Chen Yi Plants

[George R Stilwell, Jr.]

I stand corrected. The Chen Yi A-24 was from the 1999 list not the 1998
list. In fact,
the 1998 list skipped from A-17 to A-34.

Thanks to Duncan McAlpine, I made two spreadsheets, one for 1998 and one
for 1999.
Then I started searching the archives. There were auxiliary lists, plants
with the same number
are often different (even in the same batch), all I can say is UNCLE!!!!
I doubt there's any hope
of getting a cross reference of any real value. There are Chen Yi plants
that are not on either list.
They probably were on one of the supplements.

Out of a list of 90 plants for both years, there are 14 with established
identities and 3 of them
had more than one species under one number.

I think Jim put it best in his post:

<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.>

So, who'd like to volunteer to keep track of this mess????

Ray
<GRSJr at Juno.com>

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