Zs. K. Komáromy szerk.: Studia Botanica Hungarica 17. 1984 (Budapest, 1984)

Vöröss, László Zsigmond: János Wagner's Tilia herbarium

STUDIA BOTANICA HUNGARICA (Antea: Fragmenta Botanica) XVII. 1984 p. 69-72 János Wagner's Tilia herbarium By L. Zs. VÖRÖSS (Received November 30, 1982) Abstract - WAGNER'

s Tilia collection containing primary and duplicate specimens has been re-arranged. The collection, presented to the Department of Botany of the Hungarian Natural History Museum by WAGNER, contains almost all the taxa of naturally occurring and cultivated Tilia of Hungary. WAGNER' s Tilia monograph appeared between 1941 and 1944. The present arrangement of the collection makes it possible to incorporate the primary specimens into the Herbarium Carpo-Pannonicum. János WAGNER was born in 1870 in Temeskeresztes and died in 1955 in Budapest. His Tilia collection is now deposited in the Department of Botany of the Hungarian Natural History Museum, presented there after completion of his linden monograph. Even after presenting his material, he continued to visit his collection to curate it and to further study it. The collection then had been in proper order, well-curated, but repeated translocations, moving of the whole department and transfer at the new site disordered the collection and caused the loss and damage of the marking slips of papers inserted into the files. Without these markers the original system cannot be recovered, and therefore the author undertook the task of completely reordering and curating the collection. János WAGNER began to study lindens in 1918, when he repeatedly visited Szeged as supervisor of the two teachers' training colleges in the town, and it struck him that the lindens lining the streets and parks of the town were greatly variable. This diversity is quite understandable, as after the great flood Szeged received help, money, building material from all over the World, and even live plants, bushes and trees. Most of the labels were lost from the latter, thus happened that there are linden trees living even now in the town which were brought into the literature as new species. Such a species is, e.g. Tilia magyarica Wagn., which possesses very distinctive specific characters. The great varibility of the lindens prompted Wagner to study various herbaria. He was astonished to find that the dried samples of the collections were useless as in many cases the organs/parts indispensible for identification were missing. (The incomplete knowledge of trees was also probably connected with many of the dendrological discoveries in the recent decades.) He found that if he wanted to thoroughly study Tilia he would have to compile his own collection, in which the various taxa would be represented in sufficient number of samples and bear all the attributes suitable for identification, that is, several branches from a single tree with leaves, flowers and fruits. Thus he set himself to the task of collecting linden samples, which lasted from 1920 to 1933. Rezső SOO appraised the collection in the second volume of his Synopsis, where in the treatment of lindens he followed János WAGNER' s "extremely thorough and detailed" monograph and