The Plant Press

Weniomeles, a new genus in the rose family named in honor of Jun Wen

From Plant Press, Vol. 27, No. 2, April 2024.

By Bin-Bin Liu and Richard G.J. Hodel.

A new genus, Weniomeles B.B.Liu, was recently described by former Botany fellow Bin-Bin Liu in honor of Smithsonian Botany Curator Jun Wen, in recognition of her substantial contributions to botany. The genus Weniomeles is in the apple tribe, Maleae, within the rose family, Rosaceae. Wen’s extensive dedication to research and promoting collaboration has significantly advanced the field of botany, particularly in fostering Sino-American scholarly exchange within the plant systematics community. The international scientific partnerships she has worked to establish have broadened our collective botanical knowledge. Her influence and mentorship have inspired many researchers, leaving a lasting legacy in the botanical sciences.

Morphological characteristics of Weniomeles (type species W. bodinieri) and comparison with its close relatives Stranvaesia and Photinia. I, Weniomeles bodinieri (photos by Bin-Jie Ge); (a-b) a complete and partial inflorescence; (c-d) top view of a single flower (unopen vs. open); (e) bottom view of young flower; (f) longitudinal-section of ovary; (g) stamens; (h) cross-section of ovary; (i) pistil; (j) flower dissection; (k-l) infructescence; (m) fruit; (n) cross-section of fruit. II, thorns on the stems of Weniomeles bodinieri (photo by Bin-Bin Liu). III, Stranvaesia lasiogyna (photo by Long-Yuan Wang). IV, Photinia serratifolia (photo by Xin-Xin Zhu).

This new genus was recently described in the journal Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ympev.2023.107914), in a collaborative paper by Ze-Tao Jin and Jun Wu of Nanjing Agricultural University, Richard G.J. Hodel of the Smithsonian Institution (Botany Department and Data Science Lab), Bin-Bin Liu, Dai-Kun Ma, and Chao Xu from the Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Hui Wang and Shui-Hu Jin from Zhejiang Agriculture and Forestry University, Guang-Ning Liu from China National Botanical Garden, Chen Ren from South China National Botanical Garden, Bin-Jie Ge from Shanghai Chenshan Botanical Garden, and Qiang Fan from Sun Yat-sen University.

The new genus Weniomeles occupies a range from central and southern China to northern Vietnam and Indonesia. It is distinguished from other genera of the apple tribe by its purple-black fruits, thorny tree trunk and branches, and a distinctive fruit core anatomy characterized by multilocules separated by a layer of sclereids and a cluster of sclereids at the top of the locules.

A botanical detective story: uncovering the true type locality of a rare grass species

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.

Poa moabitica Bor, holotype K000789577, “Plants of the Holy Land COLLECTED BY W. A. HAYNE”, with “Adonis” crossed out.

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.

Mark M. Littler (1939-2023)

From Plant Press, Vol. 27, No. 2, April 2024.

Mark Masterton Littler, former Senior Scientist and Botany Departmental Chair, passed away on 25 July 2023 in New Mexico. He was 83 years old, born on 24 September 1939, in Athens, Ohio. Littler's lifelong passion for the outdoors began at an early age, fostered by explorations and fishing adventures in the aquatic habitats of his Appalachian surroundings. He discovered the thrill of saltwater fishing when his golf pro father moved the family to Key Biscayne, Florida, for the subsequent winters following the 1950 blizzard. He made his first scuba dive in 1955 in the upper Florida Keys at Fowey Rocks.  

Mark Littler in 2010. (photo by Chip Clark, Smithsonian Institution)

Littler graduated from Ohio University with a B.S. in 1961 and continued his academic pursuits at the same institution, earning an M.S. in Botany, focusing on the seasonal cycles of phytoplankton. It was at this time that Littler met his future wife, Diane Scullion. The two became inseparable collaborative colleagues for the rest of their professional careers. One rarely mentioned just one of “the Littlers”, it was much more common to hear someone mention them as they always were, together.

Department of Botany transitions to new leadership structure

From Plant Press, Vol. 27, No. 2, April 2024.

On March 1, 2024, Jun Wen became the new Chair of Botany at the National Museum of Natural History, while Eric Schuettpelz transitioned into a new role as Curator of the Herbarium. 

Jun Wen

Dr. Jun Wen (Chair of Botany). Jun Wen is a Research Botanist and Curator in the Department of Botany with a collections-based research program on phylogenetic systematics and biogeography of the flowering plants. Wen is a leading authority on the systematics of the ginseng plant family and the grape plant family. She has published extensively on the biogeographic relationships between eastern Asia and North America and the biogeographic patterns of Asian plants. Wen advocates collaborations and partnerships and she values collections. She has collected over 20,000 numbers of plant specimens. Wen works to inspire interest in science in young people. She actively mentors students and early-career professionals through the Smithsonian’s fellowship and internship programs. She has trained many young scientists on biodiversity and evolution through her extensive field work and collaborative research. Wen actively serves her professional communities and is currently the President of the American Society of Plant Taxonomists. She is a co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Systematics and Evolution and a co-editor of the Plant Systematics World column for Taxon published by International Association for Plant Taxonomy. Wen received her Ph.D. in Biology in 1991 at The Ohio State University. She completed a postdoctoral position at the Arnold Arboretum at Harvard University in 1994 and then moved to the Smithsonian for a postdoctoral fellowship. She was appointed as an assistant professor and curator of the herbarium at Colorado State University in 1995. She became an associate curator for The Field Museum in Chicago in 2000 and remained there for five years. In 2005 she joined the Smithsonian's Department of Botany. 

Eric Schuettpelz

Dr. Eric Schuettpelz (Curator of the Herbarium). Eric Schuettpelz is a Research Botanist and Curator in the Department of Botany, with a collections-based research program focused on pteridophytes. He earned a B.S. and M.S. from the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee and a Ph.D. from Duke University. After completing postdoctoral fellowships at Duke University and the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center, he spent three years as a faculty member at the University of North Carolina Wilmington before joining the Smithsonian's Department of Botany in 2013. His research on ferns and lycophytes has been mostly systematic in nature, emphasizing taxonomy and the identification of phylogenetic relationships. However, he has also published on rates of molecular evolution, biogeography, the evolution of epiphytism, and links between fern and flowering plant radiations. Today, he continues to integrate fieldwork, morphological and molecular data, and phylogenetic approaches to elucidate the evolutionary history of ferns and other vascular plant lineages. He served as Chair of Botany since early 2019. 

Wen, as Chair of Botany, will lead the department, with the support of Schuettpelz, as Curator of the Herbarium. Operationally, they will work as a team, overseeing responsibilities and staff under their purview while jointly conferring on shared items or with others within and outside the department as appropriate. They will attend meetings together when applicable and communicate consistently with Botany staff, seeking broader input where appropriate. Together they will form the leadership team for the Department of Botany.

As part of this transition, Sue Lutz has stepped away from her position as Acting Collections Manager. Lutz served admirably in this role for nearly 7 years and will continue to work closely with the Curator of the Herbarium on collections oversight. 

Wen is the 17^th Chair of Botany in the history of the U.S. National Herbarium, and the first woman and the first Asian-American to hold this title. For a past look at the Botany Chairs, see “A History of Chairs” in The Plant Press, Vol. 9, No. 4 (2006).