Botanist Interior 42.3

164 THE MICHIGAN BOTANIST Vol. 42 BOOK REVIEWS Riley, John L. 2003. FLORA OF THE HUDSON BAY LOWLAND AND ITS POSTGLACIAL ORIGINS. NRC Research Press, National Research Council of Canada, Building M-55, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1A 0R6. Paperback; viii + 236 pp. ISBN 0-660-18941-0. US$49.95; also CAN$49.95, at their website, where no information on credit cards is given and the on-line order form is out of commission, but one can e-mail them at [email protected] The Hudson Bay Lowland occupies 3.5% of all of Canada. It is one of the earth’s largest wetland landscapes, perhaps five times larger than the floodplain forests along the Amazon River. For the region, the author documents 816 natives vascular plant species and 98 non-native species. There are no keys and no descriptions, but the sources of the nomenclature are given in detail. In Appendix A, pages 101 through 175, there are distribution maps, which combine occurrence maps (dots) with range-limit maps (heavy black line). These range limits are difficult to interpret. For example, Fig. A63, Elymus vir- ginicus in eastern Canada, shows a range-limit line running roughly from New- foundland to Manitoba. (Since the range of the species is Newfoundland to Al- berta, south to Florida and Arizona, the line may be understood to extend indefinitely to the west.) I take the line to mean, “This species occurs generally south of this line.” But there are 8 dots (and one asterisk) north of the line, with some far outside the limits of the Hudson Bay Lowland. Taken literally, the map appears to be saying that the dots fall outside the range (an interpretation that makes no sense), or that the dots represent new information, and the position of the range limits should now be changed. Or consider Fig. A147, Zannichellia palustris in eastern Canada: the species occurs essentially throughout North America, and the dots (for specimens the author actually saw) for the Lowland are easily interpretable, but there are also dots for sites along the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes, while the heavy black “range-limit line” runs down the St. Lawrence and interruptedly through Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, and on west of Lake Winnipeg. This is emphatically not a limit of the range of the species. I think I am being most un- fair to the author, but I cannot figure out what is meant by these lines. There are 32 color plates, some showing the terrain, others showing particular species. In general, this work will be of particular interest to the plant geog- rapher, and especially to students of post-glacial re-establishment of a flora. ——Neil A. Harriman Biology Department University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh Oshkosh, Wisconsin 54901 USA [email protected] 2003 THE MICHIGAN BOTANIST 165 Semple, John C., Stephen B. Heard, and Luc Brouillet. 27 November 2002. Cul- tivated and Native Asters of Ontario (Compositae: Astereae). Aster L. (including Asteromoea Blume, Diplactis Raf., and Kalimeris (Cass.) Cass.), Callistephus Cass., Galatella Cass., Doellingeria Nees, Oclemena E. L. Greene, Eurybia (Cass.) S. F. Gray, Canadanthus Nesom, and Symphyotrichum Nees (including Virgulus Raf.) University of Waterloo Biology Series 41: viii + 1-134. Paper- back, Perfect or spiral bound. $28 + $10 s&h, with checks payable to “Univer- sity of Waterloo—Biology Series,” addressed to Biology Series, Department of Biology, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, Waterloo, On- tario, Canada N2L 3G1. No credit cards. Because this fine volume contains numerous nomenclatural innovations, and is itself only dated as “2002,” I am taking the liberty of amplifying that date, to reflect the date of the cover letter that accompanied the review copy. Absent any other information, that date may be taken as an indication of when this publica- tion became available to the botanical public. If you just glance through the book, you are left wondering, “Where have all the asters gone?” About the only things treated under Aster are cultivated plants of Old World origin; nearly all the plants that most people think of as asters are now distributed among seven other genera, as given in the extended title above. There’s only one species, Aster culminis A. Nelson, that’s native to Ontario, and it’s only known from one collection near Hudson Bay. The matter is handled very succinctly in the preface, page viii, written by John C. Semple alone, [and dated September 2002]: “The genus Aster is re- stricted to the Old World, and all the species of asters native to North America are members of other genera and are related to non-aster genera.” Why the plant from Hudson Bay, which is otherwise distributed from Alaska to the high eleva- tions of Colorado is still called Aster is not explained. Semple’s underlying principle is this: plant names allow communication and information retrieval. But plant names should also reflect phylogeny, as best that can be deduced, because this increases the information content of the name. Tra- ditional Aster is highly polyphyletic, according to the molecular data, and en- compasses members of many different branches of tribe Astereae. Traditional Aster, it is argued, was made up of all the species that were left over once all the other genera were separated out on their diagnostic features. It is what my un- dergraduate Botany professor called a “dustbin genus.” The Flora of North America volumes on Asteraceae are going to reflect this “new” arrangement, and in that spirit the authors offer us a primer as to what the botanical landscape is shortly going to look like. I say “new” in quotes, because the adopted generic names are almost entirely from the nineteenth century; Oclemena dates from 1903, and Canadanthus from 1994, but all the others (with respect to Ontario) are much older—reflecting earlier efforts to separate out the natural units. There is in preparation an extensively corrected version of Gleason & Cron- quist, Manual of Vascular Plants of Northeastern United States and Adjacent Canada. It will not be labelled as a new edition. It will still be edition 2 of 1991, with the pagination in the body of the book unchanged, and it will not show most 166 THE MICHIGAN BOTANIST Vol. 42 of these names, even in tiny italics in synonymy. Semple has foreseen this: “Un- fortunately, the new nomenclature will not be used in all floras that will be pub- lished in the next decade or two. Some will continue to treat all asters in the genus Aster; some people believe that the earth is flat.” The acidity of the remark aside, the fact remains that when the [presumed] phylogenetic content of plant names is maximized, as in this instance, communication and information retrieval are minimized, at least for a time. It is tempt- ing to suggest that the segregates could be handled nomenclaturally as subgen- era of a comprehensive genus Aster, but the cladogram on page 4 of this monograph makes it clear that this won’t work. If the molecular data have mean- ing, in concert with morphology and chromosome numbers, then the traditional notion of Aster has to give way. If you have had the pleasure of working with earlier contributions in this series, and I believe they are all still in print and available from John Semple, you will have noticed an evolution in the quality of the productions. This most recent one features 10 color plates, beautifully reproduced. There are keys that appear to work, and pen-and-ink illustrations with the quality we’ve come to expect. Cover three is devoted to listing out all the nomenclatural changes, so if you want to look up, say, Aster shortii, you can quickly and easily discover it’s now called Symphyotrichum shortii. All this is going to take a long time to digest. I am reminded of the uproar among taxonomists a couple of decades ago as an endless stream of small papers by Robert King and Harold Robinson served to dismember the genus Eupato- rium into dozens of smaller units. The problem in Eupatorium was that there were no comprehensive keys, so that one could see how all the arguments worked. This was eventually rectified by the production of a fine monograph on the entire tribe Eupatorieae, and then the segregate genera began to be accepted in local and regional floras. With respect to manifold rearrangements in Aster, we will have a full-scale treatment for North America within a couple of years, and then perhaps we can look forward to relative stability. Semple, Heard, and Brouillet have made a good start, and their work merits close attention. ——Neil A. Harriman Biology Department University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh Oshkosh, Wisconsin 54901 [email protected].

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