Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: This issue of Curtis's Botanical Magazine is devoted to the remarkable Gondwanan genus Nothofagus, the southern beeches. A genus of 37 extant species, plus a number of naturally occurring and horticultural hybrids, and over 30 extinct taxa, it is known only from areas within the former Gondwana landmass. Although best-known to northern horticulturists and foresters as trees from South America, with a few from temperate Australasia, half the species occur in the tropics, with centres of diversity on the islands of New Guinea (14 species) and New Caledonia (5 species). Most of the tropical taxa are poorly known and some are considered to be critically endangered; almost none are in cultivation and we do not profile any of them here. The impetus for this special issue has been the Plant Heritage-recognised National Plant Collection of Nothofagus cultivated at Wakehurst, from which twelve widely grown species are described and illustrated here. In addition, personnel based at Kew, Botanic Gardens Conservation International and Wakehurst have in recent years been active in evaluating the conservation status of Nothofagus (Baldwin et al., 2018) and in developing a conservation strategy for the genus as part of the Global Conservation Consortium for Nothofagus (Steed-Mundin et al., 2024). I encourage you to read the text as a single work, as it has been prepared to avoid undue repetition. The Plant Portraits have been grouped in systematic order by subgenus: Lophozonia, Fuscospora, Nothofagus (no members of the tropical subgenus Brassospora are included). We have chosen to retain the traditional unified genus Nothofagus but it is clear that it contains four ancient lineages that can be treated (as here, and widely around the world) as subgenera, or as genera in their own right, an approach that has found widespread acceptance in the New Zealand botanical and horticultural community. We hope that this special part of Curtis's Botanical Magazine will stimulate a greater interest in the southern beeches, an under-rated but attractive and useful genus of trees with wide adaptability for horticulture and forestry in the United Kingdom and other areas with a temperate maritime climate. There is a great depth of information here, providing rounded ‘biographies’ for the species covered. It has been coordinated by Jo Wenham and Olivia Steed-Mundin from Wakehurst, who have also written a large proportion of the text. I am extremely grateful to them for their hard work over an extended period of time. Our collective thanks are due to the authors who have produced such informative articles, the botanical artists and all those who have supplied images and information.
Source: Curtis s Botanical Magazine
DOI: 10.1111/curt.12608
Author: John Grimshaw
Language: English
Subfield: Plant Science
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4408334373