms of H. scabra (var. morrisiae), and I have received two collections which included totally smooth forms which apart from being a little dark in colour, could be taken for H. starkiana. This latter species has its own problems in its variation with the var. lateganiae and with the problematic H. smitii – if one wants to make problems out of the situation described above.
In Schoemanspoort it is interesting to find H. starkiana growing on very exposed north faces in huge yellow mats. H. scabra is here often found filling the cracks in the odd white quartz outcrops, just as H. tessellata does in the Richtersveld. At Kleinpoort where scabra and viscosa hybridise, the aspect is an exposed north one. Both species are at their largest and scabra in fact becomes a little reminiscent of H. reinwardtii, especially in the degree of caulescence and reddish coloration of the older leaves. Oh! but I find these plants so slow growing, and they also tend to be spoilt by a tendency of the leaves to aggregate dust and dirt.
I was very pleased to get a telephone call from Colonel Scott at East London recently. Your readers may like to know that after not being too well, he is again very active and energetic, and keeping in touch with what is going on in Haworthiad.
Editor’s Comment: I am sure everyone will join with me in wishing Colonel Scott a continued speedy recovery and hope he may perhaps write something for publication in Haworthiad very soon.
Haworthiad,
Volume 5 (Issue 2), January 1991, pp.10-11.
BRUCE BAYER WRITES FROM SOUTH AFRICA
There is not much to say about tissue culture (Ed: I had asked Bruce to write on this subject). When it was first mooted at National Botanic Gardens as the answer to a prayer for species conservation, I was appalled. Already we were trying at the other extreme to come to terms with a concept that 500 clones of a species was the bottom limit for safe conservation of an adequate genetic resource for survival of a species. I did not agree because it is just not practical. How could one hold such stocks of even a few species? They are trying this kind of thing now at the Karoo Botanic Garden and quite frankly I think it is ridiculous. Largely because the people concerned have neither the insight into what constitutes a species and hence the units they pretend to conserve; and neither do they have contact with the field situation and the whats and wheres needed in the operation. The KBG is a specialist garden (or at least it was) devoted to a particular policy (which I have to confess may have existed more in my mind than in the minds of management). My goal was to try and have a working knowledge of the entire spectrum of plant species of the arid areas of the winter rainfall region. So garden staff kept in contact with the field and with researchers and other interested persons or institutions; and had an ongoing knowledge of their species and what threats existed and how active they were.
Without that base, tissue culture solves no problems for conservation because it limits, and in fact reduces the genetic resource by a watering-down process. Remember that tissue culture is simply a technique of vegetative propagation. Already we have the problem that single vegetatively propagated clones (e.g. H. glabrata?) find their way into every collection. The one most important advance in recent years has been that your members are propagating from seed. While this also presents major problems it at least maintains some kind of genetic base. The problems are that new genetic combinations may be created which would not have survived habitat selection, and hence a resistance to planting back into the field from artificially grown plants albeit sexual or vegetative propagation. This strengthens my whole argument that the best conservation is habitat conservation and also my views on what the staff and operations of a Botanic Garden should be geared for.
Another aspect is that tissue culture is a relatively large scale operation in terms of space, equipment, development of technique and the transition from culture to practical medium for growing on. This money and effort could just as well be spent on putting horticultural activities on a sounder footing. Had all NBG money spent on tissue culture been spent on field work, and horticultural staff, facilities and activities, I think they would have been a great deal stronger not only conservation-wise but in many other respects too. I am sure this applies to the individual who is contemplating tissue culture as well. The problem is/was that NBG was trying to find a source of funding and then set itself unrealistic goals based quite largely on the one-eyed prospects of successful tissue culture – losing sight of the fact that in doing so it also set itself up against private initiative and enterprise.
Although not very relevant to the above, I would suggest that your members resist the temptation to look upon commercial nurseries as capitalistic rogues. They do have the problem of survival and when they face competition from unfair State funded activities and illegal field collecting, life can be very difficult for them. It is very discouraging to battle to grow say H. wittebergensis from seed, producing say 30 plants after 4 years, and then see a huge boxful of say 1000 stolen field collected plants fortuitously intercepted in the post. It is also frustrating to have a State institution spending tax-payers money to accumulate a vast and valuable collection, selling plants competitively at considerably below cost, and above that mostly plants which are available in the trade anyway.
Haworthiad,
Volume 5 (Issue 3), April 1991, pp.20-21.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
From Bruce Bayer dated 2nd July 1991
Regarding the April edition of Haworthiad – I do not know where the myth originated that Poellnitzia flowers do not open. I think Dr. Brandham once mooted this possibility and further that it was a sterile hybrid. That is of course not true and the species sets seed prolifically. The petal lobes are closely connivent but they do separate along the margins, and pollen can actually be seen extruded from between them. I do not know what pollinates the plant but I think it would be a bit silly to just assume that birds do. The style is up there amongst the anthers and I am remiss in not having looked to see if it is ever exposed. A bird fooling around for nectar could be more effective as a wrecker than a pollinator. Also Poellnitzia does not occur in the Karoo as this area is generally recognised. It is limited to the area south and west of Robertson which in fairly recent local usage, has come to be called the Worcester / Robertson Karoo.
Another interesting comment in Dorothy Minor’s report is in respect of white limestone. Your limestones are of marine origin and predominantly calcium carbonate. Our limestones are arid zone accumulations of predominantly calcium sulphate – calcrete. These tend to be yellowish, so if Derek Tribble’s slides showed white, it is more probable that the white was quartz?
I would like to answer Kevin Belmonte’s query on Haworthia work positively, but I am afraid that probably only Gideon Smith at Potchefstroom is in touch with both Haworthia and science. He also knows how suspicious and untrusting I am. There are a host of problems which I have commented on in my publication. The Transvaal will probably only yield new information on the relationship between H. koelmaniorum and H. limifolia. It is overall unlikely that new species will be discovered, but certainly there is limitless room for widening of perceptions about the recognised species, many known odd collections, and how they are related. I do not actually understand though why Kevin asks the question or what he expects as an answer. Does he want more names, or more controversy, or what? Robert Kent in 1991 becomes the first person to recognise that there are major problems in the Scott vs Bayer concepts of H. arachnoidea, H. setata and H. herbacea. This is a problem which I wrote about in Excelsa (1986); and if anyone even read that (I wonder if Robert did) I wonder who made anything out of it or who wants to see any scratching about with nomenclature. Taxonomy is even in disrepute among botanists themselves because of constant name changes and uncertainty of identifications. One could easily foam at the mouth about this and even some taxonomists do. I have a long manuscript on new names for H. pumila and H. minima (necessitated by a string of faulty reasoning by people who should have known better). I just do not have the technical skills, or insensitivity, to trip the light fantastic with that issue. I could be less than a telephone call away from someone about to do so, and I can guarantee that my telephone will not ring. Mark those words please. One of my biggest known mistakes is to link an old illustration of ‘atrovirens’ with my concept of ‘herbacea’. The implications are too dreadful to contemplate. Further dabbling in Haworthia will surely provide new names, with a good prospect for fewer rather than more species. Is this what Kevin would like to see?
And then there is the problem of communication. People and persons have their own secret worlds as suggested above. A single and small example. An overseas collector comes to South Africa and in his devious wanderings illegally collects something which throws light on a critical taxonomic problem (if such things ever are critical). What does he do with this? Does he write to imply how stupid I am not to know about it? How astute he was to have found it even if he does not know what it means, or what? Are the South African collectors any better? They are mostly happy with their own discoveries and are not particularly interested in a ‘spearhead’ which does anything but inform them of localities, or provide items which they would like to possess. But forgive me please, there are wonderful people out there and I am not fingering anyone.
David Cumming makes an interesting comment on H. correcta and H. emelyae but it is not clear at all what he means by a ‘picta type’ plant when he has already suggested ‘H. emelyae (H. picta)’. This is going backwards to a point where each writer has to attach a name to the object of his own specific and possibly limited experience. Many leaf surface pictures have already been taken in Haworthia and I challenge David, when next he comes to South Africa, to make a sensible study of them. The correcta / emelyae debate is quite senseless unless one considers a much wider range of collections and has a less gullible attitude to technical sophistry and concommitant obfuscation.
H. comptoniana has been for me the easiest of all the haworthias to pollinate and grow from seed, so David’s negative experience is interesting. I would actually assume that most plants in cultivation come from seed that I produced – except for the disparaging remarks of the culprit before the court at Laingsburg in connection with illegal collecting of H. wittebergensis and H. lockwoodii. This man suggested that I was quite stupid to regard H. comptoniana as rare (why therefore should he be facing prosecution?) when he had already dug out thousands. This gives the lie to that curious phenomenon of the collector who needs only to know more than the ‘expert’. I do not fully understand what David writes of self-pollination and parthenogenesis, nor why ‘parthenogenesis’ (one of the forms of apomixis?) should lead to abnormal flowers. Perhaps he can explain this for me.
For Robert Kent I should just like to comment further that the flowers of H. pehlemanniae collected by me at the type locality, were absolutely indistinguishable from the flowers of H. nortieri var. globosiflora from Doringbos (Clanwilliam). You can guess what my opinion is, and the conflict that this causes by virtue of locality. A conflict which has since been greatly diminished by Kobus Venter’s extension of the known ranges of this one element. The type locality of pehlemanniae is incidentally surrounded by populations of the Laingsburg form of arachnoidea, which Robert mentions. Robert has excluded H. batteniae from a discussion which is going to touch my concept of blackbeardiana. Does he think he can really do that? Good heavens! Can he also, as he is talking about ‘closely related’, exclude H. unicolor from a discussion which includes H. arachnoidea? Wow! and H. xiphiophylla too. Fascinating stuff.
This brings me finally to the point in Gideon Smith’s article on H. glabrata and the little bit of accidental nonsense about this species (if it is a species at all) belonging in the sub-genus Margaritiferae (!). Good friend as Gideon is, we have discussed that problem between us but without really resolving it. He says on p. 25 of Haworthiad, ‘many species names exist which cannot be linked to natural populations’. I contend that at least for the benefit of people in general, he could have said how many according to either Bayer, Scott or Pilbeam. In fact all three authors expressed I am sure the same simple aim – for heavens sake lets make things simpler than they are. My whole object was to come down to names that could be connected to natural populations. There is a lot of difference between the specific statement ‘one’ and the vague statement ‘many’. How many systems of classification can you possibly sustain at the same time? So I have only bad news for Kevin. Things are bad enough as Robert’s enforced eggdance with names indicates. If what I gather is happening in the genus Aloe is also going to be the fate of Haworthia, then you really are going to have problems. Do not bluff yourselves that any ‘guru’ is going to appear to throw a brighter light on an already difficult group. John Rourke once quoted to me ‘The ship of many a taxonomist has been wrecked on the rocks of the Liliaceae’. That is a story which can be embroidered on infinitely but all of my publications have had this awful fate closely in mind. If my ship has indeed sunk, there is quite enough wreckage around to singularly warn other seafarers. On the other hand it may be worth a double check to see if maybe that ship has not a very safe anchorage of its own. OK, perhaps waiting for a pilot boat if you insist. I do have a manuscript in my files entitled ‘Haworthia – where do we go from here’, which closes with a warning to writers to check their navigation policy and equipment. It is not published because it hurts people and therefore it hurts me. I read this article of my own at regular intervals and do not mind if the following is directed back at me. My experience suggests that there is an unfortunate urge to write, which often grossly exceeds the urge, or even the capacity, to read and comprehend. But please, let no one think there is any malice or ill will in these words of mine. It has seemed to me over the years that Haworthia may breed a contempt for the minds and skills of others. I think Haworthiad proves that this is not so and I hope that readers will accept that I would like to be a part of this constructive community.
From Bruce Bayer dated 6th August 1991
Really I cannot let Robert Kent’s ‘Part 9’ go by without some straightforward and cheerful comment. He has arrived at a point which I anticipated in my letter of 7th July. If anyone wants to confound the issue in Haworthia he really does not have to try so very hard. The effort to put it all back straight again is a job for more than the King’s men. Robert has been dancing lightly on eggs until now a few more have broken, and he seems to be stomping on the rest in grand frustration. Science rests on an ethos (Philip, 1991) of universalism, communality, disinterestedness, and organised scepticism. I emphasise these last two points because this is where we most often fail. The very last is where most scientists particularly fail. Scepticism requires that the scientist accepts nothing on trust, but this does not give him free licence to scoff at all and sundry nor at any pronouncements that they make. Organised scepticism requires a discipline of its own based on good discrimination and an allowance that anything might be true until it can be proved otherwise. The layman makes the grand mistake of replacing this organised scepticism with a mistrust born of ignorance and misunderstanding.
I thus really want to add something about how many fairies can dance on the head of a pin. Firstly you should only ask a question like that if you are organisedly sceptical about fairies. If you do not give any credence to the possible existence of fairies then don’t ask silly questions. Secondly, if you do know anything (or can imagine anything at all) about fairies, you will also know (or be able to imagine) that all the fairies in creation could dance on the head of a pin. Even if you specified sequentially or simultaneously. I repeat, there is nothing different about Haworthia. If people collected Welwitschia or Ginkgo, there would be the same amount of bellyaching about the nomenclature. The best place to find fault is thus in introspection.
So Robert, please refer to the inside pages of the Haworthia Handbook (not just the title on the spine) and read the various pieces on H. aranea, in an organisedly sceptical way. The fact is that I see H. aranea as occupying an uncomfortable middle place between H. bolusii and H. arachnoidea. Must I apologise for this?
Why do I feel compelled to explain that I did not create the genus nor am I in any way responsible for the fact that it is fairly difficult to isolate and name species in the way that you / we would like to do?
Also I do not know who your resident critic and expert is, so may I guess what you mean by the brackets?
Expert:
Spelt: ekspurt.
Pronounced: ‘cl’ as in cloud, ‘own’ as in town.
Defined: …someone with all the answers but too busy to tell anyone what they are, or
…a crafty device to devolve responsibility for ignorance to an undisclosed third party.
I think this guru of yours should be aware that the problems of colour are pretty well understood in the botanical context. There is a very good colour chart (Royal Horticultural…) that should be used when using colour as a taxonomic criterion, and which takes colour out of the realm of pure subjectivity. The fact that I did not use it is because I did not have this available when I needed it and I have my own regrets about that.
Those overworked inverted commas again appear concerning blackbeardiana. (Now, where did I read that fascinating bit on the use of punctuation’s etc.). Should I have invented some evidence to ‘clearly separate’ this from bolusii? Did I ‘clearly separate’ bolusii from cooperi apart from the level at which the names were used? Is there someone who can do this? Robert has left out batteniae from his discussion and I was a little breathless waiting to see how and where he was going to bring that one into his discussion. Conveniently he left it out.
For xiphiophylla, I wrote ‘short well spaced marginal teeth’ and ‘long and slender leaves’. Who left ‘leaves’ out? There is also reference to colour. I do not know any arachnoidea population with long slender leaves as in the original illustration of xiphiophylla, and I know only the Tradouw Pass population of arachnoidea which is generally light green. I used the ‘bright’ green for xiphiophylla and it would be useful to check this colour out using a colour chart. There is a very clear warning about anomalous populations which confuse the issue. Gosh! Robert, my dictionary says of anomalous – ‘deviating from the normal or usual order, type etc.’ This is what I considered confused the picture in the case of xiphiophylla, and the collections and records that do so are deposited in the Compton Herbarium. They do not fit comfortably in a book. Prof. Schelpe used to say that taxonomy was easy if you had little enough material, so perhaps you should count your experience in your favour? If anyone else thinks I invented a vocabulary for some hidden motive of my own then drop the handbook in a dustbin, put up a sign ‘no speaka da eengleesh’ and write a book in the language and idiom of your own manufacture. The dictionary is also a fairly useful source for pronunciation, Xiphiophylla – zifi’o’fila. I think it is a little calumnious to suggest that Col. Scott and myself should have added glossaries of the English language and guides to pronunciation – apologies from both of us. It seems that when one gets frustrated by incapacity to unravel the relationships in Haworthia, one tends to look to some outside cat to kick? Isn’t the degree of frustration perhaps inversely related to an understanding of the task?
Just to explain some other small idiosinkrisees of the inglish langwidge. Amerikins pronowns z as ‘zee’ with z as in ‘zoo’. The inglish say z as in ‘zed’ but pronowns it ‘zee’ as in ‘zeal’; and x at the beginning of a wurd as z as in ‘zee’. Hence ‘xenon’ pronownst ‘zenon’ as opposed to ‘exon’ pronownst ‘ekson’. And ‘konfewdjin’ pronownst ‘kayos’.
Kindest regards
________________________
Ref.: Philip, J.R. 1991. ‘Soils, natural science and models’, Soil Science, 151(1):91-98.
Haworthiad,
Volume 6 (Issue 1), October 1991, pp.11-17.
HARRY MAYS’ ENIGMA
by Bruce Bayer
Paarl, SA.
I wonder if I can throw any light on the problems referred to in Harry Mays ‘The enigma of H. arachnoidea’ (Haworthiad 9(4):18-21) and in ‘Letters to the editor’ (Haworthiad 10:58-60)?
In the New Haworthia Handbook, p.6, I wrote:– “Four of Oldenland’s ‘aloes’ are now placed in Haworthia, they are: ‘23 …Aloe africana arachnoidea (Commelin, fig.27) now H. arachnoidea (L.) Duval, although this name has not been previously associated with any field population. It is considered that the name is linked with H. setata Haw.” (note: this opinion did not originate with Bayer as Harry Mays correctly concludes). Accordingly H. setata is placed in my synonymy of H. arachnoidea.
Scott had his discussion of H. arachnoidea published in the C&SJ (US) 49:205-208 (1977) where he assumed that, in using that name, we were talking about the same species. He in fact used arachnoidea for what I call H. herbacea, and this is indicated in the synonymy of H. herbacea in my Handbook. In his book he correctly places my concept of H. arachnoidea (which part I cannot say) in his synonymy of his H. setata; but he overlooks my H. herbacea in the synonymy for his version of H. arachnoidea. He also said of H. herbacea Bayer (H. arachnoidea sensu Scott) “its nearest relative is H. tenera von Poelln.” and he says of H. arachnoidea sensu Bayer (H. setata sensu Scott), “I cannot agree with Bayer that it is almost impossible to define the species…” but over the page “It was also found that the species was very variable …it is quite impossible to state where one variety ends and the next begins.” He did not appreciate that we were talking about the same species. Thus I did not reduce H. setata to a variety of H. arachnoidea. I made the two names synonymous but still retained the two species H. arachnoidea (H. setata of Scott) and H. herbacea (H. arachnoidea of Scott).
I would like to ask readers to take Scott’s table setting out the features of his H. arachnoidea and H. setata and add a third column for fig. 27 of Commelin. They will find that the Commelin illustration allows no measure of sizes nor texture and gives no worthwhile indication of lines or spots on the leaves. In addition the number of flowers in total, and the number open, actually incline heavily to Scott’s column for H. setata. Please consider carefully what the bud and flowers are really like in the species to which Scott applies the name arachnoidea.
I am not an expert on typification and readers may also be as ignorant of the procedures and rules governing this topic. The fact is that I avoided choosing types and cited instead representative specimens as the authoritative reference to my application of names. I did so because confusion in Haworthia really stems from this problem of really knowing what authors refer to when they use botanical names. I used the name arachnoidea in the way in which I perceived that it was currently and historically applied. Col. Scott did venture onto the quicksand of typification and in respect of his use of arachnoidea he may in fact be reasonably right. The original illustration does in fact seem to show mottling of the leaves which my arachnoidea does not have. My disagreement stems however from the weak argument supporting his choice and his departure from current usage, which is perhaps not a valid argument. However, my decisions are often intuitive and influenced by broader unexpressed perceptions. So if you take another illustration viz. Botanical Magazine t.1417, which is that of Aloe arachnoidea var. translucens Haw. (Ker Gawler), you will find that Col. Scott has used this illustration to typify his version of Haworthia translucens. What thoroughly aggravates the matter is that this version of translucens is applied to “specimens which I have collected in the hills around Matjesfontein in the Laingsburg district” (Scott’s revision). In terms of this reported location it can only be one of three species viz. H. arachnoidea (H. setata sensu Scott), H. pehlemanniae or H. archeri (H. marumiana sensu Scott). I do not think anyone can claim to have ever collected anything relating to H. tenera sensu Scott in that area.
I think my ‘irritation’ with the whole affair is that an attempt has been made to tie a name down contrary to general usage on a flawed, incomplete argument, and at the same time important citation has been omitted. Readers must know that the name arachnoidea may have been incorrectly applied by myself and I hope that there is some satisfactory solution.
In my opinion Derek Tribble understates the case and makes more nonsense of nonsense when he writes – “This all hinges on the interpretation of the picture.” Scott’s and my views are not remotely close when it comes to relationships. I know the Robertson Karoo fairly well and I have never ever seen any plant that resembles a hybrid between (reverting to my application of the names) H. arachnoidea and H. herbacea. I do not know how to express politely my opinion on the suggested relationship of H. herbacea with H. translucens var. minima (=tenera v. Poelln.) rather than H. reticulata.
Haworthiad,
Volume 10 (Issue 4), October 1996, pp.130-132.
A MISCELLANY
by Bruce Bayer
1. I have discussed the possibility of rewriting and revising the Haworthia Handbook to bring it up to date. This will be done together with Steven Hammer, Kobus Venter and John Trager, if I have the courage, fortitude and endurance to see the project through! Perhaps members would like to express their views about a new book and what they would like to see?
I have been in a kind of self-imposed exile for many years in which there was no intention to again emerge. Now I feel I am being forced out by a will which is not quite my own. What does worry me in the process of starting to revise my Handbook is that Haworthia fans will expect me to draw lines which I could not do in the first place. I do not know if I can make any greater contribution than before and in trying to arrive at a better order I could perhaps turn back the clock and make changes that confound more than inform. In reading through all Kobus Venter’s copies of Haworthiad since 1987 it is apparent that there are a lot of people out there who know a lot about haworthias.
Whatever adverse things people say about classification and names, these are the essence of communication about our plants and I have always wanted names for the sake of knowing what I have before me and how the different things relate to one another. In looking at all the comment and the new collections (including those puzzles which I could never resolve) I do not actually require much change to satisfy myself – or else I do not see evidence convincing enough to say there is a better option. H. correcta sensu Scott will become bayeri Hammer and Venter. If names are the big ego thing they are claimed to be, I am pleased that this is a two-pronged honour which also highlights one of my biggest oversights. I would like to prepare Haworthia lovers for some re-arrangement and some name changes. I am not sure to what extent the conflicting schemes of Col. Scott affect the scene but whatever reconciliation takes place, there is going to be some re-arrangement and name changes. I do not know, but I would wish the end product to be a tribute to plants and people rather than just another stirring stick.
People write about their favourite plants and they are nearly all my favourites including all haworthias. My greatest favourite does not even have a recognised name any more – it is Haworthia coarctata forma chalwinii and it occurs around the Blaauwkrantz Pass east of Grahamstown. It is my favourite because it grew for 4 years in a pot on the verandah of our home at Komgha in the Eastern Cape. The military order of the vertical and two lateral opposing parastichies of stumpy, compacted leaves and the rows of bright white tubercles converging on the incurving leaf points, against a backdrop of dusky greeny brown, still fills me with a sense of wonder 50 years on (I think I must scratch that name out again!).
2. Astroloba bicarinata is treated by Reinecke as Astroworthia skinneri – a natural hybrid of Astroloba muricata (not muiricata) and H. pumila. The plant illustrated, Vol. 10:52, is in my opinion A. egregia (now in A. bullulata).
3. Klaasvoogds, Vol. 10:57-58, is a railway siding between Ashton and Robertson, and Sheilam Nursery is situated a little to the north. The area is sadly now mostly farmland and what natural vegetation remains is on the foothill of the Langeberg Mts. on the well known Worcester fault line. I say sadly because in 1969 large areas were still fairly pristine thickets of Euclea, Rhus, Putterlickia etc. Some of the land was put usefully under irrigation, but most of it is erratically put to wheat. It is so marginal that these fields stand for most of the time under Atriplex inflata, Galenia africana, Inula graveolens and Athanasia trifurcata and the likes. The vegetation there would be Valley Bushveld on the flats and fynbos in the mountains. I cannot think of any species peculiar to the area but do know that H. magnifica vars. notabilis and maraisii would be listed as ex Klaasvoogds.
4. I saw Col. Scott’s letter concerning H. reddii, Haworthiad 9(4)28. It is very difficult to know with Col. Scott how he arrives at certain views. If you will refer to my Handbook you will see that I refer to the same population at Klipplaat, north-east Cathcart (Waterdown Dam). I surmise as Kobus Venter probably did too, that Reddi and Scott went to look specifically for that population. Neither Kobus nor I have any problems with the application of a name, but it would be nice to really know that Scott’s interpretation of relationship was original. And we both have difficulty with some of the mumbo-jumbo that goes with it e.g. “The variations observed at the type locality are possibly due to the aggregate of surrounding conditions” or “…this together with other floral differences…” which are unspecified – but I would like it to be understood that I perceive some ‘mumbo-jumbo’ in my own comments too. If as we think (and a very old article of mine in Aloe will show that we have good reason) this originality is not so, then I think Kobus is justified in propagating the view that the concept of reddii is not new or different. Both Kobus and I are trying to view species as fairly substantial elements which have range (i.e. distribution) as well as population variation, but there is nothing at all to rule how or when species ranks should be used. At the time I commented on the Waterdown plants there was some doubt about the existence, whereabouts and whatever of H. batesiana. Since that time there have been any number of collections which fairly conclusively support its inclusion in H. marumiana. There is, so far as I know, still nothing to show that marumiana comes far enough east to support speculation of linkage with cymbiformis via reddii. The area north-west of Cathcart to Tarkastad has not been fine-combed by any collector as alleged and it probably would be better regarded as an under-collected region. Furthermore, the distance from Cathcart to Tarkastad is considerably less than Tarkastad to Beaufort West and Prince Albert (at the western known limits of marumiana). There are plants in the upper Kei collected by Peter Bruyns which may strengthen the view that reddii is associated with cymbiformis. In which case it may be sensible to consider it with the var. lepida. My inclination is to put it with marumiana. (Bill Jackson would fall off his chair laughing at how the name reddii has affected the price of a plant which a local nursery discards by the barrow load. God bless his sense of humour.)
5. Col. Scott’s letter re H. emelyae, Haworthiad 9(4):28, also cannot pass without comment. I referred to a note in G.G. Smith’s collection which indicated “beyond all reasonable doubt” that Mrs. le Roux had collected the plants she conveyed to Mrs. Ferguson from Vanwyksdorp and specifically “26 miles from Calitzdorp on the road to Vanwyksdorp.” These ‘Rooiberg emelyaes’ must be fairly ubiquitous in collections by now.
6. I really sympathise with the oft stated complaints about nomenclature, ranks, names etc. I also pontificate on the subject without much success or truth. We are trying to find a reliable means of communication and I believe Haworthiad has been so successful because Haworthia names are now in a fairly robust state whatever differences there are between authors. If pressed neither Col. Scott nor I believe that we know everything about Haworthia. We use words which fill space rather than carry precise information.
7. H. vlockii is a nom. nud. and is a species collected from on top of the Swartberg Mountains north-east of De Rust. It has also been collected by the same person, namely Jan Vlok, a very well known local conservation officer and naturalist, in Meiringspoort (type locality H. tenera var. major v. Poelln.). I referred to the collection by locality as H. emelyae simply for lack of ideas. It could well be one of von Poellnitz’s missing turgida vars., but I would not encourage anyone to try and rake up old loose names. It does remind one of both turgida (say Koks Peak) from high places and also maculata (say Audensberg) from high places.
8. H. hemicrypta is a manuscript name of mine for a plant from the dwarf fynbos along the eastern slopes of the Potberg. The plants are very hard to find as they are not proliferous and only the leaf tips are visible. Off-the-cuff it looks quite unique but if you take into consideration the collections at Kathoek, Luiperdskop and Karsriver, you have to conclude that they are western variants of H. variegata. I may recognize them in the new Handbook.
Haworthiad,
Volume 10 (Issue 4), October 1996, pp.132-135.
HAWORTHIA FLORIBUNDA – COMMENTS
by Bruce Bayer
I really appreciated the notes written by J.M. (Essie) Esterhuizen of Secunda and am pleased that there are observers of his kind. His article on this species (Haworthiad 10:3-5) is a little incomplete and I hope he will not mind these additional comments. There is also a small bit of confusion with respect to H. angustifolia. To make sense of Haworthia one has to stick to geographical realities. It just makes nonsense of the whole issue and obfuscates sensible discussion to mention the improbable if one does not also sensibly discount it. The important contenders are chloracantha and parksiana. This is not because Bayer says so. They are co-occurrent and thus there by geographic reality. No mention is made of the fact that the plants in the Gouritz Valley (south of Albertinia) are in all probability chloracantha. A population north of Albertinia, which I am sure Essie actually knows, is similar but includes forms which resemble parksiana. At Great Brak there is a form growing near to parksiana which we generally refer to as floribunda. I think this is what Essie is referring to although he only lists pygmaea as co-occurring and it is this that I believe may be chloracantha rather than floribunda. I think this also occurs east of Albertinia (Cooper siding) where the floribunda growing with argenteo-maculosa (which will be a pygmaea variant in the new dispensation) is also chloracantha. The question of ecotypic variation is a really vexing question and I will not be surprised if in this case we have a granite (subglauca) variant (across the river) east and a shale counterpart west, and that the real floribunda at Great Brak is parksiana. Similarly it would not surprise me either if variegata is the limestone equivalent of chloracantha. If one looks at the variants of variegata west of the Breede River this becomes more probable. Perhaps floribunda has arisen as the result of chloracantha meeting magnifica? Abrupt ecotypic variation is not that uncommon in Haworthia and I have seen this specifically in habdomadis changing to its var. inconfluens at Towerkop, Ladismith and in notabilis at Wolfkloof (Robertson) where a shale and a granite form face each other across the stream divide. Another interesting omission is the mention of floribunda north-west of Swellendam (which may have succumbed under exotic wattles) which has rather pointed leaves, and also the omission of sublimpidula v. Poelln. L. Malherbe (founder of Sheilam Nursery) actually told me exactly where he had collected this plant and I looked for it many times at the spot I thought he had described. Curiously he related it to a fence as though the fence was intrinsic to its taxonomic status. Unfortunately I misinterpreted what he said and it was only very much later that Dennis de Kock on my instigation found the place and the plants (growing with minima). The specimens he gave me grew to enormous proportions and include a glabrous version as well as a denticulate one with pointed leaves. It seems to me that his collection possibly has some affinity with the Luiperdskop variegata of Kobus Venter. I visited the Swellendam locality with Kobus and the plants in habitat are very small. While looking for them I had the huge cultivated plants in mind and may have missed the tiny things Kobus found. Plants of floribunda almost identical to those west of Riversdale occur in the Bontebok Park at Swellendam and also east at Buffeljachts.
Essie Esterhuizen also refers to the Bredasdorp magnifica with the curious twisted leaf tips. I have several times seen this magnifica especially from along the middle Breede where the leaf tip also tends to round and flattened.
This aspect of variation seems to puzzle us all and I wonder if it stems from the thinking paradigm of our time. We have all probably been taught something about Darwinian evolution and Mendelian inheritance. Have we come to think of genes as some kind of finitely numbered electronic on/off switches and shunts that send characters in a beautifully ordered way into sorting trays that we have only to put labels on? What if genes themselves are an infinite number of fairly diffuse things which like pumps, regulate volume and rate of flow? This would produce genetic turbulence and lead us into the unreal world of Chaos: Making a New Science (James Gleick). Clear cut-off points between species do occur but probably as the exceptions which prove the rule. My first Handbook was based on the unexpressed vision of what came to be called ‘genetic drift’. But it was not quite the same thing, as this implied only movement of generic material in space. My vision included ‘drift’ in time. This fits better into the idea of flow and turbulence.
Haworthiad,
Volume 11 (Issue 1), January 1997, pp.6-7.
OF HAWORTHIA STARKIANA AND OTHER CABBAGES AND CLAY-FOOTED KINGS
by Bruce Bayer
Paarl, SA.
Ingo Breuer makes a curious statement in Haworthiad 11:8(1997), that the classification of Haworthia has stagnated since my retirement and that serious studies by professional taxonomists have all but ceased. This statement carries with it the same misinformation that plagues the literature of Haworthia. The classification of Haworthia has done anything but stagnate and neither am I so naive and conceited to think that I am central to the point. I have watched with enormous interest how the pot has boiled and bubbled, and stirred up trouble. I never was a professional taxonomist and would not like to be considered one either. I am a simple ‘Hawfolk’ who pursues an ideal of truthfulness in everything I do and say (with mixed success unfortunately). A good deal of my writing was done in my own time and I never made any money from it, nor did my job give me any credit for it. My career would have suffered for it if my ambition had been to succeed in such a thing. Retirement is the wrong word to use as Haworthia was more of a hobby to me, and it still is. To say I have been driven to despair, or driven to silence, would be more apt perhaps, but also driven to introspection and self examination. Was I, and am I, truthful in what I wrote and in what I now write? This hope that a professional will solve the problems of classification in this genus is a myth that I would like to dispel for once and for all. If only I could. It is a ridiculous carrot that I have dangled before the ‘Hawfolk’ myself, so I recognise its false promise. That was in the days when I thought there was such a thing as a knight-in-shining-armour professional taxonomist. There are professional taxonomists and mostly they are good ones. They are also fallible human beings and they make mistakes. Some of their mistakes are in being too kind to pretenders who hope that expertise rubs off in physical proximity. The measure of a really good professional botanist is probably that he turns to the amateur for direction. The real danger I see is the amateur who turns to the professional botanist as mentor and uses that as his authority for any foolishness he perpetrates. Competence is not measured by qualification and neither is qualification a guarantee of competence. A qualification is only a formal educational step and true human values are not taught formally anywhere that I am aware of. Who of the kind ‘Hawfolk’ wrote that despite three books, the classification was still in a mess? The mess is because there are three books that the readers are unable to evaluate, and from painful experience the ‘professional botanists’ have not even tried to do. The honest ones know they cannot. They can look and see if the International Code has been kept in mind; very, very few could say without time and effort that it has been correctly applied. They can look at synonymy and check things like homotypic synonymy and chronology, commas and full stops, spelling, and all the thousand and one conventions of the trade; they may admire the pictures or comment on their focus; but they will unashamedly say “Look we do not know these things, we must accept your credentials”. I value the trust that local herbarium curators have put in me, because that is all that it really boils down to.
The problem of classification is intrinsic to the genus and this is only partly because few actually read what has been written, or can synthesise adequately what is said when they do. A professional botanist would probably also destroy the fun for the collector. It would be generous to say there are more than 40 real Haworthia species and these are indicated in ALOE 33:66(1996). The problem currently in Haworthia is that of hypothesis and what my work does. My early writing explains why I abandoned an hypothesis which distinguished between species on simple and straight morphological considerations. I pointed out that there were no sharp discontinuities between (most) species and that it was probable that separation may be true at one point in distribution range and not at another. Hence the hypothesis moved to the recognition of species based on continuities and discontinuities related to distribution and co-occurrence. An article I wrote on H. nitidula suggested that one could take similar single clones from four different species.
Haworthia starkiana provides an opportunity to air these problems and another opportunity to demonstrate that when Haworthia species are discussed, they have to be considered in terms of their distribution and co-occurrence with other species.
With this article is a distribution map which has to form the core of the discussion. Firstly, a distribution map, if we stay in the realm of fact, has to be based on documented herbarium record. This is actually true for any statement regarding classification too, but this is so abused that I am chary about even mentioning it. But it is important. I am one of the few people beyond the incredible Dr. Marge Courtenay-Latimer (who prepared and pressed and drew and annotated G.G. Smith’s collections), who bothered to make specimens. Col. Scott’s collecting numbers run to some 10,900. G.G. Smith only 7,587. Look at some of them. H. joeyae Scott 2,800, H. batteniae Scott 5,272, H. pringlei Scott 8,970 and H. venusta Scott 10,800. Why? When I wanted to describe limifolia var. gigantea in 1962, I thought it would be ridiculous to start my accession book on No. 1. The specimen is numbered Bayer 112!!! Unfortunately I doubt if there are as many as 20 herbarium specimens from Col. Scott’s record and one of the types when I looked for it was a letter promising a specimen. Von Poellnitz apparently handed his specimens over to the Dahlem Garden and if they photographed them he was lucky. When I asked them for material they could let me have a few pictures where Ingo Breuer has apparently been able to find a few more. Fortunately the war can be blamed for the non-existence of specimens. My own record is only about 6,500 and I suppose only about 1,500 are Haworthia but practically every one is represented in the herbarium. I know what those specimens do and do not say and I also became sensitive to the human effort that others had put into their specimens. It is a tedious, time consuming and hurtful activity. Unfortunately I just have not been as diligent as I should have been, pleased by the freedom to fly wild statements in the wind which no one can verify? Also a bit reluctant to remove plants from the field at all. After all the time I have spent making, arranging and rearranging these seemingly unrecognisable bits of dry compost to the casual observer and collector, it is a real humiliation to find the solution is not adequately documented. The realisations come when you are committed to placing specimens in a file, on a shelf, in a cabinet, with a written identification slip.
What has this got to do with Haworthia starkiana? Well it’s like this. Specimens do tell a story, but some botanists like to see species in the field too (some would rather not, but that makes my story too long). In the field you get a feel for the plants or from the plants. You see the habitat, the topography, the valleys and the hills. You see how different the plants are from each other and how they look in the shade as opposed to the sun. And you walk (assuming you have found them; and time, terrain and fitness permit), and you walk; this side of them to that side of them. You wonder why do they start here and end there, and you ponder about what else is there growing with it that you know and recognise. You also appreciate and value the fact that you can be there at all.
What is the relevance of this to H. starkiana and the distribution map? A problem is that despite the little pressing I have done, there is hardly a record for the species. If I add the little that there is to my own experience and material fed to me (mostly feeding is done to the amorphous wind and lost), it is evident that you cannot separate H. starkiana from H. scabra. You also cannot separate analysis of the problem from that of the genus as a whole. The problem becomes confounded when communication is disrupted by red-herrings which soil the trail. Col. Scott concluded that there were three species viz. H. starkiana, H. scabra and H. tuberculata. Three other names are also relevant viz. H. lateganiae, H. smitii and H. morrisiae. The distribution map shows that the problem is centred north and east of Oudtshoorn. North of Oudtshoorn is a river valley with pretty steep, rocky sides called Schoemanspoort. It is only about 10km long and the altitude varies from low to high, about 500 metres. The land alongside is privately owned and fenced and the terrain is very uncomfortable to traverse. It is very dissected, rocky and steep and consequently offers quite a spectrum of habitats. No one that I know has really put in more than a days hard effort in the area. My total time spent there is I suppose about four days which also included looking for other species. I would say three weeks of concentrated effort might be considered adequate to see what really occurs there in the line of Haworthia. It would be a sample only as I would estimate the limited target area to be about 400km sq.
At the south end of Schoemanspoort we find H. starkiana in its better known guise. A large smooth surfaced, yellow green, clump forming plant. The leaf arrangement varies from nearly trifarious to quinquefarious, with leaves falcate and rotate to erect, straight and spreading; it is the same as one gets across the range of the related species H. scabra (tuberculata sensu Scott). A very similar form occurs about 15km to the northeast where the plants are not as clump forming and vigorous. However, northwards in the valley there are several populations of what I would call H. scabra. Unfortunately I have not personally visited them all and the record does not properly reveal how they vary at all. There appears to be at least one population in which the leaves of the plants are dark green and scabrid as are the leaves of H. viscosa. This is what I refer to as H. scabra var. morrisiae. Col. Scott has an excellent photograph of what he assigns to H. scabra. The curious thing about this is the aside it provokes because if you refer to Scott (Cactus and Succulent Journal USA, 1980), there is a reference to this ‘species’ from 30km west of Oudtshoorn – the specimen is not mentioned in 1985 and nor does the record appear on the distribution map. Its altitude preference at 800-1000m also suggests that it may be an epiphytic variant or have aerial stems or something. A professional botanist would probably find a term for it. I would label it like this – H. scabra ⇆ starkiana. He gives its rough distribution in a triangle about Oudtshoorn, but there is no factual record of a thing like that except from Schoemanspoort, and both Kobus Venter and Peter Bruyns have brought me plants like that from there. Some of these have the same paler yellow-green colour of H. starkiana but the individual leaves may be smaller and also less rotund. H. lateganiae comes from further east about a place called Oudemuragie. It has longer, more slender, lean leaves which are intermediate in colour between the typical H. scabra and H. starkiana. I have seen several plants from that general area (in the trade and in private collections) which indicate that there is no clear distinction between this and H. scabra. Also relevant to the discussion is the topography, because there is a back road from north of Schoemanspoort to Oudemuragie. Every inch of it screams out to the explorer. Anyone could go in there and come out with something new. Kobus Venter has a wide range of specimens which go even beyond the apparent straightforward gradation I sketch here. There are a few habitat details which indicate that H. scabra occurs particularly in the cracks of more solid white quartz outcrops, but it is considerably more complicated than that. There is no adequate formal description in the literature for the vegetation there and because I have done so many surveys in the Oudtshoorn area I would not even bother to scrape out Acocks’ classic work. Even Col. Scott could say no more than that his H. scabra forms the component of different veld types. Please observe that I do not say this as ridicule. I came across many professionals in the natural sciences who have done and will do a lot worse than this charming man who rose very high in his professional field.
I have also omitted mention of H. smitii and in my opinion it is hardly relevant in terms of the variation covered by the brief preceding discussion. Kobus Venter has three clones from the garden of Mrs. Lategan. None of them look quite like the one I obtained from her in about 1972 (which is also represented, pressed and dried, in NBG) and which is now in the possession of Dr. Hayashi. Two American visitors are reported to have found this element along the back road I mention, but this has been proved to be untrue. The botanical facts of the report wait for a dead specimen to be entombed in the herbarium. Col. Scott reported collecting H. smitii at the Kamanassie Dam to the southeast of Oudtshoorn and directed me to his locality. No result. I must add here that plants do change quite dramatically. I grew them at the Karoo Garden in self made mixtures based on local sand (Table Mountain Sandstone) and local soil (Malmesbury Shales), and under fibre glass. They grew slowly and maintained their natural character. Most of those plants are still there and still fairly natural. However, there are some, which I cannot name offhand, which look far too big and fat. During my visit to the USA in 1982 it was apparent to me that conditions there were quite different and it was hard to see and recognise the plants I was familiar with at home. A slow grower like H. scabra is particularly sensitive to change and they can also be grown large and shiny in artificial mixtures.
For the Newer Haworthia Handbook I am recognising just the one species and the rest as varieties. Thus starkiana is a var. of H. scabra and lateganiae is also a variety of that species. I word it like this to try and circumvent the discussion about “I believe the division of species into subspecies, where necessary, is totally sufficient”. There is no common quantum scale by which you can find order in living systems. Not only is there the pie-in-the-sky connotation of understandable serried ranks, there is also the more ominous note of “where necessary”. If in reference to more serious matters, parliaments had to say “The death penalty is to be imposed, where necessary”, liberal minds would rise to revolt. Who is the person empowered to make the judgements? Is it self empowerment? For what else drives a person like myself to assume that they are knowledgeable enough to comment in the first place? The rank subspecies just means less-than-species. I used it originally for reasons which are very clear in my mind and a lot clearer than the unspecified “few technical matters”. I have tried to use and apply different ranks to the classification of insects as well as many genera of plant species. They do not work consistently and if any botanist claims they do, he either only thinks he is a botanist, or is inexperienced, or works with blinkers in a group where perchance it does. In Haworthia there seems to be just too much inconsistency to justify a range of categories and this is probably what Ingo means when he calls for only “subspecies”. I felt that this rank was just too formal for the way in which Haworthia is presented for wide appeal, and have used it in a new dispensation just for the venosa group.
There are other quite notable variants of H. scabra from particularly Meiringspoort (long slender leaves) and from Prince Alfred’s Pass area (sordida-like). However, these are not adequately known and recorded and this written statement is, in the way I view things, what the ‘Hawfolk’ should be happy to live with. Why I would plead for them to accept this statement is the unconsolidated, fragmentary mess that it causes in the herbarium if we do it any other way. Material from both places mentioned has been shown to me in the understandable and correct perception that they are new. If the ‘professional botanist’ is going to do his marvellous bit, he is having to cover the area shown on the distribution map a little more adequately than has been done. It looks easy from a map at this scale, and a better perspective is obtained from a 1:25,000 topographic map. ‘Professional’ implies cost and payment and so one can calculate if even a non third world country can afford to undertake such a man-to-moon mission.
I think perhaps I did not give enough credit to G.G. Smith and Dr. Courtenay-Latimer. I reflect on the time and effort I put into sorting out the physical record from the mess it was in, when actually they had already spent a vast amount of time bringing it to the point that they did. In retrospect somebody should have known what it took to do that onerous work and been able to guess at the competence and diligence required to do the same or better, or to tinker with it authoritatively. Keeping proper record and track of specimens to the point of citation is like swimming the channel with a concrete block around one’s neck. The unfortunate truth is that the block has to be taken as evidence that the swim has been accomplished.
Haworthiad,
Volume 11 (Issue 3), July 1997, pp.84-89.
AUTHORS
by the editor
It is by no means unusual for readers of journals to wonder what an author looks like and what his background is. If you take the view that what is expressed in an article is more important than who wrote it, these matters may not be of much importance to you, but if you believe that some information about authors is of added interest you may begin to ask questions and perhaps receive some confused and inaccurate, third-hand information. It is far better to have reliable information from the best possible source.
The name Bruce Bayer will be familiar to all members of the Haworthia Society but many will never have met him. His photograph, taken last year in South Africa, will be found on page 116 adjacent to photographs of an Haworthia which has been named after him. Bruce very kindly agreed to the publication of his photograph and he willingly responded to my request for information which could be published at the same time.
In his response, Bruce briefly mentions his sensitivity to computer screen emissions. Much time spent at the terminal earlier this year in connection with the Newer Haworthia Handbook, resulted in Bruce suffering a recurrence of the same condition that induced early retirement, and I am sure all members will wish to join me in expressing the hope that he has now fully recovered.
One point, which does not appear in the information Bruce sent, is that he can have a wry sense of humour. I remember receiving E-mail from him which was a jumble of codes and completely unintelligible. I sent Bruce one page so that he could appreciate my problem. His response is best summarised by saying that he felt that this was a scientific paper suitable for submission to Taxon!
We all hope that we shall be able to read many more informative and entertaining (and rebellious?) articles from Bruce Bayer in future issues of Haworthiad.
FACTUAL INFORMATION ABOUT BB
by Bruce Bayer
Paarl, SA.
I was born in Kwazulu (Natal) RSA in 1935 while my father was a magistrate in Namibia. My father was one of three brothers who were all very interested in plants. One brother was professor of Botany at the University of Natal. My own field activities date back to 1939 when the first plant I collected was Tridentea jucunda. I studied Agriculture at Pietermaritzburg between 1952 and 1956, majoring in Entomology, and then worked at the College of Agriculture at Cedara from 1957 to 1964. I completed my MSc with Noctuid moths as the study field. In 1965 I joined a commercial company as Technical Products Officer and from there went to Veterinary Products for 18 months. But my real interest was always plants and I fell into a post at the Karoo Garden rendered vacant by the untimely death of Roy Littlewood. I had been in touch with him for several years about Haworthia. I was considered unqualified and worked as a Botanical Assistant until the absence of any candidates of any kind to replace the retiring Curator (Frank Stayner), led to my default appointment as such in 1973. I left there in 1987 when my independent and rebellious spirit (I was still considered unqualified) could no longer stand an unwholesome logic and principle in the workplace. It was an ambience which I could not reconcile with the enjoyment of plants and purpose which had brought me there. I did not mind being underpaid while I was enjoying my job. I went back to the role of scientist in the Dept. of Agriculture where I worked as a research ecologist until 1992. The influence of the older second uncle was too strong. He was a nonconformist and rebel against bureaucracy and authoritarianism. So I retired early to follow my own private quest for a holy grail for which I am still looking. Actually too much time at a computer terminal burned the hole in my head a lot bigger, but nobody believes to this day that I am sensitive to computer screen emissions. I think my acquaintances must think me strange anyway. While I was at Cedara I corresponded with a farmer from the Northern Transvaal, Mr. Bill Riley, who was an avid Haworthia fanatic. He intimated that he thought we should do a revision of Haworthia, but like others, I don’t think he had much idea what it required in terms of time and trouble. I had been on a long trip in 1962 to northern Natal and to Swaziland to look for Haworthia limifolia, and that taught me a lot about looking for things which you cannot see from the window of a car.
My work at the Karoo Garden was initially the curation of the collections and I spent my three years working on haworthias and asclepiads. After that it was a mixed bag and I was lucky to have Pauline Perry working with me who became an authority on Eriospermum, Bulbinella and other geophytes. There was a lot of contact with a host of collectors, botanists and scientists such as Kare Bremer, Ulrich Meve, Heidi Hartmann, Peter Bruyns, Laurie Malherbe, Lloyd Schwegmann, Anthony Mitchell, Steven Hammer, Col. C.L. Scott, Masahiko Hayashi, Walter Wisura, Harry Hall, Ernst van Jaarsveld, Pauline Perry, Doreen Court, Gideon Smith, Jan Vlok, Ian Walters, David Cutler, Peter Brandham, Sherman Carlquist, Larry Leach, Del Wiens, Dr. R.A. Dyer, Dr. L.E. Codd, Prof. Cronquist and of course the botanists of the National Botanic Gardens itself. I was also lucky to meet many of the old guard like George Payne, Miss G. Blackbeard, Gordon King, P. Meiring, Mrs. Grant, Japie Dekenah, Dr. Courtenay-Latimer, A.J. Joubert, W.E. Armstrong and of course Frank Stayner. I spent particular time on groups like Aloe, Crassula, Euphorbia, Tylecodon, Asparagus, mesembs generally, asclepiads generally and Oxalis. The Bayer name actually was quite famous for a little while in names such as Protasparagus bayeri, Tylecodon bayeri, Anacampseros bayeriana, Huernia bayeri, Quaqua something var. bayeri, Euphorbia bayeri, Eriospermum bayeri, Gasteria brachyphylla var. bayeri, Namaquanula bruce-bayeri, plus at least two other as yet undescribed species. It is also associated with the descriptions of Protasparagus exsertus, Protasparagus mollis, Protasparagus graniticus, Brachystelma minima, Euphorbia mira, Otholobium incanum, Kedrostis ammophila, Senecio laticipes, several Haworthia species and a whole host of Oxalis species.
While I last revised the Handbook in 1976, I never relinquished my interest in a Haworthia. I just fell to silent contemplation and introverted enjoyment of these extraordinary plants. The stimulus to update the Handbook owes most to a request for a synopsis of the genus for Dr. Peter Goldblatt’s and Dr. John Manning’s revision of the book Plants of the Cape Flora; and to the enduring trust and faith of J.D. (Kobus) Venter who has shared my interest in Haworthia since 1985. How do I want to be seen and remembered? As an objective, truthful observer who discovered what the true mission of human existence really is, and who lived his life accordingly. Fat chance!
Haworthiad,
Volume 11 (Issue 4), October 1997, pp.104-106.
GRAVITATIONAL COLLAPSE AND BLACK HOLES IN HAWORTHIA
by Bruce Bayer
Paarl, SA.
I think Haworthia is a gremlin genus. Is it perhaps a black-hole that takes nothing in but easily lets nonsense out? In making the following comments I try to take into account how the black-hole affects me. I ask myself what causes this gravitational warp, because you cannot dabble in Haworthia and not know that you are a potential Haworth, Resende, Uitewaal, Smith, Baker, von Poellnitz, Scott, Bayer and/or Simple controversial Simon. As a holist, I have been tempted to ascribe “warp” to some sort of homeopathic, toxic ingredient in the plants themselves. However, the inescapable truth is that it lies in human weaknesses such as ego, ignorance, envy and other lesser virtues. These warp factors also influence this response to Haworthiad 11, No.1:–
1. Ingo Breuer’s article
1.1. Ingo writes of H. angustifolia fa. baylissii, it “does not require forma status”. His fig. 3 (Haworthiad 11:16) is labelled “from Oudekraal” and his fig. 4, “from type locality”. The first is apparently a plant from my own collection from the type locality of the second, which is the forma baylissii of Scott from Oudekraal. Peter Bruyns has also collected this latter “form” from Oudekraal. There is to my knowledge (based on Bayliss, van Jaarsveld, Bruyns and own shoe-leather) not a clear range of intermediates between this broad-leaved form and a more typical narrow-leaved version. Where does Ingo get this new information from and how can his opinion be verified? Bruyns’ collection is the most meaningful but has Ingo seen it and if so why does he not properly acknowledge it? By naming it as a species, Scott has made H. baylissii a factual and integral part of the history and understanding of the genus. I have kept the name at varietal level in the manuscript of the Newer Handbook for that reason – and further as a pointer and tool for the extension of ideas. Col. Scott presented an hypothesis and it cannot be dismissed summarily. I am not presuming innocence here either. The unanswered questions still are: what meaning does this broad-leaved form have? and is the population at Oudekraal perhaps indicative of a missing transition to H. zantneriana? The questions may never be solved satisfactorily and the name will be dropped in the same way that “uitewaaliana” and “poellnitziana” have been and will be. But they remain a part of the interesting story nevertheless.
1.2. Of pehlemanniae Ingo gives “reasons” (or at least he says he does) why it should be a variety of H. arachnoidea. H. gigas v. Poelln. did not come from between Ladismith and Laingsburg, but from between Ladismith and Calitzdorp and it is not necessarily the same ilk as the hard-spined plants from around Laingsburg. Ingo does not say what relevance this has to the status of pehlemanniae either. The tradition in botany has been to put floral ahead of vegetative characters. Here Ingo seems to think the floral resemblances (if identical is down-played) between globosiflora and pehlemanniae are less significant than the ill-defined vegetative similarities of arachnoidea and pehlemanniae. H. arachnoidea is a problem of some proportion and I do recognise there is a variant around Laingsburg (scabrispina) which co-occurs with pehlemanniae. To say the latter “should be given status as a subsp. of arachnoidea” on the basis of a non-argument, adding absolutely zilch to existing knowledge (in fact ignoring and losing information in the process) is unfortunate. It further only touches on the problem that if you start excising bits of arachnoidea do you know where you will end? Its easy, as Schelpe said, if you only have two or three collections to fiddle with.
1.3. H. aranea has the opaque darker-green leaves of the arachnoidea group and is continuous with that group. It has no continuity with the translucent and blue-green leaves of H. bolusii. Ingo adds nothing new about the bolusii/cooperi problem except to add an incorrect statement about var. blackbeardiana making no offsets. In his introductory comments he makes claims about all the (previously) unused morphological characters which he has considered, and then makes an incorrect statement like this. Ingo actually claims that his discussion takes into consideration the gamut of morphological characters as well as geographical locations. This is untrue, and obviously so from the discussion. A statement like this in the context of his article makes a mockery of the little work which has been done on the genus and perpetuates a myth about science. This myth is that somebody can be in the know for something the less educated or the more gullible should simply acknowledge as so. Nearly every bit of worthwhile modern literature is exposing the falseness of it. As a soft aside, there are forms of cooperi which can be claimed not to make offsets either. Like there are forms of marumiana (nigra, zantneriana and limifolia too) which do make stolons as opposed to forms that do not. I wish Ingo had been at the Aloe congress in Pretoria in August 1996 and listened to, and digested, my suggestion. This was that prospective Haworthia taxonomists should be required to first devastate the taxonomy of at least four other genera before that of Haworthia.
1.4. H. radula has no apparent discrete existence from that of H. attenuata. It was kept as a species because I had very little information to demonstrate otherwise, and Ingo again offers no new information to support a purely cosmetic change. Furthermore it remains an interesting variant. Gordon Rowley was critical of me for ignoring cultivars and here I am made to feel stupid for maintaining a real and unexplained phenomenon in the non-horticultural realm. Ironically the one collection I thought might provide a clue to the separate existence of H. radula (at whatever rank) has been chosen by Ingo as the neotype of H. attenuata in an exercise which I also think is a little unfortunate.
1.5. I do get concerned when commentators seem to assume some kind of mantle of hard accomplished omniscience. This is reflected in Ingo’s opinion about batesiana and marumiana, which he suggests is new. I left them separate because there was no substantial evidence to then lump them in the obvious way that Ingo now suggests. What is the sense of making changes which are simply another groundless statement of opinion and personal conviction (guesswork). What we need is evidence and new facts. If that evidence is there, which it now is (and some indeed was in published form), what is this provisional suggestion worth? It should be written in the context of already published opinion and supported by something new, however slight.
1.6. H. blackburniae/graminifolia. Ingo makes a vague and incorrect statement about their respective distribution ranges and that “intermediate forms are known”. Where are they and who are they known by? This kind of basis for opinion-making lies at the heart of the problems with Haworthia taxonomy. I refrained from making the same wild guess because I have spent a lot of time in the respective distribution ranges of the two species concerned and not found what I am guessing at.
1.7. H. coarctata/reinwardtii. Ingo’s comments here do me a thoroughly bad service. To say “the forms known today” suggests that he actually has discovered something unknown to even Smith. If Ingo was as familiar with the literature and lore of the genus as any aspiring expert/authority should be, he would have perceived that the problem within the species coarctata and reinwardtii has very little significance at all. The subspecies, varieties and forms within them are simply related to the communication process and the core of the matter is – is there any sense, for the audience with whom we are dealing, in lumping the two species or not? The unsubstantiated comments earlier about transitional forms is true for these two species – so what is the big deal in lumping blackburniae and graminifolia for which the statement in the herbarium record (if none other) is untrue, and keeping coarctata and reinwardtii (for which the statement is true), separate? Is Ingo unhappy about the four forms of reinwardtii which are taxonomic and material realities in a species which he can hardly profess to know any better than Resende did? Whatever the taxonomist does with a published name, does not erase that name from the record. Smith’s “olivacea” and “zebrina” will always be a part of the history of the genus and people interested in the species would probably like to see and acquire these variants which Smith thought distinctive enough to describe. It does not help here to say ‘Kaffirdrift’, and it is quite clear from the literature (apart from the three varieties from there which Smith described) why this is so. So reference to locality is not always adequate for the purposes of the ‘Hawfolk’. In my opinion I did not think that “baccata”, “musculina”, “fulva” etc. would be as notable. The var. greenii has substance in two populations and the plants are distinctive in the species. The variation adelaidensis has more substance but it is actually less distinctive than greenii. In reinwardtii, the fa olivacea has more substance than the fa zebrina, and they are both very distinctive. Quibbling about subspecies, varietal and forma ranking is pretentious nonsense.
1.8. H. cymbiformis/reddii. What does Ingo mean when he says “should be”, when even “could be” is a weak statement in the light of the discussion which precedes it. On what is his opinion based? His analysis leaves me breathless and I have been punched unfairly in the solar plexus like this before. Is there really a different set of criteria here than is the case of coarctata and reinwardtii. There is a major problem in definitively separating what is recognisable as cymbiformis, from gracilis, from cooperi and from mucronata; and here we have this apparently authoritative statement of the true condition within cymbiformis.
1.9. H. emelyae/multifolia. The comments are extremely weak; e.g. “I have seen lots of plants belonging to this taxon and I am convinced that two distinct species…”. Steven Hammer and Kobus Venter have fortunately sorted out the problem here – rationally.
1.10. H. fasciata. I do not know why the fibrous leaves in this species have never been used to separate it from attenuata. The rank ‘forma’ is just that, and the comments above refer. ‘browniana’ just happens to be a distinctive form which someone formally named. It has thus become a formal taxon and it is anyway within the “natural variability” of the species which the rank forma implies. It is an intrinsic part of the history of the genus and whether or not it deserved recognition is quite irrelevant. Dr. Hayashi incidentally maintains that the one population is not vegetatively derived.
1.11. H. floribunda. Ingo refers to Bayer (1976) but in what context is difficult to know. In 1976 I refer to populations north and south of Albertinia as chloracantha var. denticulifera and in 1982 (I do hope that there is not some kind of chronological priority attached to perceptions as there is to published names, that I am unaware of) I also specifically mention the Albertinia connection.
1.12. I must add one last comment here. Ingo Breuer’s written opinion of my classification of Haworthia leaves me unmoved as I do not think on the basis of the above, that it is a really competent one. His opinion is only worth as much as he truthfully knows and apparent in what he has written and I am not very impressed. The specimens in the Pretoria herbarium, those in the Bolus herbarium and those in the Compton herbarium are arranged according to my classification. The abridged account of the species in the Cape Flora will follow that arrangement too. A classification is an hypothesis built on a testable foundation of fact. A revision represents the current state of knowledge. That is going to change and hence a revision will again become necessary. My Newer Handbook represents another step and in its completion lie the foundations of the next step. Whether that step is backward or forward is the collective responsibility of your readers and others who ever come to consult the revised version. They should ensure that writers and aspirant taxonomists like Ingo and myself, apply reasonable standards of factualness, evidence, accuracy, competence, experience, literacy, disinterestedness, and organised scepticism to their work. They should also be sure they can measure these things and are fit to do so. I hope Haworthiad will take that responsibility seriously because it is, as an individual, a very difficult thing to do. If it appears that I have ever pretended to be more than a seeker after a truthful account of the genus, trying to separate what might have come from a car-boot sale, from what can be ascribed to more natural processes, my apology is unconditional. I am trying very hard to understand why we have made so little progress since the acrimony of 1947.
2. Stephen Holloway
Trying to sort out the nomenclature of H. minima is fairly easy (I suppose), but that of its bigger relative is actually the confusing “Historia maxima” of his which caught my eye. The facets of this puzzle are about as easy to follow as the legs of a demented millipede. I think there are some mis-steps in Stephen’s article but would hate to be asked to nail them down. There are five early illustrations of Commelin, Bradley and Dillenius about which most of the problem revolves. Two Commelin plates are t10 and t11 of 1703 – the first is the big job (pumila and margaritifera sensu Bayer and partly sensu Scott). The second and the others, and particularly Bradley (leaves less than 1 inch long), are H. minima. I think it is now generally accepted that the epithet margaritifera is typified by Commelin t10. However, Haworth’s Haworthia margaritifera is based on Bradley and is therefore a later synonym of H. minima and unavailable for a different species. After all the big guns have so befuddled this nomenclatural issue (as I wrote in the Nat. Cact. Succ. J. about 1976), I am just doing my own thing and am applying the name Haworthia maxima (Haw.) Duval. Haworthia pumila (Ait.) Duval is based on Boerhaave t130 and is thus synonymous with H. herbacea. (Note:– the rules of nomenclature change at regular intervals in accordance with the needs of the moment and you do not have to have much interest in plants to fiddle with them. My contact with botanists and taxonomists over a very long period also does not let my discomfort with the International Code faze me in the least. It is apparently an occupational hazard. The whole effort also becomes pretty wasted and senseless when it comes to be applied in a half-witted way.)
3. Lucio Russo
A very insightful letter and I think he may be right in his diagnosis of asepsis in the sense that he means of uninteresting and unexciting. It was the fresh candour and enthusiasm of Haworthiad and its members, and their complete lack of taxonomic pretension, that I too admired. More strength to the writing arm of Bill Jackson for great humour.
4. Essie Esterhuizen
Very good authoritative comment. Essie has appreciated that understanding Haworthia is not one or two or even several casual visits to the country, but a lot of hard footwork over a long period of time. He unfortunately misquotes one of my earliest publications and puts things out of context. I was actually shown three populations by P.L. Meiring himself at Drew where he said he collected H. poellnitziana, also roughly indicated to me by George Payne. One population (it was just one in about 1971 – there is one surviving plant at the time of writing) I simply omitted from my discussion because I still think it is/was of hybrids (there is more to this). It is of a second population that I wrote:– “indicate that H. poellnitziana may be of hybrid origin”. Essie starts his quote with ‘H. poellnitziana’, which is misleading. He finishes it with “can be regarded as variety of H. margaritifera” and leaves out “for the present”. The problem lay with the second population which I have never disputed as being very, very like H. minima if not H. minima itself. Most commentators only base their opinion on this second population which I introduced to cultivation. I retained the name for the record because I did not know what the right solution was and leaving the taxon there invites investigation. Unfortunately what mostly happens is mis-informed comment which adds absolutely nothing to what is already known and recorded in the literature or herbarium, and even ignores much of what there is. Guesswork and laboured elaborate opinion are built on new foundations of sand and the old substantial bits are left to erode away forgotten.
Essie also makes an interesting observation “Although it is often mentioned that H. minima grows under Renosterbos…”. The only time and place I have heard this mentioned is actually in Col. Scott’s book. I raise the point because the good ‘Hawfolk’ are inundated with inaccuracies. Renosterbosveld is a vegetation type in which the species Renosterbos is dominant. It is a weedy, invasive, indigenous species which invades disturbed areas and the plants are fairly short-lived. The veld-type is on the ecotone between Fynbos and Karoid vegetation and most of the Southern Cape species are probably represented in it. It is probably a poor mother- or nurse-plant for Haworthia which generally occur in stable rocky habitats where competition with other plants is reduced (shallow, rocky soils), but somewhere a representative of practically every relevant Haworthia species will be found under a Renosterbush.
The significance of H. poellnitziana, whatever its rank, is that it lies geographically where it does among both H. marginata and also H. pumila. The taxon surely, I ask, is not the one plant which Mr. X has in his collection, it also includes the historic record and facts which surround its conception. The funny thing about the whole issue is the significance of Col. Scott’s distribution map of his H. pumila and selected specimens. It suggests that he does not in fact distinguish between minima sensu Bayer and pumila sensu Bayer. If Ingo wants to make a proper contribution, he should toddle off to the herbarium at Amsterdam, find Uitewaal’s specimen of poellnitziana and substantially prove it to be one thing or the other – if the answer is indeed that simple.
The track record for ESM of leaf surfaces is poor and there is a warning attached to the use of sophisticated techniques. An apparently technical claim that this technique or something like “Palynological conclusions based on ESM and Atomic Force Microscopy” should not be taken at face value. There are indeed dangers in both approaches – the thumb-suck and the serious investigation – leading to the same nonsensical result. One can also go to a great deal of trouble to nail a name down in a nomenclaturally septic state and make a complete mess of its application.
Incidentally I have not seen the original Alida Withoos’ painting. Can anyone tell me if or why this is H. minima and not H. maxima?
Now there is some more irony here and I have to quote almost in full. Page 19, paragraph bottom right:– ‘it is very difficult to distinguish between this species (poellnitziana) and H. minima judging from plants seen in the Karoo Botanical Gardens at Worcester. Howard Gie wrote in Aloe 24 No. 1, “The plants were very impressive, but the visitors were not generally impressed with the status of these plants…” ’ – page break!. As an ordinary reader I simply assumed that over the page would read ‘…as a separate species from H. “minima” ’. But it does not. It reads “margaritifera”. Quite unwittingly it seems Essie has made the point that I wanted to make about there being a problem determining where it should actually belong. In essence, the ‘Hawfolk’ were not impressed by the plants as being either H. minima or H. maxima (pumila, margaritifera sensu Bayer 1976) and neither were their informed mentors able to agree. In addition it is not actually certain that what Essie saw is what Howard Gie and his group saw. Some plants were brought to the Karoo Garden from the Drew area which were assumed by the collectors to be aspirant ‘poellnitziana’ and may have even been labelled as such. My recording skills let me down there. I cannot begin to explain the ramification that Masahiko Hayashi brings to this discussion in seeking a connection between H. minima and an ‘attenuata’ complex which includes that species and H. fasciata.
The text of the Newer Handbook is written and there are indeed problems. There is a great deal of new information which unfortunately does not resolve the outstanding ones. It simply confirms that there are alternative solutions and that these are likely to have the same weaknesses that the current Handbook has. In fact my one fear is that I have made some changes which are not necessarily better solutions than the ones I offered before. What I do fear is some Don Quixote rushing in to offer other more senseless solutions with less attempted honesty and truthfulness, and with even more ignorance. There is a very big issue here which relates to the whole process of classification as a communication process. I was surprised to see an Abbey Garden (USA) catalogue where in it they refer to my handbook and imply that it is the reason for the continued confusion in Haworthia. The reason for the continued confusion is that there is just so little discriminant thought. Very bluntly, my opinion is that the confusion is in the mind of whoever wrote the words. I do find myself a little disturbed because I think those silent readers that Russo calls the ‘genuine Hawfolk’, are being and have been, led up the garden path by a bunch of frauds who really do not know an awful lot. It is time that some arbiter with integrity and sincerity came to the fore and brought some balance to the scene. This is unlikely to happen and the best solution is for the ‘Hawfolk’ to organise their own scepticism.
Haworthiad,
Volume 11 (Issue 4), October 1997, pp.119-125.
VARIATION IN H. CYMBIFORMIS AND H. MARAISII
Editor’s introduction
A little time ago, Bruce Bayer received a private letter from a well known American who has a large collection of haworthias. The letter dealt with variation and he wanted to know why more varieties had not been proposed for H. maraisii as Bruce was doing for H. cymbiformis (in the Newer Handbook). Long experience and a large collection was evidently the basis for the comments made by the American. Bruce presents the view that extensive and representative as the American’s collection undoubtedly is, it is but a small window on the real world of haworthias. Bruce tells me that he has always preferred to collect 3-10 clones to represent each population (if the vigour of the population allows) and does not like to comment unless he has seen and evaluated it in the field. Small samples and cultivated specimens can be treacherous, and populations have to be considered in their geographical and habitat context.
Bruce’s drafted response to this American’s comment on varieties is published below. The letter was sent as such to the correspondent and names have been omitted for two reasons. Firstly the letter was essentially private. Secondly the correspondent’s opinion was highly respected and Bruce did not wish to intimate anything to the contrary.
AN OPEN LETTER TO AN AMERICAN…
from Bruce Bayer
Dear ……
The seed I would have sent …… would have come from the first Sandkraal plants I saw, which is not the same locality Kobus took you to (although fairly close). I have no idea how it came to be assumed they were (which is also implicit in your letter). …… has turned up yet another Sandkraal population which is again “different”. The plants at “my” locality are pretty variable and include both rough and smooth. The name “Horn Farm” is not known to me. The Nigrini family owned Muiskraal Farm in 1969-72, and Sandkraal has been Van Wyk since that time. I have difficulty in trying to take the major–multifolia–emelyae question away from all the other vexing questions associated with it. It is interesting that Steven relates bayeri to pygmaea, as emelyae is probably the Karoo equivalent of magnifica.
Your question re “fashion” varieties for cymbiformis and not for maraisii, is an interesting if rather depressing one, both for its provocative use of words and for the difficulty in finding a mutually agreed point of departure. Perhaps you could have chosen a better example e.g. mirabilis, reticulata.
I have just written a seven-page, close-typed article on cymbiformis var. reddii and a similar one on “fundamentals”, to analyse the problem from the base up. The latter is in reaction to Ingo Breuer’s article in Haworthiad 11:36. We seem to be taking two steps forward and three back. Rather than repeat that all here, you will possibly see copies in due course. And then after reading my manuscript, …… still thinks that reddii belongs better with batesiana/marumiana. I have asked …… to have a critical look at the manuscript because he has the same problems of perception and reception in …… that I do in Haworthia.
If you look at cymbiformis, consider its distribution and population structure, you will find that the scale is quite different to that of maraisii, and I closed my last letter with that statement. The probability is that you may not know cymbiformis any better than you do maraisii. I can visit most of the known localities of the latter in about a week, and at the same time be confident that I have fairly adequately sampled (it remains a sample) the area. For cymbiformis I think this would take about six weeks and there would still be big uncovered and unexplored areas – reddii is a case in point. Just prior to the Handbook I started an article to discuss the variation in maraisii and never went on to finish it. The variation is generally one-population based and what I wrote somewhere or other is, that if you do recognise a variety, the result may be a conglomerate mess for the “typical” with no geographical coherence whatsoever. Therefore, I have urged that people do not take varieties too seriously, and have used them as a communication tool. From my point of view I have, and have cognitively tried to do so, treated maraisii and cymbiformis equitably. I am disappointed, but not surprised, if you find there is an inconsistency, if that is what you meant. Probably you just do not fundamentally agree with what I have said and still think that there is actually a simple rational way of organising Haworthia. Perhaps you simply do not follow my approach and line of argument. There are two varieties of maraisii (one described by me) both of which should say something meaningful (purposeful) and predictive. A part of my approach is to be not averse to persons resuscitating varietal names and there is nothing to stop you or anyone using von Poellnitz’s names. I, in fact, regard them as a part of the picture anyway although I seldom refer to them. In my recent writing I suggest, in essence, that if you in fact follow this approach to species (never mind varieties) you end up with a lot of names which mean absolutely nothing, except to the collector who has been tricky enough to have stayed close to the “taxonomist” concerned, and who would rather not know what has not been described. A great deal could be said and understood without involving a musical chairs of names.
I “fashioned” H. maraisii var. meiringii, but not one of the names in cymbiformis. In cymbiformis I have maintained incurvula for a reason, which is that it is a hanging question mark against the relationship between cymbiformis, gracilis and cooperi. I want to start an article to explain obtusa and I envisage one for transiens – the essence is that I am trying to explain what I think can be projected from a known sample to the general. On the other hand I suspect there is barely an audience. I am not trying to only classify what you may know, nor what I might know, but also that which we do not know. H. notabilis is a big departure (I feel I am back to square one) from the norm for maraisii, probably of the order of transiens, and I preferred not to elaborate here. However, look at the scale and the evidence. In 1976 there was probably the one locality cited and known by me for transiens – Prince Alfred’s Pass. For notabilis – two and perhaps three. Apart from the herbarium record I have only visited about 30 cymbiformis populations as against about 50 for maraisii. Because it is so easy and so proliferous in cultivation the former are well-represented in collections and the latter not. I may see more variation within cymbiformis var. obtusa than within maraisii.
…… has wanted me to recognise e.g. “pulcheloides” and I resist the temptation because I know of perhaps six other local variants of the same class, with great variation within populations. Interestingly a specimen/collection caught his eye which has spotting on the back of the leaves and he saw the relationship with paradoxa. It is not a new observation but it lies near the base of my hypothesis viz. that of reciprocal forms in different populations and also “species” [*]. Also bringing paradoxa into the equation means you have to consider a very great many more options. It creates a ripple effect and you are required to see what the implications are beyond that point. I do not claim that I am successful in doing this, but I also do not see evidence that many people go that far either. The dispassionate observer then confirms his view that there are in fact 34 species of Haworthia and quibbling about varieties is just nitpicking. If anyone thinks my classification obscures the obvious relation of major to magnifica or paradoxa or to maraisii, then I do not think they are playing the ball.
I regret that I suggested that flowering time was such a good isolationary mechanism and used it to identify pubescens. Somehow or other this is being projected as a last-resort, fail-safe or foolproof character. After major, paradoxa will come under the spotlight. If that is explained, the attention will jump to splendens and major will have been forgotten. We do not learn anything and keep going around in a circle. We answer one question to our satisfaction and ignore the new ones that the answer raises, or forget some of the assumptions under-lying it when we tackle the next problem. How do we come to an agreed stable starting-point and move progressively and cognitively from there? Without that we might as well just forget about the whole issue.
More or less I conclude that unless there is a more rational, impersonal and objective approach to classification there will always be this mish-mash of opinion. If each person is going to have a go from his own perspective, from what he has seen and from what he has read (and I can say that people do not read very well) there is not going to be any agreement and we will not move forward. Each of the three elements in that sentence will be influenced by the factor of “competence”. Instead it can be asked what is the basis of the classification available to us, does it have a working postulate that a person can test and build on, or does it need construction first. At the same time one can ask “Am I competent to do any of this” – and answer that honestly and correctly. You review the basis for the classification as it is expressed against the background of the literature, then you look at and collect the physical evidence, and then you report on it. That physical evidence has to be deposited in a public place where it is available as evidence and against which the conclusion can be tested. It becomes pretty senseless if we each use a different sample as it will certainly lead to different results. I do not believe (and perhaps you can help me here) that I have claimed anywhere that my classification is the end. However, I am repeatedly required to defend it against argument built on a different foundation, if founded at all. What actually is necessary now is a logical and rational examination of my hypothesis, or Scott’s for that matter (if you can recognise one there), and a proper and logical construction for that examination – not a series of ad hoc one-off guesses. One of the main objects of the ICBN and its rule of priority is that revisions are extensions of what has been done before, and not entirely new inventions. Contrary to what seems a popular belief, I am not so averse to other views if I can see that they have something substantial to rest upon. My tolerance and diffidence got strained when these opinions review less evidence than is available, confound it if they can, build more upon it than they should, and present nothing new in the process.
I am curious about your reaction to Ingo Breuer’s three articles in Haworthiad. Any fulmination on my part only undermines my own credibility. I cannot understand why the only flak (actually I was a bit encouraged in that Smith and Hilton-Taylor, on their own initiative provided a small bit) for some thorough untruth, comes from me. The silence is deafening? Where are you in this?
Regarding the …… plants. I am going to leave “aristata” as it is. I have very, very little faith in it but it is a useful exercise in pattern recognition or lack thereof, and it does leave a marker for someone to resolve. There will also always be someone in need of something to froth about. I also cite Verdun and Stonefountain Collections which I am pretty sure will prove to be part of the gracilis/cooperi explanation when it is one day resolved. Hybridisation and subsequent propagation does not, I think, necessarily produce great variability. …… usually brought back absolute scraps (sometimes he still does) and it has often been a battle to do anything with such dregs. It would surprise me if the …… collection was anything more substantial and if it even consisted of more than one clone. I cannot imagine what would have led me to part with it nor can I remember what I made of it at the time. Do you have a record other than just locality?
The Succulent Society branch visited Montagu on Saturday 31st May to look for an old Smith collection and newer ones by Bruyns and also myself. The plants raise the spectre of the arachnoidea/mucronata interaction and while …… does not seem to have much problem with it, I shrink at the prospect of trying to present an explanation on available evidence and speculating about something which we may not have enough evidence for. However, I do think it can be done. I would just be happier if it was fresher in my mind, if I could see some of the plants again in the field, and including some of those which are just dry specimens to me.
________________________
[*] I put species in inverted commas to indicate that it is an artificial construct in Haworthia built upon an historical framework, and structured with intent to provide a workable communication tool for interested students of the genus, which includes myself.
Haworthiad,
Volume 12 (Issue 1), January 1998, pp.16-19.
HAWORTHIAD 11.3 – BAYER’S PENNYWORTH
by Bruce Bayer
1. Mr. Stirling Baker re Haworthia magnifica
What plant did John Pilbeam illustrate? The plant(s) I illustrated (Handbook 1976, 1982) were collected by myself at the locality as understood and shown to me by Dekenah. Aloe will shortly publish an article dealing with the “role-players” in Haworthia and this will elaborate on the relation between H. turgida, H. retusa, and H. magnifica. It really is very difficult and I am engaged in an on-going, frustrating debate about how this all extends to other “species”. The news is not good. There is no single, simple solution but there are plants in the trade which are genuinely from the type-locality of H. magnifica, as well as a whole range of other material which impinges on the problem. It will probably be impossible to obtain a specimen of the type, but easily possible to obtain a typical specimen.
The role of geology and topography may be helpful in understanding all the variants and the problem a little better. H. magnifica is more closely associated with Witteberg series ferricretes and fine clays (white or ochre), whereas turgida is with either sandstones or shale embankments, and retusa with Bokkeveld shallow soils. But there is no definitive association here or between these three elements and a good many others. It is as difficult to generalise habitat data as it is to circumscribe or profile populations and species. However, the type locality for magnifica is ferricrete and H. retusa occurs in Bokkeveld shales closely to both north and west. If one were to examine the variants there, one would definitely find plants which resemble magnifica.
2. The editor re H. graminifolia
I collected this species with Len Newton and Gordon Rowley at the type locality in 1972. It is possible that all the plants presently in cultivation come from seedlings or offsets from these few plants. It has since been collected by myself nearby there, as well as at three other sites by Rodney Moffett, Peter Bruyns and Essie Esterhuizen. It does proliferate by slow offsets, but like H. blackburniae there are populations in which the plants apparently do not e.g. as reported in private communication by Esterhuizen for H. graminifolia north of Calitzdorp, and similarly by Bruyns and Venter for H. blackburniae in the Anysberg Mountain west of Ladismith. (Like Charles Glass I am reaching the conclusion that obscuring locality information even for very rare oddities is possibly counter-productive).
3. Dr. Colin Walker reviewing (?) new literature
He makes some interesting comments, particularly because they also fail under close scrutiny and thus comfortably comply with the general standard of cognitive thinking as applied to Haworthia. Par for the course. He refers to the works of myself and Col. Scott and uses the term “taxonomic rigour”. I wish he had brought some kind of “rigour” to his perception of the two works and to his comment, other than intellectual “-mortis”. Col. Scott may have claimed by title that his work was a “Revision”, and there is the “blindly optimistic” (Bruyns, Kew Bulletin 1987) blurb on the dust-cover which refers to the work as a “monograph” and definitive work. I am quite sure that Colin knows or should know what a “monograph” is as opposed to a revision. Perhaps he could elaborate on the hybrid term revisionary-monograph if it would serve any purpose at all. Which it would not. I hope the editor will in due course publish an article of mine which spells out my perception of the “revisionary” process. My work was called a “Handbook” and stated what its objective was. If I had had my way it would have been titled an “Illustrated Index…”. Complaints about the title have to be laid at the door of Prof. E.A.C.L.E. Schelpe (late Prof. of Botany, UCT and erstwhile taxonomist). Retrospectively trying to analyse the general myth about confusion in Haworthia, I have no doubt that reviewers and commentators are as much at fault as any errant authors and probably even more so.
There is a difference between saying something that is accurate, informative and important, and thinking that it is accurate, informative and important to say something. The commentators have a very important role in interpreting and evaluating publications on a peer review basis. The responsibility is enormous because the average reader is not in a position to do it himself, and cannot be expected to be. As a noted newspaper columnist (Mulholland, Sunday Times, Gauteng) pointed out, it is time journalists started writing for the readers and not to impress each other. Quote “Credibility is the key, and it comes from honest, factual, fair and balanced journalism”. So please come now.
I would like to point out most emphatically that very little of the difficulty in the naming of haworthias arises from typification and nomenclature. If anything, attempts to typify and meddle with nomenclature have produced and generated problems (H. pumila sensu Scott and perforce Bayer, and H. arachnoidea sensu Scott vs. H. herbacea sensu Bayer, are two cases in point). There are other much bigger problems. My work was to relate names to a rationally constructed hypothesis of the species in Haworthia. It was not claimed to be a revision although it was approached with due cognisance of the principles of taxonomy, nomenclature and priority in mind. What I essentially did was to organise, rationalise and contribute to the first real and essential comprehensive physical basis for a realistic revision. In the process I used names and very few of these I have used will be found to need change on the basis of typification. The ideals of nomenclatural consistency, stability and priority which, I presume, are what the Code is intended to serve, are engrained in my approach. The names were applied rigorously in terms of those principles and ideals and also in terms of the general and accustomed (tradition, culture and legacy of the literature) way in which the history of the genus has unfolded, if not fully to the letter of the law. As far as I am aware, von Poellnitz handed his specimens as living plants to the Berlin Dahlem garden and I remain sceptical that dried specimens ever were made. In many cases it is possible to trace names back to original collectors, localities and types. It is a tribute to von Poellnitz that there are so few problems in applying his names despite the poor herbarium record. For all the intellectual pretension about nomenclature and typification it has been really quite easy to maintain some kind of order. Where there is lack of order is in the thinking processes related to application of names, analysis and organisation of review, assessment and commentary. There has been a remarkable consistency in the way which names have been applied since the very first illustrations, and discord and confusion really dates from circa 1970. The reasons are obvious if one cares to look for them and I think Colin’s inaccurate comment is just another one of many failures to really do so.
Perhaps far more important than the code itself is to understand that it is actually trying to regulate principles of accuracy and honesty as they relate to nomenclature. What is the point if we circumvent and prostitute these same principles in everything else we do? Is there any other aspect of science which is so manacled by ritual, protocol and ceremony.
If Ingo Breuer considers my classification more appropriate it is no credit to me because it is simply the product of honest effort. The fact is that my classification is the only available one which is based on a comprehensive, documented herbarium collection; arranged according to a system derived from it, for it. There is nothing that suggests to me that Breuer has any credentials to make an assessment of my efforts and less that he can and will do any better. (My evidence is the three articles by him which have been published in Haworthiad, a manuscript which I have seen and a private communication which has yielded nothing of any consequence other than personal frustration). I know, as do many other thinking people, that better answers will need more information and that this will mostly come from the field.
A recent manuscript by Breuer dealing with arachnoidea and herbacea suggests that typification lay at the root of the problem of application of those names. This is just more of the baloney which confounds so much of the literature, and seems like a good excuse to leap into print. Breuer and Metzing do not seem to have been adequately familiar with that literature either (see Wijnands, 1985? and other references referred to below). There is, and was, no reason to doubt about how either Scott or myself arrived at or used the names. If any culpability is sought anywhere, it should be laid at the door of commentators and reviewers claiming to be knowledgeable enough to fulfil that role, and who have not performed accordingly.
Where Breuer and Metzing have now had a go at the nomenclature and typification, they have I regret done it from a point of ignorance. In trying to follow their typification for my Newer Handbook, I find that they have generated a whole lot of new problems by hair-brained choice of neotypes and epitypes. I find it improbable, and difficult to believe, that someone who can not write accurately for a hobbyist magazine, as indicated above, can do so for a prestigious technical journal. I find it very difficult indeed to take this Taxon article seriously. Colin Walker refers specifically to the application of the name H. margaritifera. This typification was actually corrected from H. pumila by Dr. Onno Wijnands in his book Botany of the Commelins (1983), who also typified H. arachnoidea (See also Wijnands, Succulenta 10:230, 1984). However, there is also a twist to the story in which Heath (Taxon 38:481, 1989) turned up Wijnands and suggested that both pumila and margaritifera were incorrect. (Additional articles relating to typification of Haworthia are Taxon 42:93, 1993; and Taxon 44:217, 1995).
What Heath says is “Doubtless article 26.1, concerning infraspecific autonyms, was not intended to cause instability and confusion at specific rank…” etc etc etc. Further quote “proposals like those concerning legitimacy, priority, validity and lectotypification should give cause for concern”. He need not worry as the rules already do cause both confusion and concern, and there are few botanists comfortable with them. Heath overlooked the candidacy of the name (the elite use the term “epithet”) maxima. Were the Hawfolk to read Heath’s article they would begin to understand that nomenclature is for the intellectual. Another interesting point is that professional scientists are required to produce articles in recognised journals at a given rate, or else. The result is that they feel required to say something whether it is necessary or not. They therefore are compelled to write for neither fellow scientist nor reader, but for survival. Nomenclature has become a professional activity virtually practised for its own sake. So much for scientific integrity. A similar situation arises in changing the status of taxa, e.g. varieties to subspecies. It is commonly suggested that people do so as the easiest way of ensuring a permanent memorial.
The use of the name H. pumila arose from the collaboration C.L. Scott and L.E. Codd. Here we had a case of the aspirant revisioner using the services of the professional taxonomist/systematist (as I warned in my recent article on H. starkiana). This combination does not work very well and my experience has been that the professional tends to assume that the enthusiast does actually know what he is talking about, and vice versa. (Dr. Wijnands acknowledges my assistance sic!)
Where Scott and Codd erred is that they did not collectively know and understand the elements involved in the argument. Breuer and Metzing seem to have made exactly the same collective mistake, each assuming the other is competent enough to make the contribution required of them. I also made the mistake of crediting Dr. Codd’s authority and in adopting their application of H. pumila. It has led me to ask repeatedly “Does the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature with all its convoluted ever changing rules, clauses, articles and whatever, require that you know something about the plants whose names you have the temerity and arrogance to fiddle with?” Having the literature is not the same thing as knowing it and being familiar with it. I have pointed out in several places that the nomenclature of H. pumila/margaritifera/maxima is by no means finalised and Breuer and Metzing have not done a complete job either. Ingo Breuer (Haworthiad 10:2)([Ed.]11(2):39) has shown that he knows very little indeed about that species (or indeed any others) and its relation to H. minima. The same can be said for Col. Scott on the basis of his distribution maps if nothing else. Neither should have ventured into either the taxonomy or the nomenclature of these species at their level of misinformation, ignorance and misunderstanding. One would expect the author of a review article to know the things mentioned above and write in that context. However, I suppose I should be grateful that he did not attempt to review the article on generic relations which appeared in Taxon 44:557, 1991.
I feel privileged to have known and spent so much time with Larry C. Leach and also with many other taxonomists. They have strengthened my opinion that the nomenclatural rules are unnecessarily complex and incomprehensible. While I have good reason to suspect that Larry Leach may have made some serious errors in his application of the Code, Dr. G. Smith wrote a fine obituary to Leach in which he states that Leach was one of the few taxonomists who was familiar with and able to, or even dared to question the “CODE”. Leach even propounded the informed opinion that the rules were manipulated and changed with the intention of producing a desired nomenclatural result. He actually regarded the Kew establishment as self-appointed Mafia-like guardians of the “CODE” and he waged an undeclared war on it. It takes an exceptional mind (apart from a reasonable understanding of the plants themselves) to apply the ICBN rules correctly and accurately. It also then takes an exceptional mind to bring organised scepticism to evaluating the product of the proceeds. I do not claim to have such a mind and object to pretension by anybody else that they do. I see no evidence that anybody with the requisite skills and knowledge of the genus Haworthia has ever come forward, and my opinion of the Taxon article is that my statement remains true.
Regretfully publication in a reputable journal like Taxon is not necessarily a measure of the “truth” and integrity of the work. It is also irresponsible to abandon scientific principle (organised scepticism) in the mistaken belief that the editor of the journal (Taxon or Haworthiad) should have done the work for you. I regret if there are any points at which my taxonomy and nomenclatures and formal accurate (note accurate) typification disagree. If they do, it is quite probable that Colin Walker’s faith in that Taxon publication will be found to be misplaced. All he has done for this reader is to confirm that appearance and procedure are more important than accurate product. Readers would be wholly mistaken to assume that he has done any serious thinking for them and I am frankly disappointed that this is what his “review” suggests. Readers should be able to read a review article as a source of insight and understanding and not as just another piece of poor journalism. Nitpicking about nomenclature at the same general low standard of cognitive, organised thought applied to Haworthia, makes it all incredibly difficult for the Hawfolk to know what to think. No wonder confusion prevails.
_______________
Footnote: I would like to add that there is evidence that the skull-numbing homeopathic, toxic ingredient which rubs off of even pages on which the name Haworthia is printed can be at least partially neutralised by oxalic acid. How one gets the afflicted to take the remedy is another matter.
4. Stephen Holloway – Physiological shade plants
The only comment I can make on this informative and considered article is on the section on “light transmission” and to the degree that it affects my perceptions. What the article excludes is mention of the capacity of the plants to adjust window opacity, and of the variability of surface translucence in plants even of the same species including H. truncata. I think it may be misleading to adopt the Krulik data as generally true for H. truncata and for Fenestraria, and is probably much less so for the former species than the latter. The quantitative information is also possibly only true for the circumstances specific to the investigation, and the specimens used by Krulik. It may be very instructive to relate variability of surface patterning and translucency in H. truncata to distribution of clear parenchyma and photosynthetic material. It would also be really good to know how colouration and pigmentation relate to translucency and growth habit viz. hypogean as opposed to surface growth and clumping, as in say H. cooperi vs H. cymbiformis, or H. turgida vs H. retusa.
One of the problems of biological research is to know how far to extrapolate research data. In my experience ecologists and cladists tend to view species as having a relatively “normal” (statistically) character and performance profile, with also a narrow range and low median. This perception rubs off on the layman. Examples: In discussing ecology one may correctly describe Themeda triandra as a climax grass of the Natal Mistbelt, which wholly excludes the same species growing successfully on a hot, north slope in a semi-desert, winter-rainfall zone. In talking of a common ancestor for Haworthia, aspirant evolutionists seem to think in terms of a simple circumscribable “species”, when in fact that “species” could have been even more variable and confounded than its descendants.
5. Bayer – new comment
In pondering about varieties and subspecies and also about my violent reaction to Breuer’s proposal for subspecies as the only infra-specific rank, I would like to add to many other comments I have made. The definition of species was at least until fairly recently really based on the zoological domain. Here the perception of habitat range was very important in the recognition of subspecies as was the consideration given to interbreeding. Plants are different. Range and transfer and movement of genetic material is quite different because plants are largely immobile. Variation patterns are different from that of animals and in my opinion subspecies is not a rank which has good general application. I have tried it and really do not feel comfortable with it.
6. Bayer – a review of alkaloids in Haworthia
I have several times wondered why no one has ever commented on the uses of Haworthia since they were first mentioned in a book of medicinal plants. So I consulted a rather abstruse tome entitled The Medicinal and Poisonous Plants of Wildest Africa written by Major Brandwick. Incredibly this is what it says:
“Plants of the genus Haworthia are widely regarded by indigenous tribes as highly potent herbals. They are widely grown in a motley assortment of containers from on the kitchen window sill to inside elaborate structures specific for the purpose. Strangely their medicinal and toxic properties are not actually taken into consideration and it is supposed that warding off lightning and more violent cataclysmic events is their only usefulness. Scientific research has revealed that the plants actually contain a series of powerful alkaloids called Hawtoxins which have subtle but profound affects on the central nervous system as well as on the psyche. The Hawtoxins have been observed to cause a condition diagnosed as egotriposis. This is because of the affect on the egotripic cells which are located at the base of the spine close to the Kundalini. Pressure on these cells induced by downward pressure on the butt releases a powerful euphoric effect and a feeling that one can attain immortality without further effort. Particularly notable is the suppression of any desire to know what any facts there are that relate to any issue, or what anyone else opines. Symptoms of intoxication include an enhanced acquisitiveness, literary diarrhoea and a belief that ones competence exceeds ones innate ability.
“The effect on the psyche is also odd. Sufferers are known to take egotripic books such as Bayer, Pilbeam and Scott, glue the pages and then sit on them. This is said to raise the consciousness by as much as 3cm and gives the illusion that the contents of the books are known and much, much, more too. The pages are glued otherwise the tendency to peep repeatedly at the pictures becomes a distraction.
“The Hawtoxins are thought to comprise several sub-lethal alkaloids:
| 1. | Isohaworthinein – taken in through thick skin only but it penetrates to the cognus in the brain where it interferes with the discriminatory process, sometimes depressing it totally. |
| 2. | Neohaworthinein – taken in telepathically and penetrates to the muddlery area of the brain where it makes it more so. |
| 3. | Pumiliomargaritiferein – (found in several diverse species depending on whose guess one accepts) taken in by vacant or dormant brain cells and destroys pattern recognition skills. It is thought this is because it may also affect the ocular nerve. |
| 4. | Arachnodein – a recent discovery, it comes to concentrate in the messianic urge hemisphere of the brain. This may be either on the left or right side depending on which half is vacant and available. The name of the toxin is derived from the curious fuzzy cobweb-like growth that develops around the nerve synapses. It produces uncontrollable excitation of the writing hand, and a desire to change the world by disturbing all the points of reference. |
“The prognosis for the infected is fortunately fairly good although all cases of poisoning unfailingly end in fatal attacks of death. Symptoms barely last for more than 40 years and severity seldom extends beyond 10-15 years. Very fortunately the public at large is generally immune and Hawtoxins thus appear to be specific to a limited genotype.”
Haworthiad,
Volume 12 (Issue 1), January 1998, pp.26-33.
HAWORTHIA CYMBIFORMIS VAR. REDDII (Scott) Bayer (in ms.) –
a test of an hypothesis – part 1
by M.B. Bayer,
with acknowledgement to P. V. Bruyns and J. D. Venter
The normal process for aspiring taxonomists is to determine what needs to be done that is not being done, and which attracts and interests them and so select a group to study. There are probably not many instances where different people have worked comfortably together to explore and resolve the taxonomy of any plant group, and it is unfortunate when a situation arises where individuals compete to provide a classification for a group of plants. Difficulties also arise when people set out to present a point of view without really and properly considering what has gone before. The objective of this article is to show that it should be possible to look rationally and objectively at a problem and produce a solution which can be taken forward in the same way.
I think it is understood in the taxonomic fraternity that one of the main aims of a classification is that it must presume to account for all of the plants in the group in question. A classification therefore can never be considered to be complete and is only an hypothesis based on what is known. For that which is at the time unknown, it should be assumptive and predictive. It is further necessary that the classification meets the needs of a general group of people who will use it. The nature of these needs is in a large part already expressed in the preceding attempts to classify the group and in the literature associated therewith. A classification is important in the way it allows of generalisation, extrapolation to hitherto unknown collections and for communication.
The test of the hypothesis contained in the classification is the subsequent successful identification of plants by means of the key provided and also by the incorporation of new data into the structure of the classification. It can also be tested by the ease with which people communicate about the components of the classification, and, of course, whether it comes to be generally accepted at all. The strongest and most practical test is its acceptance by curators of herbaria and the way it is used to store and retrieve data in an herbarium.
In the case of plants popular in horticulture and with the general public (such as orchids and succulents) there is often controversy over their classification. The reason for this controversy is that, because of their popularity with the general public, untrained and non-professional people are drawn into the process of classification and identification. Their only justification for this is their own enthusiasm and interest in the subject, which they feel generates new and previously unrecorded information, which they perceive a real need to express. It should be recognised that they do not necessarily make any more or fewer mistakes than professionals working on obscure groups or at levels of classification (or sophistication) beyond the reach and interest of the layman. There are also many cases where so-called “amateurs” have made contributions unsurpassed by professionals. It should also be noted that many classifications by professionals may very seldom come under any kind of practical and proper scrutiny because those plant groups do not attract the attention of anybody else. Errors, inconsistencies and absurdities consequently might remain undetected. The professional also goes to the outer limits of his intellect where he/she is just as error-prone as any other person operating at the extreme. Both classes of enthusiasts – the professional and the layman – need to draw on some other wisdom to know (probably) what is right and what is wrong.
One of the particular problems faced by both professional botanists and laymen in a popular group of plants, is the profusion of material that comes to be passed around in the horticultural trade without any information on its origin and frequently under the wrong name. This considerably confuses the picture and this confusion is difficult to dispel without reference to populations in the field.
A further problem, again experienced by anyone who does not have extensive experience in the field (and indeed of pattern recognition generally, and not only in living systems), is the quite extraordinary variability of taxa like Haworthia. The degree of variation is not consistent for species or for populations. In extreme cases, where vegetative propagation has occurred, there may indeed be virtually no variation (e.g. H. reinwardtii); and at the other extreme, hardly two clones in a population are identical. There are no quantum steps whereby categories like subspecies, varieties etc. have consistent and invariable connotation. Even the more fundamental and philosophical concept of the species becomes questionable.
Haworthia has been one case where conflicting views have produced a fair amount of difference of opinion and acrimony among authors, and subsequent confusion in the minds of the audience that need the classification to serve their interest. Nobody in the least familiar with Haworthia has any doubt that the territory to be covered for a study of the genus is unbelievably big. The nature of habitats and size of populations coupled with intrinsic variability and the sometimes cryptic nature of many of the plants make it not only possible but probable, that exploration of even a relatively small geographical area may miss something important. The complexity in the field is not unique to Haworthia. At present there are two classifications available for Haworthia, the one by C.L. Scott (Scott 1985) and the other by M.B. Bayer (Bayer 1982). Neither has proved unassailable and both have shortcomings. Particular shortcomings of both treatments are that they did not address typification, they did not comprehensively cite herbarium specimens and they did not provide credible identification keys.
In Haworthia the classifications are largely artificial because there are no definite morphological discontinuities between the different species recognised. This is why I have said elsewhere that a truly objective botanical classification would probably reduce the numbers of species to about half of that recognised even by myself. For such an objective classification a key could perhaps be provided. A key was provided in the older Handbooks (e.g. Bayer 1982) but my new classification will not provide a key. The reasons for this are very obvious in my Handbooks and in most of my writing on the subject since 1971:
| 1. | there are really not enough tangible characters on which to build a key; |
| 2. | where two keys (Scott 1985, Bayer 1982) have been provided, I have no knowledge that anyone has been able to prove their worth or make anything out of them. |
Out of about five published reviews of the two accounts by Scott and Bayer, three were quite ambivalent: they did not attempt to test the classifications and did not espouse either. Since a reliable and useful key cannot be constructed, I have concluded that photographs and information on distribution are the simplest, most reliable and most direct route to obtaining an identification. The herbarium specimens in the three main South African herbaria follow the revised scheme (Bayer, in ms.) but this could be happenstance rather than cognitive intention.
Part of my strategy in the Handbook (Bayer 1982) was to retain species and variety names even if the indications were that their status may have been weak. There were two reasons for this. Firstly, classification is also a communication process and I tried to match my classification to what I felt was the mood of the day. Secondly I tried to avoid, where possible, dramatic change which may have had to be reversed, and where there was uncertainty of some kind. Thirdly I retained names where I felt they had value in terms of the information portrayed, if not as substantial taxonomic elements. Whether or not I succeeded is beside the point because classification is an ongoing event, based on a sample that is known, on how well it is known and unfortunately on personal perceptions too.
The description of Haworthia reddii (Scott 1994) provides me with an opportunity to evaluate the respective hypotheses of Bayer (1982) and Scott (1985). This account should also serve as a guide to aspiring taxonomists in the group who may be tempted to start at their own levels of knowledge and competence, rather than properly build on what has gone before and thoroughly investigating what is known.
The population upon which H. reddii is based is referred to in the New Haworthia Handbook (Bayer 1982, p.30) under H. batesiana, as follows – “…a collection from Klipplaat, northwest of Cathcart is clearly comparable. However, the plants there are too robust to be regarded as H. batesiana and it appears that there is a tendency towards H. cymbiformis”.
Scott did not seem to make the connection between this reference and the plants collected by Dr. Reddi and himself at the same place, which had in the meantime become better known as Waterdown Dam. This is unfortunate because he does mention both H. batesiana and H. cymbiformis as possible relatives of his new species, and it would have been significant if this was an independent and credible observation.
In 1982, H. batesiana was not well known and there were very few pointers to the reality of its existence. Since then there has been another collection from the Valley of Desolation to confirm its existence there, as well as two collections by P.V. Bruyns from the Kamdeboo Mountains and another from the Tandjiesberg. These are both in the greater Graaff-Reinet area. From observations on these collections (and several others pertaining to H. archeri), it seems batesiana must be incorporated in H. marumiana as suggested in 1982. Furthermore, the concept of that species needs also to be broadened to include H. archeri and relevant collections (Bayer in ms.).
In Bayer (pages 133-134, Haworthiad, 1996) I wrote with reference to H. reddii – “At the time I commented on the Waterdown plants there was some doubt about the existence, whereabouts and whatever of H. batesiana. Since that time there have been any number of collections which fairly conclusively support its inclusion in H. marumiana. There is, so far as I know, still nothing to show that marumiana comes far enough east to support speculation of linkage with cymbiformis var. reddii. The area northwest of Cathcart to Tarkastad has not been fine-combed by any collector and it probably would better be regarded as an under-collected region. Furthermore, the distance from Cathcart to Tarkastad is considerably less than Tarkastad to Beaufort West and Prince Albert (at the western known limits of marumiana). There are plants in the upper Kei collected by Peter Bruyns which may strengthen the view that reddii is associated with cymbiformis. In which case it may be sensible to consider it with the var. lepida. My inclination is to put it with marumiana”.
It is quite obvious from Bayer (1982) that at the time I did not want to commit myself to a decision on the collection from Waterdown Dam. I did not regard it as substantial enough as a single population to justify formal description and was fairly sure that it would fit into either of two already described species. One of these was batesiana, which I suspected would prove to fit into marumiana. The other was cymbiformis. At the time the odds were heavily against the latter because it was not known at all from the Kei River valley, and only slightly better for the former. The nearest populations included the missing H. lepida and a collection of my own from near that site and both of these came from the middle reaches of the Fish River which is rather far to the south. However there were two collections from much further to the east in the Transkei to hint at a more extensive distribution for H. cymbiformis.
The drainage system of the Kei river and its tributaries is a highly dissected landscape and the terrain is rugged and steep. There are many rocky cliff faces which undoubtedly harbour haworthias. It will be a very difficult task to thoroughly investigate even a small proportion of possible Haworthia sites. (I did at one time point at the possible significance of river drainage systems regarding species, but it is self-evident that geographical features of any kind will influence distributions and breeding systems). Nevertheless, some collections have now been made from which a clearer picture begins to emerge.
Haworthiad,
Volume 12 (Issue 2), April 1998, pp.48-52.
EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION
to Bruce Bayer’s open letter to a scientist
Differences of opinion on any subject are common place and the classification of plants is no exception. The following open letter gives insights into how Bruce works, and an indication of the deficiencies in methods he detects in the way one of his correspondents, a scientist, works. Names have been omitted because the correspondence is private, but the thoughts and information are not and may be of interest and value to readers.
In correspondence with me, Bruce very kindly outlined his thoughts on genotypes, phenotypes and classification. These are not only interesting and informative but also relevant to the open letter. I am, therefore, including them in this introduction.
“Variation in organisms is due to genotype and the play of environmental factors. The genotype is the totality of the genetic factors which determine heredity. It is generally considered that there are different genes responsible for specific characters, and that these genes have alternate forms which account for different expression of that particular character. What is mostly overlooked is that there may be other genes or gene combinations and other genetic factors (e.g. chromosome duplication, chromosome loss etc.) which override or determine how those genetic factors finally come to be expressed in the environmentally affected adult plant. Thus we could have two species which have exactly the same variable genetic make up regarding simple things like tuberculation, hairiness, windowing, etc., but have some fundamental difference which controls growth rate of the leaves, hairs and tubercles and density of the windows.
“Phenotype is the observable characteristics of the plant that result from the interaction of the genotype (the genetic base that controls growth and appearance) with the environment. Thus variation (differences) is the consequence of genetic differences as they are affected by age, different substrates, water, temperature, or light regimes etc. It is possible that environmental factors can lead to quite major differences in how the genetic potential of plants is realised. In the field, at any particular habitat, it is usually the case that phenotypic differences far exceed genotypic differences. Continuity is the degree of similarity or dissimilarity (the variation) which occurs between the individuals in a population or in different populations. If the continuity is broken by gross structural differences, there may be no need to provide any measure of such difference. If there is no such obvious difference or differences, continuity is usually best assessed quantitatively by measurement and numbers. The statistical discipline used to measure and determine (analyse) degrees of continuity and correlation is called biometry. Thus it is possible, with statistical methods, to measure exactly the range of variation, to calculate means, and to arrive at coefficients of variation and standard deviation. From these statistical values it is possible to determine the degree by which individuals and populations may be said to differ. There are many different statistical tests by which the certainty of a decision (the significance of the difference) can be measured.
“Such numerical methods can be used to exclude the aberrations of human judgement. However, there are many ‘characters’ which do not lend themselves to easy measurement (quantification). Thus the major problem in plant taxonomy comes down to differences in the logical processes and the intuitive and judgmental skills of human minds.
“From such a brief explanation one should conclude that reaching any firm conclusion about anything in the biological field, requires a vast amount of thinking and probably experimental work too. There are many different things which affect the way plants look, and decisions are largely based on the way one synthesises, analyses and integrates all that information in relation to ones own experience and observations.
“Does everyone studying haworthias have the background and experience to:
1. make good judgements about the way in which all the different plants and populations occur and vary in the field?
2. relate this to other families, genera and species?
3. make meaningful comments on the way in which the plants should be classified to conform with general practice?”
Haworthiad,
Volume 12 (Issue 2), April 1998, pp.60-61.
AN OPEN LETTER TO A SCIENTIST
from Bruce Bayer
Dear ___ ,
I was very disappointed in your letter and also frustrated by it for many reasons. It is not just apparent – it is very clear – that you do not read and understand what I write. The problem you seem to have with my species concept is entirely in your own head. My concept is expressed very clearly in recent articles I have written in Aloe (e.g. 34:6) as well as elsewhere. My species concept is explained in the original Haworthia Handbook pp.11-13. On page 1 there are statements which I had hoped would preempt unnecessary questions.
Firstly it is not true to say, as you do, that the concept of continuity is obscure. I am astounded that you say this. Anybody trying to sort or classify anything uses the concept. If you gave a child a box full of blocks with five sizes and five colours, it would divide them into 25 groups using the concept of continuity. And it would probably require no incentive or encouragement to do. Many toys for children are based on the natural inclination to recognise pattern and react to it. If you gave me a box with blocks of all sizes and with different colours intergrading, I would say there was no discontinuity and you could either try to find it in the way they are arranged in the box, or after they have been thrown out on the floor.
Someone once asked me how I knew if a plant was a hybrid. It seemed a really foolish question to me. If you give me a box with 100 large blue blocks, and a box with 100 small yellow blocks, and also two green blocks which are medium sized, I would say that the green blocks are intermediates. If the blocks were cross-pollinating and seed propagating plants, I would assume that the two odd blocks were hybrids and I would not think it necessary to have to explain why to anyone. I come from a cultural and experiential background which is based on these kinds of decisions. While it is correct to be sceptical about my decisions, it is necessary to organise that scepticism correctly and truthfully.
In Haworthia (and elsewhere) the problem is that it is the continuities that are both confounded AND obscure. This is not a new statement of mine – it is in nearly every article since Haworth started writing about them. I have often referred to this problem. Do you know who Rafinesque was and what he did? Do you know how many species there are according to the RigVeda, and how do you think this should affect our thinking? Do you know the initial condition in Haworthia species, or is your guess better than anyone else’s? Is it my fault that all Haworthia species do not have the same range of variation e.g. wittebergensis with practically none, and heidelbergensis with practically no similarity (between populations). How do you propose to classify the genus? If you persist with the view that comptoniana is a different species from emelyae, then you will end up with a result that will please Rafinesque. I said long ago (in 1971) that we need more detailed analysis of populations, so why are you trying to tell me something I have already said. Go back and read my first Handbook properly, as I have no option but to deduce that you have done nothing with it but perhaps look at the pictures.
I have attempted to quantify differences. It has also been attempted with cytology and with morphology and with leaf surface anatomy. It has not solved anything. I attempted analysis of H. reticulata, H. herbacea and the hybrids at Orange Grove with numerical analysis. I did not even take the data to the point of statistical analysis because the result was so obviously statistically non-significant. The sample sizes required, as indicated by the coefficiencies of variation, were enormous and while I am not prepared to collect that number of plants, it is any way impractical. I tested my views and judgements in Oxalis because, unlike Haworthia, there are any number of quantifiable characters (see my publication in Herbertia, 1993?). I also tested them in Asclepiad genera where I produced things like Huernia distincta and Duvalia pillansii in breeding experiments. If you want to question my judgement then be honest and take a proper look at my credential, and read what I have written with a little more cognition.
You certainly do not have the field experience to make a worthwhile comment of your own and neither have you seen the herbarium records from which opinions also have to be formed. I have seen absolutely nothing from you and heard nothing from you personally either to suggest that you have adequate experience to even form an opinion of my subjective judgements, never mind evaluate those judgements. You seem confident that you can do so, and I would like to explain why I disagree. I have given my species concept clearly and yet you ask me to explain it to you again and again and again. I have said also that I do not attach much weight to varieties for the very reasons that continuities are even more difficult to judge and explain at that level. I have also explained that synonymy has to be used to assess variability and a name in synonymy must be taken as meaningful even if it implies non-recognition. Hence I recognise no varieties in H. viscosa because I think the synonymy adequately does so, as compared to H. mirabilis where I describe many new varieties. You need to think more about the problem of “constancy of standard”.
I think that you are not in a position, nor competent to make any informed judgement about my classification. This is apparent from your comment on the reddii article and the way in which you have failed to relate what I wrote there, and in other comments you make about my species concept. In the first place you project the view that batesiana is a species different from marumiana, and therefore have suggested in the way you have written that I also do. My view is that it is H. marumiana and the field evidence is also that this is correct – unless of course you suggest that species are not also geographically circumscribed. Or maybe you envisage 200 species in the collections which I classify now under H. marumiana. If you had understood my article you would know that I excluded blackbeardiana from the equation because of co-occurrence (in the area in question and also elsewhere). You should also acknowledge that I expressed exactly the same doubts about Waterdown Dam as a variation of H. cymbiformis or of marumiana (including var. batesiana) for that matter. After all, that is why I went to see what there was and found Turnstream and Highclere (there was also an Herbarium record, Galpin, that needed to be considered). I have now said that my views present an hypothesis which needs to be further tested by better understanding of the plants in the field. The problem is inaccessibility, and also the cost and effort required to do the fieldwork. The confusion you suffer from is that you say you understand from my article that there are two kinds of population in the area. I have written the whole article to explain that point. There are “populations” which suggest to me continuity between marumiana and cymbiformis. Looking at all the variation in each of those species has made me decide that this inferred continuity is best expressed within the context of those two species, rather than otherwise. I have pointed out that the taxonomic system does not allow for this situation, and I have ascribed the populations to the species cymbiformis as two varieties. It is fully explained in the text of the article and others can do it in any other way they like. If they want to stay in the realm of sanity rather than fantasy, they will leave things like that, until they have field evidence on which they can suggest another solution. Unfortunately they may be like other taxonomists and nonsense-writers who sacrificed common sense for self-deification.
I have followed a way of thinking regarding continuity as consistently as the populations I have seen in the field allow, but I do not claim that the final decisions are necessarily consistent. I also know that there are many populations that I have not seen. This is explained in everything I have written. My whole attitude is that we have a sample on which we have built an hypothesis and that this hypothesis must be tested by further sampling, always retaining as much of the structure as is feasible. If you cannot manage to appraise such a simple situation as Waterdown Dam to Inversomo, how on earth are you going to deal with the absolute confusion that one finds in the Baviaanskloof and Longkloof with gracilis, transiens, cooperi, decipiens, cymbiformis and mucronata all involved. The product of the Newer Handbook will actually be the database of collections. That is how I would expect someone I regard as a scientist to react. The next step is to review again and confirm that identifications are correct or that they fit adequately the system in which they are arranged. As I point out in the Handbook, a nit-picking reviewer will complain that there is no key by which he can evaluate my judgements in an easy simplistic way. Only someone sensible and with experience with Haworthia will understand why I have not attempted that key. My work will have to be tested and extended by re-visiting many of the localities and by making new collections. I have kept myself busy doing this constant collecting and testing and re-testing (knowing there are people like yourself acquiring single clones from my collections and making ill considered judgements on the basis of cultivated and selected clones).
I really wonder how you can claim that visiting South Africa regularly for 15 years is any worthwhile experience at all. ___ also claims that he has been walking in the field for 15 years and therefore knows what he is talking about. Actually I also have a letter from him in which he states that in 1987 he did not know what to look for, so that makes it only 10 years. He does not even seem to get the period of time right, so how is he going to get the plants right? I suppose exaggeration helps the cause and the self-confidence. He defies botanical tradition and judgement and claims that photographs are just as good as specimens. Like you, he seems to think that a type specimen is also typical and hence you both get thoroughly muddled-up as to how I treat magnifica, and why I have dismissed asperula. Do you have no idea whatsoever of my field experience and where it has ranged since 1940? I have been making judgements about pattern recognition for the last 57 years and I suppose this last month alone have spent about as much time in the field as you have in the 15 years you have visited South Africa. You should try to read the papers I wrote on morphological variation in noctuid moths (South African Journal of Entomology about 1960) and also on classification of Oxalis (Herbertia circa 1990). Or what I wrote about Duvalia and Piaranthus. On what basis do you actually question my decisions about species when you have not read what I have written (see again Aloe 36:6), and give poor indication that you in fact can make any judgement at all?
In the reddii article I point out that people like yourself are trying to judge and evaluate what I have written on less evidence than I have had available. What is worse is that you are not even reading and understanding what I have written, and then want to write and impress others yourself. Unless you truly get into the field and into the herbarium, you will never be able to assess the value and truth of what I have written. You will not be able to do it unless you have similar experience of a whole range of biological systems, and you will not be able to do it until you can recognise that your subjectivity may be considerably worse than my own. You should try to properly understand what the basis is for my own doubts and find common ground to build on, rather than imagine you have unique insights outside of the English scientific literature, outside of the “college” of South African botany, and outside my own background and experience.
Haworthiad,
Volume 12 (Issue 2), April 1998, pp.61-64.
HAWORTHIA CYMBIFORMIS VAR. REDDII (Scott) Bayer (in ms.) –
a test of an hypothesis – part 2
by M.B. Bayer,
with acknowledgement to P.V. Bruyns and J.D. Venter
The first interesting collections relevant to the “reddii” problem were collected by P.V. Bruyns at Inversomo on the Kei River east of Cathcart. These were of H. cymbiformis and established for the first time the existence of this species on the Kei River. He also collected what purports to be H. marumiana var. marumiana in several places north of Queenstown, near to Sterkstroom (in an area which, like Waterdown Dam, is also drained by an upper tributary of the Black Kei). This indicates that H. marumiana also occurs much further east than previously thought. These collections have rather attenuate, strongly spined leaves and are highly marked with translucence between the dense reticulation.
In December 1996, I was fortunate that P.V. Bruyns was able to accompany me on a collecting trip to the Eastern Cape and one of our objectives was the upper Black Kei. It is a tributary of the Black Kei on which the Waterdown Dam was built and the relative location of the populations discussed can be seen on the accompanying map (Part 1, page 51, April 1998). We were also helped and motivated by a very old specimen in the Pretoria Herbarium collected by Galpin, which I only became aware of earlier in the year and which indicated the occurrence of plants related to H. cymbiformis and “reddii” southeast of Queenstown.
We travelled on a road running northeast from Cathcart in the direction of the Galpin site, but stopped at the bridge over the Black Kei on the farm Turnstream. Peter did the climbing of the huge south-facing cliff there and came back with several clones of reddii-like plants. At the same time I found H. bolusii var. blackbeardiana at the eastern base of the same cliff. We then turned back and travelled eastward along the river to the base of a still higher west-facing cliff on the farm Highclere. Peter again did the very strenuous climbing and again returned with a few clones, which he described as difficult to reach on the vertical cliff face.
Peter’s earlier collection along the lower Kei at Inversomo is still further to the south and east. He also collected H. bolusii var. blackbeardiana at this site.
We took the opportunity to revisit the Waterdown Dam on the way home. I was really surprised to find the south-facing cliff alongside the dam clothed with huge numbers of plants. Although H. marumiana is also a clump-former, these larger clumps were at lower altitude and much more accessible than H. marumiana usually is. Some of the plants had very distinctive translucent dots and lines while others are unmarked and uniformly opaque with a faint reticulate patterning on the leaves. The floral characters mentioned by Scott are not definitive although the flowers do appear to have strongly coloured veins. We also noted the presence at Waterdown Dam of H. bolusii var. blackbeardiana. The repeated presence of this species may be important in the context of co-occurrence, which forms the basis of my hypothesis relating geographical distribution to the species concept. It is only slightly relevant to this article but it is critical to a broader understanding of the genus.[1]
The offsets we collected from Turnstream, Highclere and Waterdown Dam have taken several months under relatively low light to grow out enough to make useful comment. At the moment it is extremely difficult to see any difference between three distinct clones from Turnstream and the collection made on the same trip from Waterdown Dam. I put it like this because the Waterdown plants are quite variable as to the translucent patterning on the leaves. This may be almost absent, or the margins may be translucent, or the face of the leaves may be quite heavily marked with a series of elongated translucent dots or short lines. (It should be noted that in H. cymbiformis as a whole, there is a vast range of translucent patterning, from virtually absent, to only translucent leaf-margins, to massive reticulate or dotted translucence). The Turnstream collection comprises a very small sample (smaller than I would have liked, and I would have preferred to have seen the plants in situ if I had been fit enough to do so) but the plants are virtually identical in both shape and size to those Waterdown plants which lack the translucent markings. The colour is also the same rather opaque mid-green. The leaves are sub-cylindrical, or flatter and slightly recurved with a faint darker reticulation similar to that in H. marumiana var. batesiana, and which is also often evident in H. cymbiformis. The leaf margins in both the Turnstream and Waterdown collections are relatively smooth with evidence of more spination in a few clones of the bigger Waterdown sample. This spination is by degree comparable with that of the Andriesberg collections.
The Highclere plants looked slightly different at the time of collection. They were bigger, paler in colour and less opaque. The margins were also more heavily spined. I relate these plants to a wider concept of H. cymbiformis var. setulifera v. Poelln. It seems extremely improbable in the context of Haworthia, that these two populations at Turnstream and Highclere could be different species and I cannot harbour any doubts on this score.
The Inversomo plants have been in cultivation for more than eight years and, as they were also grown under brighter light, a straight comparison is perhaps unwise. In comparison with the Turnstream and Waterdown plants they have relatively short obtuse leaves and form tighter smaller rosettes, the coloration is more intense, slightly more glaucous, and the reticulation, opaqueness and/or translucence in either of the two clones (the sample is too small) representing this collection is practically the same. I included this collection among the specimens of H. cymbiformis var. setulifera, which is indicative of the compounding difficulty of making decisions, already difficult, below species level.
These three collections taken together seem to show a definite and tangible connection between the Waterdown Dam plants on the upper reaches of the Black Kei, through the collection at Turnstream and the herbarium collection of Galpin’s, to H. cymbiformis as represented by the Highclere collection and also the Inversomo collections further to the south.
The connection to H. marumiana is weaker. As one moves northeastwards from Tarkastad, populations of H. marumiana retain their more plentiful and rather slender leaves and do not tend to become more like the Waterdown collections or like H. cymbiformis. The translucence becomes denser and the plants more spinescent. Collections from the western Karoo (Sutherland, Merweville and Carnarvon by Bruyns and Bayer) which make the inclusion of H. archeri under marumiana obligatory weaken the argument to include reddii there too. In particular, forms of H. marumiana var. batesiana, which do bear resemblance to the Waterdown Dam collections, occur only very far to the west around Graaff-Reinet. This variety apparently does not occur further east than the Tandjiesberg, and is replaced by the typical variety further to the east and south of Tarkastad at Spring Valley. The clinal trend in this species eastward and from Tarkastad northeastward, is thus rather away from a resemblance to the Waterdown Dam plants than towards it. Thus, if one is to seek continuity of variation, the Waterdown Dam populations do not form part of the series exhibited by H. marumiana but fit into the series of variants now known in H. cymbiformis along the upper reaches of the Kei River. However, this discussion should not be construed to exclude the reality of the relationship with H. marumiana. There are clones at Waterdown Dam, which are both more reticulate and spinescent, and there is a report of H. marumiana still further east than the Andriesberg.
In 1982 I postulated that there were two species viz. H. batesiana and H. cymbiformis involved in an assessment of the Waterdown Dam collections and was unable to fit it conclusively into either of these. Nevertheless, I was convinced that it could be accommodated here and this was, and has been, the prediction of my classification hypothesis.
More recent collections (mostly by P.V. Bruyns) have filled in much detail in the distributions of both H. cymbiformis and H. marumiana that was, at that time, unknown. These have indicated that H. batesiana and H. archeri can be included in a broader concept of H. marumiana (also as predicted), and they have amplified the known information on H. cymbiformis. This new information shows that, if the species concepts of geographical continuity and co-occurrence are followed, “reddii” is not a discrete new element standing outside of known and variable species. My prediction that it should not be accommodated in H. batesiana (i.e. H. marumiana) seems to be correct, and our investigations seem to confirm rather that it is an integral part of H. cymbiformis.
The important facts are that:–
| a) | recognition of H. reddii as a distinct species is not warranted and the taxon can adequately be discussed and classified in terms of the structure of the Haworthia Handbooks. |
| b) | the classification hypotheses of the Handbooks has not been disproved and it appears to serve as a rational basis for development of a still better understanding. |
| c) | in this specific case the hypothesis can and should be further tested by exploration of the areas drained by the upper White and Black Kei Rivers. |
An important implication is that if reddii and similar individual populations are to be treated as distinct species, then each new discovery (of which there could be many) would require a new name and the system would become increasingly disordered and fail. Evidence of exactly this problem is presented by the descriptions of H. batteniae, H. pringlei, H. joeyae, H. venusta and H. mcmurtryi, all of which can similarly be accommodated within other variable species. As far as variability is concerned, the plants from Waterdown Dam, and other populations now associated with them, are not exceptional. If we had to continue naming each apparently different element like this, we would end up with a structure that has no coherence, no predictive element and no value in the sense that botanical classification is required to express “pattern” and carry information generally. It would be simply a meaningless list of names. Such a system may work for the collector in that he may have a name for a particular clone or set of clones, but have no wider or deeper meaning. Many people may be comfortable with and feel justified in using such a treatment, but it would do very little to sensibly accommodate the incredible variation within the genus.
Because of the conflicting views that seem to be an inevitable part of the process of plant classification, many commentators have said that it is not a science but an art. However, this conflict should not be there. The essence of science is replication i.e. the deduction of conclusions (for example, a classification) from experiments (for example, observations on plants) which should be repeatable. In my work on Haworthia, I have been very conscious of the historic conflict in the genus, the need for credibility, and the responsibility attached to making public statements. Unfortunately, while I may have made mistakes, other authors seem to be less conscientious. Therefore the presentation of differing taxonomic treatments requires the reader to discriminate between them. This demands of the reader that he consider carefully the evidence put forward by authors and then discriminate for himself which author has concluded correctly. Most readers are not prepared to go to this amount of trouble and would rather declare the taxonomy of the group concerned to be “controversial”. Unfortunately there seem to be as many aspiring authors who do not go to that much trouble either and are all too eager to express views which have little respect for the broader realities and needs of botanical classification. This is unfair to all more conscientious authors and also other readers, as it discounts the effort and sacrifice these people put into collecting and communicating their information. The opinion that taxonomy is an art with little relevance to the enjoyment of the plants themselves, stems from intellectual laziness and ignorance. Also it belies the fact that the mere learning of a name, which can be forgotten in the very same moment, satisfies some deep psychological need. The audience also has the responsibility to think analytically and critically about what is laid before it. Otherwise they may get a meaningless classification that they have earned, but which is just another yoke around the neck of others who may be striving for the light.
P.V.Bruyns in J.D.Venter 88/62
J.D.Venter 96/66
________________________
[1]
My classification hypothesis is built on a definition of species which pre-supposes that they are “continuous genetically and morphologically in space and/or time” (Bayer 1982). Therefore the extended prediction is that not only is it probable that H. cymbiformis and H. marumiana will eventually be found to be continuous in geographic space, but it is probable that they will also be found to be continuous with H. bolusii. The entire hypothesis should fit within the framework of taxonomic botany, whatever the level of expertise, and satisfy the requirements of scientific discipline. Any two people should come to the same conclusion. If there is conflict there is error.
Haworthiad,
Volume 12 (Issue 3), July 1998, pp.90-94.
REVIEWS AND REACTIONS
by Bruce Bayer
I am sorry that Colin has missed the point of my comment (Haworthiad 26-30, Jan. 1998) and that he should have taken umbrage at what I said. Colin is a very competent and able scientist. Such people are extremely important for the vital role that they play in upholding the scientific integrity of Haworthia and other succulent plants. We need informed, knowledgeable and balanced persons like Colin to bring organised scepticism to bear on the study of the literature on Haworthia. Colin helped me organise my own thinking when I started writing about Haworthia and I am still grateful to him for that.
However, Colin has responded to my criticism in a very stereotyped way (the Pavlovian Resende Reflex!) whereas I actually hoped he would have been suspicious that I had exposed myself in such an obvious way. I am disappointed that he did not stop and think about this. If he had done so, he might have seen the similarity between the present situation in Haworthia and that which gave rise to the earlier exchanges between Smith, Resende and Uitewaal. He might have assisted then in preventing history from repeating itself. A precious opportunity was missed and we have the trite response “let’s not waste valuable space on this matter after I have had the last word”.
My point was this. Colin called his note a “review”. I do not know what that means in technical language as opposed to “layman’s language” but I feel free to attach conventional meaning to the term. This is that a review is a “critical assessment”, “retrospective survey”, or “re-examination”. The subject of the paper being reviewed was typification of specific names in Haworthia. Thus I would have expected the review to discuss the significance, for the nomenclature and application of names in Haworthia, of the paper under review, with some reference to the relevant literature. In particular this review should have attempted to determine whether the paper on typification made any significant contribution to the subject. As far as I can make out, the review did nothing to examine and test this. Therefore, if Colin really believes that he is able to recognise what is worthwhile in and for Haworthia, in my opinion this is not apparent in this “review”. I feel strongly that it is essential that commentators set and observe some kind of standard in their writing and I am sure that Colin will agree with this entirely. For, if standards are not set and adhered to, we all suffer.
Underlying my disappointment with this “review” is one essential fact that I have pointed out directly and indirectly many times. This is that typification in Haworthia is a formality which is unlikely to have any practical significance whatsoever. Although it is essential to typify each name, the fact that there are very few diagnostic features for the species of Haworthia makes most of the early illustrations (which ought to serve as types for many of the earlier names) hopelessly inadequate. That typification has no practical significance becomes apparent when one tries to relate these types to known populations in the wild. Most of those who have attempted to typify species have been inadequately prepared for dealing with this problem of application. I would like to illustrate this point with two examples:
1. The types that Scott and I selected for H. arachnoidea and H. herbacea were the same for each of these names. However, in our respective accounts, these names were applied to different species. Therefore the problem does not lie with selecting the type but in linking it with known populations in the wild. In the case of H. herbacea, Boerhaave’s “Aloe, africana, minima, atroviridis, spinis herbaceis numerosus ornata” was typified by Stern in 1937, who selected Boerhaave’s illustration as the type. Confusion over this illustration had already arisen in the previous century since De Candolle applied the name “atrovirens” to it. Miller called it “herbacea” and Haworth called it “pumila”. However, this is not the main problem; there remains the question of which species known in the wild corresponds most closely to Boerhaave’s illustration. I took the colour and “numerous spines” to be definitive and concluded that the only species to which the epithet “herbacea” could be applied was the Worcester species. At that time I was not very familiar with the species “maraisii/magnifica”. In fact this species is probably far more like the plant figured by Boerhaave since it is of course dark green and the epithet “atrovirens” would then have been very apt.
2. H. magnifica/minima/pumila. In their paper, Breuer & Metzing added nothing to clarify the confusion which has blossomed around these “species” since Scott & Codd wrote in 1978 (Aloe 16) on this issue. I would have expected Colin, as an informed commentator (especially if he had known the relevant literature, as he now claims is the case), to mention in his review the extent of this confusion and demonstrate that Breuer & Metzing made no discernible contribution.
Thus any paper (such as a recent manuscript of Breuer on typification of H. arachnoidea) stating how significant typification is in the confusion over the application of names, misses the point completely. While this fact remains unrecognised, all the discussion about typification remains meaningless.
One final point I would like to make is this. My criticism of Colin’s writing and that of others does not arise from any egocentric or “arrogant” view that I am the only one who can write anything worthwhile about Haworthia. Although I may claim to have a very thorough knowledge of Haworthia, having been in the fortunate position to acquire this knowledge in the field and having had the legacies of Compton and Smith placed at my disposal, it distresses me no end that I see so little useful and accurate information coming from anywhere else. I write (and I apologise to readers who are uncomfortable with the personal nature of some of my recent writing) therefore, to reflect my own mental discomfort when I see the understanding of Haworthia threatened. It is this discomfort which has motivated me to say anything at all. If competent commentators were playing their proper role to the full, it would not be necessary for me to flail about so (with a lesser talent) to guard the truthfulness of what is written about Haworthia.
Haworthiad,
Volume 12 (Issue 3), July 1998, pp.113-115.
HAWORTHIA SORDIDA et al
by Bruce Bayer
Cape Town, South Africa.
I find John Pilbeam’s comment “I wonder if H. sordida will withstand his (Bayer’s) pending onslaught, since it post-dates H. scabra, and is not that far away from it!” (Haworthiad 12:43 [April 1998]) very curious indeed. Here we have an accomplished writer who can only say of H. scabra and H. sordida that they are not very far from each other. I only agree in so far as it is difficult to state what the difference is. The basis of my species hypothesis is geographic distribution and Pilbeam thus unwittingly emphasises for me that unless the student has a thorough and extensive knowledge of South African geography and botany he is going to understand precious little about Haworthia and going to contribute even less to any debate about classification. What is incongruous is that Pilbeam’s book has a very good chapter on geography and he has not put that information together with his comment! Could I say that H. sordida is separated from H. scabra by the Baviaanskloof? There are some other singular curiosities about this piece of geography touching other species and genera.
I see each species as having a distribution range and a range of variability. H. sordida occurs north of the Baviaanskloof from about Steytlerville eastwards towards Addo. At its western point the plants tend to have short, recurved leaves (var. lavranii) which Kobus Venter even suggests relate to the retuseness of H. bruynsii. The description of the H. agavoides (v. Poelln.) Smith does not tell us very much despite all the detail. The v. Poelln. diagnosis only says the leaf shape was “at first glance different from that of H. sordida”. Therefore one presumes that at second glance they are the same. From the description I presume he means the leaves were slightly falcate (sickle-shaped) and bent slightly sideways at the tip. This might make the var. lavranii superfluous! Breuer (private communication) suggests that the leaves were also longer and more slender because in his wisdom he thought my proposal for a var. scottiana would be a superfluous name for agavoides. I had in 1988 stumbled across a dense population near Kirkwood with very long slender leaves to 300mm or more (70-100mm – v. Poelln.). I was impressed by the similarity to H. longiana. My herbarium specimen confirms the slenderness of the leaves but not the length, and in trying to relocate the exact site it seems the bushy area has been cleared. Plants grown by Clive McDowell have not achieved the observed length. Occasional specimens in the vicinity of my find were not notably different from many other sordidas I have seen. Plants of H. sordida are essentially scabrid (rough but not necessarily tubercled) and may be pruinose and uniformly blackish-green or a deep bluish-black colour. The leaf tips and margins are usually obtuse.
H. scabra occurs from Ladismith in the west to within the Baviaanskloof in the east. (This last is a very recent discovery by Gerhard Marx and is probably linked to the escape of the Coega river from the Longkloof northwards to the Baviaanskloof.) Its variants include the glabrous, bright yellow starkiana, the dark-green smooth lateganiae, and the two transitions viz. finely tubercled, dark morrisiae and the coarsely tubercled smitii. It is essentially tubercled, pungent leaved (for scabra) and also blackish to greyish-green. I am quite sure an anatomist would be able to show major differences between this species and sordida. There is an odd population found by David Cumming south of Uniondale, which has long slender leaves, and he also thought it was perhaps a variant of H. sordida. My considered opinion, based on distribution and within my species hypothesis generally, is that this is actually still H. scabra. I saw a television program recently where the speculation “birds ARE dinosaurs” was propounded. This is not a new thought to me at all and is consistent with my species definition encompassing continuity in space AND time. The problem is to identify that point in time and space when continuity becomes discontinuity. Incidentally if readers think that they can integrate my classification with Col. Scott’s by trying to accommodate an H. tuberculata as well, they will struggle.
I doubt if any collector having grown any of the variants of H. scabra and H. sordida could ever confuse the two. However, there are knowledgeable people who have confused H. pulchella and H. wittebergensis, and H. limifolia and H. minima despite descriptions and pictures. John Pilbeam is in good company but I do not think his reference to me was very well considered.
I think readers and haworthiophiles underestimate the value of a knowledge of other genera and species, and their distributions, to an assessment of species and relationships in Haworthia. Classification should address the question of origins, but it seems to me that for the Alooid genera and species, the answers are lost in the mists of time. Thus some of the best evidence yet might be the discovery of the Astroloba-like new species from the Longkloof.
Haworthiad,
Volume 12 (Issue 4), October 1998, pp.119-120.
Editor’s Note: Thank you to Alina Rabinovich for helping compile and edit these letters and articles. Bruce Bayer’s thinking has evolved as new data has come to light and yet he remains remarkably consistent gathering and sharing information to better help describe, classify, and communicate what he has seen.