Union of Chionanthus and Linociera (Oleaceae)

Abstract

Reasons for the union of Chionanthus and Linociera are presented, and the following new combinations are made: Chionanthus guianensis (Aublet) Stearn, C. panarnensis (Standley) Stearn, C. bakeri (Urban) Stearn, C. axilliflorus (Griseb.) Stearn, C. cubensis (P. Wilson) Stearn, C. bumehioides (Griseb.) Stearn, C. dictyophyllus (Urban) Stearn, C. urbanii (Knobl.) Stearn, C. dussii (Krug & Urban) Stearn, and C. holdridgii (Camp & Monachino) Stearn. A survey of morphological together with palynological characters in a diversity of species from America, Africa and Asia, which have been referred to the genera Chionanthus L., Mayepea Aublet, Linociera Swartz and Tessarandra Miers, a survey undertaken in the hope of finding correlated diagnostic characters which would permit at least the maintenance of Chionanthus and Linociera as distinct genera in volume 6 (ined.) of the Flora of Jamaica, has convinced me that these must all be treated as congeneric. The correct name for this large essentially tropical group commonly known as Linociera is Chionanthus, based on one of its few temperate representatives, the North American Chionanthus virginicus L. This shrub or small tree loses its leaves in autumn and covers itself in spring with drooping panicles of white flowers, easily recognizable by their four linear corolla lobes and two short stamens. It had reached Dutch gardens by 1736 and was already known there as Sneebaum or Sneeuwboom (snow tree), a vernacular name which led Linnaeus's friend Adrian van Royen to suggest the generic name Chionanthus (from xtv, chion, snow). Linnaeus adopted this in the first edition (1737) as well as the fifth edition (1754) of his Genera Plantarum and used it in his Hortus Cliffortianus (1738). He named the species Chionanthus virginica in the Species Plantarum (1753), treating the generic name as feminine because the plants were trees or large shrubs. It is the lectotype of Chionanthus, Linnaeus having added in 1747 a Ceylon species, his C. zeylonica, with which Thouinia nutans L. f. (1781) and Chionanthus purpureus Lam. (Linociera purpurea (Lam.) Vahl) are conspecific. In 1775 Aublet published the name Mayepea guianensis in his Histoire des Plantes de la Guiane Franqoise (Vol. 1: 81, tab. 31) for a plant found in French Guiana, the generic name being a latinization of a vernacular name Mayepe. No known plant, however, exactly corresponds to Aublet's illustration. Some apparently alternate leaves are possibly due to one leaf of a pair falling before the other. The attribution of four stamens may be due to an error of observation influenced by the existence of four corolla lobes or, since Chionanthus virginicus, though normally with two stamens in a flower, sometimes produces four, Aublet may have chanced upon an abnormal specimen. The Aublet specimen representative of his Mayepea guianensis in the general herbarium of the British