From Plant Press, Vol. 27, No. 2, April 2024.
By Robert J. Soreng.
In 1992 I examined and annotated the holotype at Kew (K) of Poa moabitica Bor (published in 1972). Labelled as, “Plants of the Holy Land Collected by W. A. Hayne,” the specimen was collected in 1872. As far as botanist Norman Bor knew, or I could discover, no one had collected this grass species since. Bor guessed the plant was collected in Jordan on the Moab Plateau because Hayne had published a general paper in 1872 “On The Flora of Moab”. The type specimen was unusual, mesophitic looking, tall, closed-sheathed, densely hairy-liguled, broad-leaved, large-panicled and small-spikeleted, floret callus hairs scant (easily missed) or absent, perennial. Back then I was not sure if it was a Poa or perhaps a Glyceria or something new until I saw the dorsal tuft of callus hairs, a trait known only from Poa.
My chance encounter in 2023 with two newer Henri A. Pabot specimens of P. moabitica, donated to the general herbarium at G (Geneva) in 1972, mistakenly determined as and filed under Poa chaixii Vill., lead to an extended investigation, combing through the old floristic literature of the Levant region (an historical geographical term referring to a large area in the Eastern Mediterranean region of West Asia), through many website searches (many dead ends), and language translations from French to Arabic and some back to English, and to contacts with multiple herbaria curators to track down where the original Hayne and newer Pabot specimens were actually collected, and where else Hayne’s collections might be housed.
The story of the original collection place revolved around Hayne’s fine set of Plants of the Holy Land, but there was little known about William Amherst Hayne other than he survived less than a year after returning to Oxford from his seminal foray to the Moab Plateau. In 1873 Kew received a full set of Hayne’s Plants of the Holy Land specimens but no itinerary has been reconstructed nor inventory of taxa or collections has been found. Unfortunately, most of the K labels of this set seen online have little or very sketchy provinces or dates. All this sleuthing shed a little more light on the short life of Hayne (1847-1873), that his collecting expedition extended northward to Lebanon and to Damascus, Syria, and that there is also a good set of duplicates at Oxford (OXF) with original labels, including places and dates.
This research led me to conclude that P. moabitica occurs only in wet habitats in forests of Lebanon and Syria, and not in Jordan as Bor assumed. As a result of my research, Harvard Index to Botanists has now been updated for Hayne and Pabot entries, and Plants of the World Online and Euro + Med PlantBase have corrected the ranges of both P. chaixii and P. moabitica.
Further detail about this research appears in my article, “Reassessment of Poa moabitica (Poaceae: Pooideae), mistaken identity of P. chaixii, and notes on Hayne’s Plants of the Holy Land,” (Kew Bulletin; http://doi.org/10.1007/S12225-024-10165-9). Poa moabitica belongs to P. sect. Homalopoa Dumort., is morphologically most similar to P. asiae-minoris H. Scholz & Byfield, of NW Anatolian Turkey, and allied to P. chaixii, P. hybrida Gaudin, and P. remota Forselles, which are mostly confined to Europe. The latter four are known to be diploids in the large (ca 580 spp.), predominantly polyploid genus. The paper also provides a good introduction to floras of the Levant Region.
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