From Plant Press, Vol. 24, No. 4, October 2021.
Jun Wen recently completed two ‘Grape Escapes’—one collecting trip to the southeast United States (August 30 – September 10, 2021) with Sue Lutz, and the other collecting trip to Texas and western Louisiana (September 19-28, 2021) with her long-time collaborator Stefanie Ickert-Bond (University of Alaska, Fairbanks). Wen and her colleagues made important collections and observations throughout the southeast (especially South Carolina, Florida, Alabama, and Kentucky), as well as Texas and western Louisiana, targeting grapevines (Vitis, Vitaceae), hickories (Carya, Juglandaceae), and rattlebox (Crotalaria, Fabaceae).
While in Texas, Wen and Ickert-Bond visited the John Fairey Garden near Hempstead. Having a unique artistic design by its founder John Fairey, the Garden is a hidden treasure with extraordinary collections from Mexico. The collecting team enjoyed getting to know the Garden via an introduction from botanist Adam Black via FaceBook. The team was given a tour by Executive Director Randy Twaddle and horticultural botanist Wally Wilkins.
The two trips were among many recent grape escapes that Wen had led, setting a foundation to wrap up the taxonomic revision of North American grapes. The studies of Carya and Crotalaria are collaborative work with colleagues at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for DNA-based species identification assay development.
Wen and her colleagues found the field work hard but also fun and productive, doing what they love to do and to better document these economically important plant species. The targeted field work has led to the discovery of several key variations of the economically important plant lineages that are not preserved in herbarium collections. The summer collections have filled in many gaps of the current knowledge on grapes and hickories, demonstrating that the discovery phase of biodiversity science is far from over. Wen and her associates and collaborators will soon start to analyze the collections using genomic and morphological tools to try to better understand the evolutionary patterns and processes of the grape and hickory species. They will also integrate the evidence from herbarium work, field studies, and cutting-edge phylogenomic analyses to revise the taxonomy of both of these economically important plant groups.
All photos by Jun Wen and Stefanie Ickert-Bond unless otherwise noted.
Left: Jun Wen Collecting Vitis aestivalis.
Right: Stefanie Ickert-Bond collecting Vitis berlandieri.
Left: Nutmeg hickory in eastern Texas. This hickory is very rare, and now Jun Wen has collected it in South Carolina, Alabama, and eastern Texas.
Right: The bark of nutmeg hickory.
Left: The nutmeg hickory tree is very tall. Here it is in a floodplain forest owned by Mr. Greg Grant, a citizen who strives to conserve important forests. In this photo, Grant and Ickert-Bond collect nutmeg hickory specimens, while Wen checks the fruits.
Right: Grant helps collect black hickory, Carya texana, which was just 400 ft away from the nutmeg hickory. There were five species of hickories in this one forest in eastern Texas. These private woods are conserved by Grant.
Left: Mexican buckeye on the Edward's Plateau.
Right: Ickert-Bond collecting an unusual Vitis hybrid in Lampasas, Texas. Native grapes from this area played an important role in saving the French grape industry from phylloxera (an insect pest of commercial grapevines), thanks to the efforts by the great viticulturalist T.V. Munson.
Left: The easternmost population of Vitis arizonica, just north of Rocksprings, north of Del Rio, Texas.
Right: Jun Wen at work in her hotel room pressing, recording, and placing DNA samples into silica gel.
Left: Wen and Ickert-Bond tour and collect in the John Fairey Garden near Hempstead, Texas, with horticultural botanist Wally Wilkins. (photo by Randy Twaddle)
Right: Sue Lutz collecting Carya floridana in Central Florida.
Left: Vitis berlandieri in its full glory on Grape Creek Road in Grape Creek, Texas.
Right: Wen and Ickert-Bond dug up a few roots and saplings of grapevine species to grow at the Smithsonian Botany Research Greenhouses. They mailed them back to Washington, DC in FedEx boxes.
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