Maurice Mason – farmer, plant hunter and friend to the National Botanic Gardens, Glasnevin, Dublin, Ireland

Maurice Mason is well documented as an accomplished amateur horticulturist and plant collector. His contributions to horticulture were recognised by his guest attendance at the Kew Guild Annual Dinner in 1960 and the award of the Royal Horticultural Society’s Victoria Medal of Honour in the same year. He was generous in sharing his plant collections, and this generosity extended to Ireland. His less well-known contribution to Irish horticulture through the National Botanic Gardens, Glasnevin is outlined here.

A reassessment of Eugenia astringens (Myrtaceae) and its synonyms, including their formal typification

Giovanni Casaretto published Eugenia rotundifolia Casaretto (1842: 40) using material that he collected in Restinga vegetation between Copacabana and Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Berg (1857: 287) treated E. rotundifolia Casaretto as a distinct species, and recognized two varieties. However, the binomial E. rotundifolia (Walker-Arnott 1836: 335) Wight (1841: 17) was previously published for a taxon occurring in Sri Lanka. Therefore, Casaretto’s name is a later superfluous homonym and illegitimate. In a recent article on the typification of plant names published by Casaretto, Delprete et al. (2019) proposed E. casarettoana Delprete (2019: 25) as a substitute name for E. rotundifolia Casaretto. However, Delprete and his collaborators overlooked that the name E. casarettoana O. Berg (1857: 520) was previously published using material collected by Martius near the town of Coari, state of Amazonas, Brazil, and belongs to a distinct species occurring in the Brazilian Amazon. Also, Berg (1857) spelled the specific epithet “casaretteana” without explaining to whom he dedicated the epithet. It is obvious that it was dedicated to Casaretto, as no other botanist or plant collector has a similar last name. Therefore, according to Recommendation 60C of the ICN (Turland et al. 2018), the spelling of this epithet should be corrected to casarettoana, as it has been done for this and other specific epithets dedicated to Casaretto (Delprete 2016).

Alwyn Hasso von Wedel (1873–1957): bird and plant collector on the Caribbean coast of Panama

Hasso von Wedel, usually “H. Wedel” on specimen labels, settled on the northwestern Caribbean coast of Panama in the province of Bocas del Toro in 1898 and sustained himself mainly through the production of picture postcards and as a photographer for the United Fruit Company. He learned to prepare bird specimens in 1926 and collected widely in Bocas del Toro for various museums, mainly Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology, at least up until 1939. Wedel made the first collections of birds from the easternmost Caribbean coast of Panama in the Comarca de San Blas at intervals from 1929 until 1934. He learned the fundamentals of botanical collecting in 1938 and made extensive collections of plants for the Missouri Botanical Garden from then until 1941, his specimens forming the basis for dozens of presumed new species, at least ten of which were named for him. His biological explorations appear to have ceased about the time the United States entered the Second World War, although he lived in Changuinola, Bocas del Toro, until his death at Almirante in 1957.

Second-step typification of Statice insignis, basionym of Limonium insigne (Plumbaginaceae)

Cosson (1852: 177) described Statice insignis (Plumbaginaceae Juss.), providing a detailed description of this species, reporting several localities of provenance and indicating a pertinent gathering by the French traveler and plant collector Eugène Bourgeau: “In salsuginosis Hispaniae australioris, in regno Granatensi ad urbem Vera (E. Bourgeau, pl. Esp. n. 1442) et ad oppidula Santa-Fe et Roqueta (E. Bourgeau, 1851)”.