” Dear all:
\none thing I learned from studying cancer …. which is also a study of structure, biology behaviour…
\none thing I learned: is that we should try to keep an open mind…
\nthings may turn out to be quite different and may surprise the heck out of the learned minds, sometimes…
\nnothing is written in stone… none of these floras.. or hortuses or whoever… went on the mountain and returned with a burning bush… these are not commandments from god… merely guidelines made by experts from some local university groups or botanical gardens, \u00a0they study hard and make deductions BUT\u00a0what they say should sometimes be taken as a guideline and not a commandment…
\nI am sure they never came to India and saw these
murraya<\/i> plants in action…
\nmay be it behooves someone\/ one two a few … from our group to do that…
\nsomewhere in this thread I had even agreed to collect specimen and preserve and send for genetic analysis if someone was interested… or had the grant monies and lab equipment and grad students to do the research….
\nso lets not fight … but do something constructive…<\/div>\nmay be we should have a\u00a0
Murraya panniculata<\/i> week…. once every 3 months, that will cover the entire year’s worth of the plants behaviour… leaf only, leaf and flowering stage, \u00a0fruiting stage and dormancy in deep winter… which would perhaps be different \u00a0in different parts of India… where people will take pictures in Prescribed format, with rulers \/\/\/ \u00a0 \u00a0and collect twigs, plant material fruits… etc… and press herbarium specimen… from all states of India….<\/div>\nand may be ceylon … kamini grows there too…<\/div>\n
LETS THINK ABOUT THIS….<\/div>\n
\n
Thanks for this new idea, I fear studying only morphological features of few photographs won’t help much. As you must be aware the important decisions these days are taken on the basis of collecting data from thousands of specimens\/populations regarding attributes of morphology, anatomy, embryology, palynology, and more recently DNA, RNA and proteins. This huge data is subjected to sophisticated phylogenetic analysis<\/b><\/u> to generate phylogenetic trees, and the nesting of different taxa decides which two are closer and how much. supposing out of 20 taxa studied 18 are separated by at least 20 percent (or any other unit) and two by only 5 percent (or so). It would be logical to merge these two. It is only these studies which led to the merger of Apocynaceae<\/i> and Asclepiadaceae<\/i>, and separation of\u00a0Liliaceae<\/i> into so many families.<\/span><\/div>\nFor more than 100 years or so Nerium indicum<\/i> and Nerium oleander<\/i> were treated as distinct species, and no one questioned it, but now that studies have shown that especially the molecular data does not support this separation, the two are merged, and no one seems to question it. The same has been true for the merger of tomato back into Solanum<\/i> after nearly 250 years.