Rubus creticus Tournefort ex Linnaeus (1756: 15)

Ferrer-Gallego, P. Pablo & Beek, Abraham Van De, 2024, After the conservation of Rubus ulmifolius (Rosaceae), Phytotaxa 677 (3), pp. 289-297 : 290

1. Rubus creticus Tournefort ex Linnaeus (1756: 15)

Lectotype (designated by Van de Beek 2016: 46):— GREECE. Crete, s.d., Tournefort 6073 (P-TRF, 2-D, code P00680425 ).

The earliest rejected name is R. creticus Linnaeus (1756: 21) . This has been rejected now in favour of R. ulmifolius . In the general committee considered rejection of the name R. creticus , but decided to postpone a decision for this issue because of discussions about nomenclature and taxonomy ( Wilson 2024).

Firstly, there is a discussion about the validity of the publication of R. creticus . In the Flora Palestina, the name is written in italics. In the introduction, Linnaeus (1756: 10) writes: ‘Plantas … nondum vero determinatas, literis cursivis, ut vocant, annotavi’. This sentence can be interpreted in three ways:

a. Plants that were not identified previously are printed in italics; so these are new names.

b. The identity of these plants is still unclear; so they are only provisionally mentioned.

c. The identity of these plants as such is clear, but it is not certain that the specimens that were collected in Palestine or Egypt are identical with these.

The present authors will deal with this issue in a separate paper.

The discussion on taxonomy deals with the relation of R. creticus and R. ulmifolius . Van de Beek (2016) mentions several arguments for conceiving them as infraspecific taxa. Especially the gradual shift in characteristics on the Balkan from the western to the eastern form is a strong argument for this. If they were two separate species all these forms on the Balkan and the Greek archipelago, including the plants that Tournefort (1703) and Schreber (1766) used for their descriptions, would be hybrids. However, they do not look like hybrids; they only have characteristics, in varying compositions, of both the eastern and the western form.

So we keep to our opinion ( Ferrer-Gallego & Van de Beek 2021) that they are infraspecific taxa. This was also the opinion of earlier authors (e.g., Focke 1902: 504 [as R. ulmifolius subsp. anatolicus Focke ], Sudre 1909: 76, Juzepczuk 1941: 24, Parsa 1948: 105, Van de Beek 2016: 46). If R. creticus is conceived as a subspecies of R. ulmifolius (as thus the authors of this paper do), the correct name is R. ulmifolius subsp. anatolicus Focke (1886: 325) , the oldest available epithet at the rank of subspecies.

More definitive conclusions can be drawn after molecular research. The most important will be to investigate plants from Greece and especially from Chania on Crete, where the team of Tournefort collected the specimens that he (1703) and Schreber (1766) used for their publications. The results of such taxonomic research may make nomenclature easier.