Query about Androsace species

[Lesley Cox]

Would someone who knows this genus well please set me right here.
If I'm NOT wrong, Androsace sarmentosa and A. studiosorum are the same thing? Right?

But if they are different species please say so because I may have made a rash statement in the October in the Southern Hemisphere thread just yesterday, in which case I'll need to retract and apologise.

The Internet gives me photos of both and they seem indistinguishable and I've found references to A. sarmentosa 'Chumbyi' (an old form) and also to A. studiosorum 'Chumbyi.' Yet an IRG writer speaks of having both species in an article recently.

I hate having my own plants wrongly named so would welcome some input here. It is not unknown that I have made a statement about a plant then had to acknowledge that I was wrong, so please someone, are they synonyms or are they not. If not, what is different?

Thanks

[Jupiter]

Lesley, Otto told me that A. sarmentosa is a syn. for studiosorum and a more current name. He wrote both names on the same tag when he sent me a piece last year. I will be interested to see what the European experts say when they pipe in on the topic.

Here are some detailed pictures of Andros I have flowering now, which I thought were lanuginosa and sarmentosa respectively, but after careful and close inspection this morning I'm coming around to your way of thinking... I agree they are essentially the same apart from flower colour and size. The one I have labelled as sarmentosa has significantly larger flowers, but they might be selections of the same species.

[Gabriela]

I'm familiar with A. sarmentosa, lanuginosa and others but by no means expert in Androsace. However, nowadays there are resources accessible to verify names.
Opening The Plant List - Primulaceae - Androsace - Androsace sarmentosa - we can observe that A. studiosorum is not given as a synonim to sarmentosa.
More than this, A. studiosorum name is not listed at all for Androsace.
http://www.theplantlist.org/tpl1.1/record/kew-2637759

In this case, I recommend to access the database from Missouri Bot. G. - Tropicos. It is listing all names, even the ones illegit, rej. and so on...
Androsace - http://www.tropicos.org/NameSearch.aspx?name=Androsace&commonname=

Scrolling to pag.5 we find A. studiosorum - with 2 syn.: Androsace sarmentosa var. primuloides and Androsace primuloides. Further it gets a bit confusing since A. primuloides also has another syn.
http://www.tropicos.org/Name/50326713

So, they are not the same and  unless someone else has new info regarding these names, until things are clarified A. studiosorum should be used as such, or as Androsace sarmentosa var. primuloides.

[Tristan_He]

Hi Gabriela, I didn't totally follow your post. But A. studiosorum is listed in The Plant List, as a synonym of A. sarmentosa var. primuloides. A. primuloides seems to have been independently used by three different authors but none of these names are valid.

My impression in the tangle of names is that A. studiosorum is not valid and that Lesley is right - this is a form of A. sarmentosa, which you could call var. primuloides if you want (personally I'm not a fan of variety names, often they are just ecotypes rather than something distinctive and it makes very long and cumbersome names).

A. sarmentosa seems to make sense as the sarmentosa and "studiosorum" in cultivation look very similar to me. I would avoid using A. primuloides at all costs!

Best, Tristan

[Jupiter]

Thanks Tristan, I'm happy to stick with sarmentosa but still not sure whether what I have is that or a form of lanuginosa. Can you comment on my pics above and give your opinion please? I am tending to think Lesley was right in her original assessment of my plants as both lanuginosa... but I'm really not sure.

[Karaba]

The Plantlist and Tropicos are not the good tools to resolve this kind of problem. They are good tools to quickly looks at synonyms or make a homogeneous list but, IMHO, not more.

After some googling, A. sarmentosa and A. studiosorum don't seem to be same plants. You can find some differences here : http://www.srgc.net/forum/index.php?topic=10273.msg271794#msg271794 or in the flora of Pakistan : http://www.efloras.org/florataxon.aspx?flora_id=5&taxon_id=250081167
the true sarmentosa and studiosorum seems to hybridize in nature, so, the taxonomic position are still unclear and then the true name. Should it be A. studiosorum Kress, or A. sarmentosa ssp. primuloides (Duby) Govaerts or Androsace primuloides Duby or Androsace sarmentosa var. primuloides (Duby) Hook.f., I don't know.

[Gabriela]

Yes Yvain, that's exactly what I was going to say. I never liked the idea of The Plant List, which is a computerized compilation but since many people are using it, is indeed a sort of 'starting point'.
Best is to look if possible in Flora of the particular country, if possible and if updated.

I don't know how they will end up either to be called but they are definitely not the same. A. sarmentosa ssp. primuloides (Duby) Govaertz listed in the Plant List is illeg. because as mentioned in Tropicos (with references) they used a wrong basionym. It will take some time to entangle the situation.

Tristan - many other species in cultivation 'looking similar' don't necessarily have the same name

[Tristan_He]

Gah! I should have known better to respond to a thread on Androsace - they really are a taxonomic muddle.

The problem is that there isn't really a definitive catalogue of species anywhere (which I think things like The Plant List are trying to sort out). I'm not sure why they have listed A. studiosorum as a synonym as on further investigation it still appears on IPNI as well as the references cited by Yvain and Gabriela. So I stand corrected  .

Gabriela - my comment about 'looks the same' was perhaps jumping to conclusions, but there are plenty of examples of plants being wrongly named in horticulture for various reasons, as per the Digitalis "not-stewartii" thread elsewhere.

Jamus, I think you had better ask someone else to ID your Androsace!  (and I haven't grown lanuginosa).

Best, Tristan

[Lesley Cox]

Thanks everyone for this interesting discussion. Am I any the wiser? I'm not sure really. My first note of A. studiosorum was an AGS or SRGC show photo as I remember, of a plant labelled Androsace studiosorum 'Doksa,' a fine white flowered plant and while I don't remember the foliage especially, I do remember (don't I?) someone saying it was a new name (without the 'Doksa') for what we had called A. sarmentosa and I've been working on that principle ever since. Maybe that was 5 or so years ago. Not sure now.
 
In the meantime, I'm still convinced Jamus that the photo you have above in Reply #1(foliage detail of A. sarmentosa) is A. lanuginosa. While I said above that colour is not the best way to identify species, A. sarmentosa has an almost lolly-pink flower head, some would even say a vulgar pink compared with the softer, slightly more lavender-pink of lanuginosa. But it is the arrangement of the foliage that talks to me. Winter foilage of A. sarmentosa is reduced to a group of firm cushion-shaped pads with no leafage around them. Leaves develop as spring advances and buds are produced.

[Lesley Cox]

Re A. primuloides, I'm pretty sure this was the oldest, original name for A. sarmentosa, maybe back in the time of Farrer and his colleagues. I'm pretty sure I saw this name in the earliest catalogues such as those of Clarence Elliott and Walter Ingwersen, long ago.

[Vincent]

This is very interesting. I grow several forms of A. sarmentosa ('Chumbyi', 'Watkinsii' and plain sarmentosa) and I also have two plants of A. studiosorum. It's hard to see a difference between the A. sarmentosas, but A. studiosorum is clearly different, not only in flower colour (being paler than my sarmentosas, clearly not a reliable feature for distinguishing species in general) but also in the way it is spreading. The stolons are much longer. On the website of the german nursery 'Flora Montana' it also says that A. studiosorum 'Doksa' makes longer stolons and the leaves are more narrow than in A. sarmentosa.
Vincent

[MatthewC]

Information from 'The Genus Androsace' by George Smith and Duncan Lowe, published in 1997:

1. A. studiosorum is the correct name for what was previously called A. primuloides.

2. A. sarmentosa and A. studiosorum are so closely related that in the previous edition of the book they were both held to be variants of one species, A. sarmentosa. The authors now believe them to be different species - but this belief seems to be pending better information. There are typical forms of each, geographically separated, that are clearly distinct but also forms in overlapping regions that cannot with certainty be assigned to either species.

3. 'The main difference between the two species is found in the bracts, which in A. sarmentosa are narrow and of about the same length, and in A. studiosorum they are elliptic and broader and of different lengths on the same umbel.'

4. The authors state 'In cultivation, nearly all plants labelled A. sarmentosa are forms of A. studiosorum, with the exception of plants recently collected in Nepal and Uttar Pradesh.'

I have nothing more up to date.

[Lesley Cox]

Thank you Vincent and Matthew (and a warm welcome to the Forum). Based on those notes it seems we in NZ and probably in Australia should be calling our long established plants as studiosorum rather than sarmentosa. Which still doesn't change my feeling that Jamus's plants pictured in Reply#1 are all lanuginosa. ("A man convinced against his will.........")

Which brings me to another little question about A. sempervivoides. Though I've not seen mention in northern hemisphere publications any mention of two quite distinct forms, we in NZ certainly have two plants which we are calling sempervivoides and I've sometimes wondered if they are actually two species. I haven't pictures available at the moment but will try to arrange them over the next few days then post them here.
So be waiting for our next exciting episode. 

[Jupiter]

Speaking to Otto on the phone he was very confident and quite matter of fact. He has the books and is settled on studiosorum. It is not dead in my garden by the way, just much reduced!

[Gabriela]

Jupiter - that's a nice Androsace but we weren't discussing here about this particular plant you have from Otto. Lesley had a general query about the names: if A. sarmentosa is the same with A. studiosorum, and all evidence indicates now that they are not.
So if your plant is labeled Androsace studiosorum then it shouldn't have as syn. sarmentosa.

An interesting continuation to this thread would be if anyone having these species would post close-up images with the flowers (the main difference being the bracts). Maybe we can observe the details which separate them.