More Chen Yi plants

[Jim McClements, Dover, DE z6]

In a message dated 6/15/99 8:02:46 PM, grsjr at JUNO.COM writes:

<< I suggest that AEG members report seed offered to the AEG Seedex
using the Chen Yi number coupled with the year purchased.
One could include the reported Chen Yi name in parentheses
where no number was assigned by Chen Yi.
>>

Ray

One problem here, as I pointed out last month, is that Chen Yi changed a
bunch of the numbers when she inserted an extra "A. candidissimum var." into
the list. Also, I, and perhaps others, no longer have her numbers for the
species that were offered after the original list.

And even if the number and name are used together, they can still obviously
be different species, as evidenced by my "Sp#12", 2 plants which appear quite
different. It's a real can of worms!  AEG, being the group of "experts",
shouldn't be responsible for spreading  arisaemas that are misidentified, yet
it's obvious that a lot of us are going to have seed of some rare species
which should be shared.

Maybe, as an interim solution, AEG could use its own code, and avoid
assigning any species name to any Chen Yi plant. For instance, even though A.
wilsonii is probably correctly ID'd, all seeds sent to Craig under that name
could be called "AEG 1", with the proviso that each code name will be
identified later as it becomes possible to do so. It might work out that "AEG
14" (which could be Chen Yi's Sp #12) turns out to all the same species but
takes a while to be sure. But it's not called A. yunnanense until we're
relatively sure that all of the plants are the same. If it turns out to be 2
species, we haven't perpetuated bad information.

Jim