This was a fantastic plant shown by Ian Robertson - saw it at the Wisley Alpine day. The comment about the name confused me until I looked back in the guides to cyclamen by Doris Saunders and Christopher Grey-Wilson and found that this was a name once given to this (or a) particular plant from southern Turkey by Hildebrand (and that 'graecum' has often been split into different species in the past). Changing the name doesn't seem to add to any clearer understanding as far as I can see, except perhaps in making you go and look more closely again at the botanical literature and realise more about the natural distribution of these plants. The different forms of 'graecum' all look like 'graecum' more than they look like anything else - a new name just seems to add obfuscation.
On a different level it seems clear that the more you learn about plants, and see their variation, the more names will be split to identify differences in distribution, cytology etc., but it would be useful to explain this more at Alpine Shows rather than simply 'giving' a new name with no explanation. To a degree this might explain why alpine gardening can come to seem rather exclusive - after all a high proportion of gardeners will have no trouble knowing what a cyclamen is but it takes a clear explanation to take in (and want to take in) the genus in more detail and C. graecum itself is hardly a reliable and good garden plant in most UK gardens unless under glass. Most interesting of all are comparative displays which show the variation and relate it to place.
