In message .com, Dave
Poole writes
On Nov 4, 6:56 pm, "'Mike'" wrote:
An irrelevant assemblage of ill-understood information, which proves
Sacha's point. Any fool can trawl info about one species of a genus
and attach it to another. It happens all too often and results in a
slurry of disinformation.
As you no doubt realise the problem with the web is distinguishing good
information from bad. Wikipedia's not as bad as I feared it would be -
it's not a bad first port of call for many subjects - but it's hardly
authoritative.
So I went to the Flora of China being produced at Harvard University
(Arnold Arboretum?), in collaboration with Chinese botanists (and RBGE).
It appears that there's only a draft up for Rutaceae. See
http://flora.huh.harvard.edu/china/m...-CAS_final.htm
a. Skimmia anquetilia. Western Himalaya to Afghanistan. Shrub to 2 m.
Not recorded at that size outside native haunts and only rarely seen
that large in the Western Himalayas. In Afghanistan it remains very
dwarf due to the extreme climate. Rarely grown.
Not in Flora of China. More surprisingly not in Flora of Pakistan, which
only has Skimmia laureola, nor in Flora of Nepal Checklist, even tho'
IPNI gives the range as Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nepal.
Hillier, which is all I can conveniently find on this, just says "a
small shrub". I would have thought that JSTOR would have had the
original description in Curtis's Botanical Magazine, but Google's not
finding it, and anyway I don't have a JSTOR subscription, and it's too
recent to be in Botanicus or Google Books.
b.. Skimmia arborescens. Eastern Himalaya to southeast Asia. Shrub or
small tree to 15 m
"Tree to 8 m"
Never been cultivated above 4m. Rarely grown.
e. Skimmia japonica. Japan, Korea, China. Shrub to 7 m.
Skimmia japonica is not in the Flora of China. I guess that the
reference to China in the above applies to Skimmia reevesiana.
However going to the Flora of Japan at the University of Tokyo. See
http://foj.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp/gbif/foj/
gives us "60-200 cm tall", i.e. 0.6-2 m.
Not seen anywhere near that size outside its native haunts. Such
plants are well in excess of 100 years old.
a. Skimmia japonica subsp. reevesiana (syn. S. reevesiana)
"Shrubs 1-2 m tall". Hillier says less.
Very compact and rarely seen above 1m.
h. Skimmia laureola. Nepal to Vietnam and China. Shrub or small tree to
13 m.
"Shrub to 1.3 m." Did someone lose a decimal point?
Maximum 3m. in cultivation. Rarely grown.
Wikipedia is only as good as the information posted to it. In this
case it is less than useless.
I guess some of the discrepancies are due to differences between the
size of the usual run of the species, and the extreme specimens -
there's a Malva sylvestris down the canal from me which reaches 3m,
twice what Flora Europaea gives, and thrice what Stace gives (the
Mediterranean forms are larger).
Of course, from the point of view of Sacha and her customers, it's the
expected, not extreme, size that is relevant, and also the size that is
reached within a sensible period of time.
--
Stewart Robert Hinsley