Justicia prostrata (Roxb. ex C.B. Clarke) Gamble (1921: 1081)

Soumya, Puliyakode & Sunojkumar, Purayidathkandy, 2018, Lectotypification of three names in Justicia (Acanthaceae), Phytotaxa 350 (1), pp. 97-100 : 97

Justicia prostrata (Roxb. ex C.B. Clarke) Gamble (1921: 1081)

≡ Justicia diffusa var. prostrata Roxb. ex Clarke (1885: 538)

Type (Lectotype designated here):— INDIA ( K 000884088) Fig. 2.

Notes:— Justicia diffusa var. prostrata was originally described by Clarke (1885) in Flora of British India, but he did not mention any material as type and where it was housed. Within the protologue, he mentioned “Roxb. ms.” and also cited the location “Deccan Peninsula and Ceylon ”. In his Flora of the Presidency of Madras, Gamble (1921) elevated Clarke’s variety to the specific rank as Justicia prostrata . He also did not designate a type, but he gave a small description to the plant and mentioned some locations where the plant is available. Graham (1988) mentioned a syntype (at K) with the locality "Deccan peninsula and Ceylon " against J. prostrata . Following this, we traced two specimens at K ( K 000884088, K 000884089) and both collections are from India. One of this is Wight’s specimen kept under the name J. prostrata , and the other by Perrottet under the name J. diffusa var. prostrata . A close examination reveals that two specimens are mounted on Perrottet’s sheet. The one at top on the left corner apparently belongs to Roxburgh’s collection, with the annotation “East India, Dr. Roxburgh, Herb. Forsyth, Purchased 1835” and the bottom one belongs to Perrottet’s collection. According to Stafleu and Cowan (1983), Roxburgh did not keep a personal herbarium but distributed his Indian collections widely. The personal collections of Forsyth (both William Forsyth (1737–1804) and his son William Forsyth, Jr. (1772–1835)) that included Roxburgh’s collections was purchased by Kew in 1835. Here all these specimens (Roxburgh’s, Wight’s & Perrottet’s) can qualify as original materials according to the Art. 9.3 (a) of the ICN ( McNeill et al., 2012). Moreover, Clarke used all these Kew materials for his descriptions, because both two sheets have annotated by Clarke. So it is reasonable to assume that all three collections are the original material used by Clarke. Gamble’s annotation “Flora of the Presidency of Madras” is also seen on these sheets, which clearly depicts that he consulted these materials during his study. Since Clarke ascribed the varietal name to Roxburgh, we selected Roxburgh’s collection ( K 000884088) as lectotype according to Art. 9.2, 9.11 & 9.12 of the ICN ( McNeill et al., 2012).