Vereia Andrews

Smith, Gideon F., 2024, A review and analysis of the nomenclature and taxonomy of the genus-rank synonyms of Kalanchoe (Crassulaceae subfam. Kalanchooideae) published between 1763 and 1956, Phytotaxa 659 (3), pp. 236-254 : 240-242

2. Vereia Andrews (1798: t. 21), a heterotypic synonym of Kalanchoe Adanson (1763: 248) .

Type [species] of the genus name Vereia :— Vereia crenata Andrews (1798: t. 21), currently accepted name Kalanchoe crenata (Andrews) Haworth (1812: 109) ( Turland et al. 2018: Art. 10.2) ( Fig. 2A ).

Type specimen of the name Vereia crenata , basionym of Kalanchoe crenata :— SIERRA LEONE. “Hort. Vere 1798 (e Sierra Leone)” s.c. s.n. (holotype BM barcode BM000649706!), image available at https://data.nhm.ac.uk/object/ 598fa169-593f-4624-b9c0-526ae3457571 ( Fig. 2B ).

Nomenclatural notes:—The nomenclature and taxonomy of Vereia and of the species described in it was comprehensively discussed by Smith (2024b). Only a summary is provided here, with, where necessary for clarity of this discussion, background information and explanatory notes summarised or deliberately repeated from Smith (2024b).

The genus name Vereia , with, at the time, Vereia crenata Andrews (1798: t. 21) the only species included in it, was described 25 years after Adanson (1763: 248) published the genus name Kalanchoe , for a species today treated as belonging in Kalanchoe . Vereia was named for James Vere, a wealthy merchant, based at Kensington Gore, London. The material described originated from Sierra Leone, where it had been collected in 1793 by Adam Afzelius (1750– 1837), a Swedish botanist, and was cultivated in the garden of Vere, where William Anderson (1766–1846) was the gardener (Smith et al. 2018: 40–41, Smith et al. 2019: 153–154). However, as noted by Fernandes (1980: 338) it is likely that plants of V. crenata , i.e., of K. crenata , were known in Europe long before the species was described in the late-1700s—possibly already for as much as 100 years.

Andrews (1798: t. 21) did not cite the work of Adanson (1763) and he might have been unaware of the availability of the name Kalanchoe at genus rank, or he probably simply ignored Adanson (1763), because of Adanson’s approach to nomenclature in which the Linnaean system of binomials did not find favour. In addition, between 1792 and 1802 (and again soon thereafter) Great Britain and France was in military conflict as part of the French Revolutionary Wars, which might have further influenced Andrews (1798: t. 21) to not adopt a name published by Adanson, a Frenchman (Adanson was born in Aix-en-Provence in southern France).

Apart from the original spelling, Vereia used by Andrews (1798: t. 21) four further spellings of the genus name (as ‘ Verea ’, ‘ Veria ’, ‘ Veraea ’, and ‘ Vareia ’) have been traced in literature that dates from 1798 to 1840 ( Table 2).

One year after Andrews (1798: t. 21) published the genus name Vereia, Willdenow (1799: 471) treated “*792. VEREA [i.e., lacking the “ I ”]. Andrews repos. bot. 21.” in which only “*1. VEREA crenata .” was included. The genus name and species name were asterisked (*) because, as explained by Willdenow (1797: vii), these names had not been included in, inter alia, Linnaeus (1762), i.e., the second edition of Species plantarum, nor in Linnaeus (1774), i.e., the 13 th edition of Systema vegetabilium (which was edited by Johann Andreas Murray). Boiteau & Allorge-Boiteau (1995: 128) listed “ Verea pinnata (Lamarck) Willdenow ” as having been published [by Willdenow] in “Spec.: 471, 1799, Pl II”, but as far as could be ascertained there is no mention of the combination “ Verea pinnata ” in that work of Willdenow, nor 10 years later in Willdenow (1809: 433). Willdenow (1799: 471) carries the text for Verea crenata only, while Willdenow (1809: 433) treated that species, as well as Verea laciniata (Linnaeus 1753: 430) Willdenow (1809: 433) . However, tacitly endorsing the inclusion of Bryophyllum in the synonymy of Kalanchoe , the combination Verea pinnata (Lamarck 1786: 141) Sprengel (1825: 260) was eventually published. This species is often in the vernacular known as Goethe’s kalanchoe (Goethe 1857: 161–162) and is well-known in mild-climate parts of the world for easily becoming established—even naturalised and invasive—in places well-beyond its natural geographical distribution range in Madagascar ( Smith & Figueiredo 2018b: 220, Smith et al. 2019: 263–268, Smith et al. 2021a: 9–12, 18).

In terms of the orthography of the genus name, Persoon (1805: 446) followed Willdenow (1799: 471) and spelled it Verea , as did Andrews (1809: t. 560) himself, four years after Persoon (1805). Also in 1809, Willdenow (1809: 433) retained this spelling with, eventually, Sprengel (1825: 260) and Dietrich (1840: 1328) following suit.

However, when citing the basionyms, Vereia crenata Andrews (1798: t. 21) and Vereia acutiflora Andrews (1809: t. 560), of, respectively, the two names K. crenata (Andrews) Haworth (1812: 109) and K. acutiflora (Andrews) Haworth (1812: 109) , Haworth spelled the genus name “ Veria ”, i.e., without the second “ e ”, and with the “ i ” reintroduced. Haworth (1821: 23) still used this spelling, but, later, reverted to Vereia (Haworth 1829: 301, 303), i.e., the original spelling used by Andrews (1798: t. 21) with an “ i ” after the second “ e ”.

Candolle (1828:394–395)gave both“ Vereia Andr. bot.rep.t. 21.”as well as “ Verea Willd. ”under“X. KALANCHOE Adans. fam. 2. p. 248.” Under K. acutiflora he additionally introduced the spelling “V a reia acutiflora”.

Figures

FIGURE 2. A. Material of Kalanchoe crenata, the currently accepted name of Vereia crenata, the type [species] of the genus name Vereia. B. Type specimen (holotype) of the name V. crenata, basionym of Kalanchoe crenata: “Hort. Vere 1798 (e Sierra Leone)” s.c. s.n. (Herb. BM barcode BM000649706). Credits: Photograph 2A taken by Gideon F. Smith. Photograph 2B courtesy and reproduced with the permission of the Natural History Museum, London, United Kingdom. Photograph 2B is © and reproduced with the permission of The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London, United Kingdom. Use of Figure 2B is covered by Creative Commons Attribution CC BY licence.