Cistanche tubulosa

Aldughayman, Majed, Thorogood, Chris J. & Hawkins, Julie A., 2024, Neotypification of Cistanche tubulosa (Schenk) Wight ex Hook. f.: a name applied to a widely distributed, polyphyletic group of plants, Phytotaxa 633 (1), pp. 9-16 : 12

Cistanche tubulosa as synonym of Cistanche tinctoria (Forssk.) Beck

The basionym Orobanche tinctoria was published in 1775 by Peter Forsskål for a plant he collected in Yemen ( Forsskål, 1775). Forsskål, a student of Linnaeus, arrived in Arabia Felix (present-day Yemen) in December 1762 and died there the following July. In his protologue he describes the plant as collected ‘ad urbem Mȏr’, meaning ‘near the town or city of Mȏr’. The authors of Index of Orobanchaceae ( Sánchez Pedraja et al., 2023) interpret this to be in Wadi Mawr, a valley in Yemen. The lectotype designated by Moreno Moral et al. (2017), is a specimen held at the Natural History Museum of Denmark C 10002702, herb. Vahl – Forsskål, 1537. The date of publication of this basionym certainly predates the publication date of the basionym of C. tubulosa . The justification for synonymising C. tubulosa under C. tinctoria was that Forsskål’s specimen ‘represents something we understand today as C. tubulosa (inflorescence dense and many-flowered, corolla with the tube narrow and strongly curved).’ Notwithstanding, the name C. tubulosa is still the most widely applied today (used in at least 21 regional floras). Given the difficulties in interpreting morphological characters in this genus – especially in herbarium specimens – it is timely to review whether the two entities are correctly synonymised ahead of a new phylogeny that includes sequence data from the neotype designated here.