Szekessy Vilmos (szerk.): A Magyar Természettudományi Múzeum évkönyve 59. (Budapest 1967)
Radics, F.: A revision of the Nymphaea material in Hungarian Natural History Museum
It still seems as if our herbarial plants were actually Gastalia alba LINK var. venusta SIMK. (Nymphaea venusta HENTZE.) (HENTZE himself had considered these Nymphaeas as a distinct species, though he added in brackets also alba with a questionmark.) If there were still some doubts that SIMONKAI found, in indubitably the same locality, two kinds of waterlilies and had then described at times one and then the other — aside of having finally corrected the specific relegation of one of them — the painstaking examination of our herbarial plants reveals the cause of the respective uncertainties. For the safe recognition of the characteristic morphological features distinguishing the known Nymphaea species, I have undertaken the checking, parly on herbarial and partly on live plants, of the descriptions of mainly H. CONARD (1. c), J. SCHUSTER (13), R. CASPARY (1. a), S. KORSHLNSKY (14), P. ASCHERSON and P. GRAEBNER (1. c). I have done the same with respect to every relevant original description and the statements of our home and foreign horticultural journals as well as the applied botanical works of HENKEL (15) and S. LOVASSY (16). For diagnosting the specific differences and to obtain the necessary practice, I made protracted examinations of the hybrids growing in the lake around the Botanical Department in the City Park, Budapest. The existing uncertainty and confusion have been caused by the mutual or disparate appearance on the three Nymphaea specimens of the morphological features, discernible also on herbarial desiccates, of the alba, Candida, and even, the tetragona-types . The horizontal, blackish rhizome, the elevated leaf-cushions, and the long hairs on the roop-cap are alba features ; the strong lateral roots and the apically situated lamellar petioles and peduncle are candida-tr&its, while the apically not emarginate and not keeled stipules are tetragona marks. The locally emerging violet reddish tinge of the brownish black rhizome seems to be a new trait. The uniformly thick petiole and peduncle of one plant and the different thickness of these parts of another one point to a hybrid nature. The floating leaf of one plant is rounded with a slightly emarginate apex (albatype), but the surface of this same leaf is brown-spotted, the lobes are strongly divergent and their apex slightly projecting (tetragona-type), further, the underside of the lamella is a paler green, the veins rather prominent; on the upperside of the leaf, above the insertion of the petiole and along the primaries, it is not paler, the inner margins of the sinus is weakly arcuate distally, while the lower pair of the (lobal) primaries is arcuately convergent or, when theoretically lengthened, describing an oval (candida-type). The leaf of another of our plants is slightly cuspidate, the veins are prominent on the underside (rather a Candida feature), but it is still paler on the upperside above the insertion of the petiole (astomatic area) and on the primary veins (alba-type), whereas the slightly cuspidate and weakly divergent lobes of the rounded leaf speak more or less for tetragona traits. In both flowers, the roundedly quadrangular receptacle refers rather to a tetragona feature ; decidedly tetragona characters are the short, elevated, small lines on the dry sepals, the nearly equal length and parallel position of the anthers of the innermost stamens with those of the external ones, as well as the greater length of certain inner stamens than that of the outermost ones (indeed, of the outernmost anthers there is sometimes only one which had developed; CONARD, 1. c, p. 168). On the other hand, the graded (and not sudden) separation of the corolla from the staminal area is characteristic of the subgenus Eucastalia; further, in one of the flowers the petals have more rounded apices (candida feature) and longer stamens (alba feature), whereas in the other they have attenuating and obtuse apices, and the
