In article ,
Malcolm writes:
|
| I think that either he or you didn't mean to type that, unless he is
| using a new and extremely bizarre meaning of the word "native"!
| It is more traditionally called "of garden origin".
|
| I wish to retract my claim that Stace's use of "native" was certainly an
| error as I have been in contact with the man himself, querying his use
| of it.
|
| He replied saying that there is disagreement among botanists as to what
| can be regarded as a native taxon! For hybrids, his own view is that
| any that arose in the UK can be called native, whether or not its
| parents are native (not least because quite often such hybrids occur
| nowhere else). In the case of the Russell Lupin, although the hybrid
| arose in cultivation, it also did in the wild, and it is this latter
| occurrence that led him to use the term native in the New Flora,
| reinforcing this with the words "spontaneous hybrids".

Thank you. Most interesting. That confirms my view that the term is,
at best, scientifically largely meaningless as it applies to the British
Isles.

Inter alia, a huge number of such hybrids were FIRST crossed in the UK,
but have been INDEPENDENTLY crossed elsewhere. Does a variety of
something grown in the USA, none of whose ancestors have grown in the
British Isles for at least the past 10 million years, count as native
to the British Isles because the first cross of its two parent species
was made here? :-)

And does a Spanish bluebell count as native provided that it has at
least some English bluebell in its ancestry? And would that still be
true if the Englishness was only in its ancestry and not its genes?

And so on ....


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.