Iresine interrupta Bentham (1844: 156)

Sandoval-Ortega, Manuel Higinio & Zumaya-Mendoza, Silvia, 2023, Types of some Mexican names in Amaranthaceae s. l. (Caryophyllales), Phytotaxa 597 (1), pp. 8-14 : 10

2. Iresine interrupta Bentham (1844: 156) .

Lectotype (designated here):― MEXICO. Tepic , Sinclair s.n. (K000195155 [image!] image available at http://apps.kew.org/herbcat/ getImage.do?imageBarcode=K000195155http://specimens.kew.org/herbarium/K000195155).

= Iresine acuminata Moquin-Tandon (1849: 345) .

Holotype: ― MEXICO. Bates s.n. ( P00438664 [image!] image available at http://coldb.mnhn.fr/catalognumber/mnhn/p/p00438664).

Note on the type of Iresine interrupta : ― Bentham (1844: 156) provided a short morphological description for Iresine interrupta ; no collector name or collection number are given, whereas two Mexican localities (“Tepic”, in the state of Nayarit; and “Acapulco” in the state of Guerrero) are reported. At K there are three specimens of I. interrupta , all bearing a label written by Bentham (barcodes K000195154, K000195155 and K000195156).

The label on K000195155 reads “Tepic” and the name “Hooker” and the year 1845, one year after the publication of I. interrupta . However, this information does not correspond to the collector and year of collection since W. Hooker did not collected material from Acapulco and was not part of the H.M.S. (Her Majesty’s ship) Sulphur crew. The collector seems to be Sinclair, whose name is written on the label, just after “Tepic”. Raven (1964) explains why some Bentham’s labels have a date that does not correspond to the collection date, indicating that Bentham wrote the year in which he included the duplicates provided by Hooker in his own herbarium.

The label on K000195156 reads “Acapulco” and the last name “Barclay”, who was the official collector sent out by the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew. Some of the material collected by Barclay came into the possession of Hooker, who became director of the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew in 1941, and who provided those specimens to Bentham ( Raven 1964).

Finally, on the sheet K000195154 reads “ Mexico ” and “Beechey”.

W. Hooker sent to Bentham all the specimens collected by Hinds, Sinclair and Barclay and other members of the H.M.S. Sulphur crew. About this matter, Raven (1964) wrote: “It is important to note that all of this material was available to Bentham throughout the time he was conducting his studies, and hence all of it is equally important for purposes of typification”.

Borsch et al. (2018) cited one of these specimens (K000195155) as the holotype. According to Art. 9.1 of ICN, that specimen cannot be the holotype, but it is a sintype (Art. 9.6 of ICN). K000195155 is designated as lectotype, matching the protologue and the current concept in Iresine ( Calderón de Rzedowski 2005, Sandoval-Ortega 2020).