Mystery – part 7, Floribunda spots

19. 2019.5.23 – On more than one occasion some collector or other has sought retreat from an argument about species to some purported botanical expert (i.e. someone with a botany qualification) to support their wild guesses and assumptions about names. Too often such persons simply assume they know more about classification than any botanists might. Here are two plants of H. floribunda in a population that differ in having these strange white spots in the leaves. According to the H. groenewaldii argument it must surely be a new species. What about all the other plants in the population? Far more significant is that these plants are in a floribunda population not far from where “H. groenewaldii” (= H. mutica) occurs, where occasional plants have significant leaf spotting too. H. floribunda is very closely entangled with the greater retusoid complex where groenewaldii is secondary to the mutica element in that complex. Those spots must have a significant connection.