When is a hepatica a hepatica ?

[P. Kohn]

Can anyone explain why the Plant List has now transferred all Hepaticas back to the genus Anemone except Hepatica nobilis ? Many of those transferred have at times been treated as subspecies of H. nobilis and to the casual eye they clearly are very closely related.  Is the separation purely based on DNA ?  It is hard to understand how it could be based on morpholgy.

[Maggi Young]

Is this any help ?   https://www.revolvy.com/main/index.php?s=Anemone&item_type=topic

[TheOnionMan]

In a number of taxonomic discussions recently, people have suggested steering clear The Plant List because it's rarely updated (latest version is 2013) and their many mistakes. These suggestions come from people for whom I trust their taxonomic acuity. I've been led to the Catalog of Life, which is said to be updated nearly constantly. Here's the status for Hepatica:

http://www.catalogueoflife.org/col/search/all/key/Hepatica/fossil/0/match/1

[David Nicholson]

Well at least The Plant List strikes me as being readable and relatively understandable, on the other hand The Catalogue of Life comes across me as just a jumble of information.

[P. Kohn]

Our friendly taxonomist from the RHS also recommends we use the Plant Finder for naming. However, potentially the Plant List should be the ultimate authority and my impression is that it is constantly being updated section by section. I suddenly find a genus where everything is now accepted ( or moved off elsewhere) which was previously full of 'unresolved' entries. It is frustrating that not everything has been dealt with but there are an awful lot of plant species in cultivatiion.

[P. Kohn]

The reference given by Maggi does imply that the whole of Hepatica should be subsumed into Anemone. The retention of Hepatica nobilis as the only Hepatica seems to make even less sense. Seems like it should be all or none.

[Karaba]

It's of course a mistake and it's mainly because the Plant List use different sources that may have a different approach of taxonomy or have different level of cleaning... Here, Hepatica nobilis is an accepted name by Tropicos but the genus Hepatica is synonym of Anemone and this is the last 10 year position of taxonomists.

This synonymy is cautious. It cames from a molecular phylogeny from a south-african team which lump every genus closed to Anemone (as Pulsatilla, Hepatica and many others) so that the Anemone genus is monophyletic (=it gather all the species that have a common ancestor). Recent papers suggest that this wide Anemone genus senso lato is not monophyletic and that Clematis might root in it. This would need to split the genus Anemone senso lato. The problem is that the phylogeny doesn't match the common sub-classification of subgenus/section of Anemone... and you can't use this classical classification to make new genus and new combinaison. Obviously, two "genus" are monophyletic : Pulsatilla and Hepatica and they are quite far from each other. To restore this two genus, taxonomists have to resolve the position of the others species and other "genus" to have a taxonomy coherent with phylogeny. This needs a lot of works because Anemone s.l. is a big genus with species from all over the world...

Until this revision, use what is the best for you Anemone hepatica, Hepatica nobilis or Anemone (Hepatica) nobilis 

[Afloden]

The most recent paper (http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0174792) looked at the Anemone-Hepatica problem and found good support for recognizing Hepatica and Anemone separate, but Hepatica also included subgenus Anemonidium which is very different in growth and appearance.

I have taken their data and other data from the Anemonideae and created a larger, well-sampled phylogeny and got basically the same results with Clematis as the outgroup. I could see recognizing the following based on the molecular results combined with morphology and cytology; Keiskia sister to Anemonidium, these sister to Hepatica, then Oreithales (including some other southern hemisphere "Anemone" like Barneoudia, Knowltonia, etc) sister to a clade containing Pulsatilla which is sister to the remaining true Anemone.  I still like my Hepatica separate from Anemone and they are distantly related to the core (type) Anemone species, though closely related to Anemonidium.

[P. Kohn]

Many thanks for the explanations. It seems reasonable to continue to call all hepaticas Heptica until the taxonomists actually insist on Anemone.