Some of you already know I've been working on this piece over the past few years (close to four years now); hampered by slow literature availability and battling my way through translating some often fairly archaic text with lots of problems.
It is finally coming together nicely so I wanted to start to put this online in hopes of stimulating two things:
1) Cactus lovers starting to think about this name in a way that can rise above much of the morass of confusion that presently exists. I believe a fair number of people got lost in a bit of detritis within the pages of Flora Brasiliensis and may have missed most of this fascinatingly twisted taxonomic adventure story.
I will not try to claim this piece is going to be able to answer every single question that exists, it will no doubt even raise some additional questions, but it will certainly make a good start at painting the scene. At the very least when this is completed I anticipate that no one will have any question remaining about what the original macrogonus looked like or lack awareness that it became "lost" in plain sight due to the later appearance of peruvianus on the scene and the aftermath from that mistaken entry in Flora Brasiliensis.
2) I also plan to incorporate a list of image links to macrogonus images on this site and elsewhere, and to add a number of additional images, inviting others to contribute anything pertinent in order to create a database overviewing the good, the bad, the ugly and the seriously confused plants being sold with this name.
During the course of this project I paraphrased my way through a host of translations into English including German, French, Italian, Latin & Danish. Paraphrasing felt much better than a direct translation that often clearly read like the speaker was using a different language than English (which of course many were).
If I missed the mark in that process I welcome corrections, suggestions and fine-tuning.
If some ambitious person wants to participate, this would greatly benefit from a full translation into German, French, Italian and Danish. Or into any other language on the planet. I imagine that a lot of Czechs and Russians for example would enjoy reading this in their own languages.
This will begin appearing here as I transfer the material from the PDF that this work presently forms. I'm going to have to do this in pieces due to not having more than some small windows of time right now but perhaps that will better enable commentary or corrections to occur. I could have put this on the troutsnotes.com website but a public forum has a much greater capacity to encourage public input.
Feedback and input is greatly welcomed but please do bear in mind that I am starting at the beginning and progressing to modern times in roughly chronological order so answers may well be forthcoming within the later pages.
The end result is intended to serve as a overarching meta-review and analysis of the taxonomic literature involving Trichocereus macrogonus.
I hope people enjoy it. I suspect that it may hold a number of surprises for many of you. At the least I anticipate most people are going to have some fun in reading this.
Some of you already know I've been working on this piece over the past few years (close to four years now); hampered by slow literature availability and battling my way through translating some often fairly archaic text with lots of problems.
It is finally coming together nicely so I wanted to start to put this online in hopes of stimulating two things:
1) Cactus lovers starting to think about this name in a way that can rise above much of the morass of confusion that presently exists. I believe a fair number of people got lost in a bit of detritis within the pages of Flora Brasiliensis and may have missed most of this fascinatingly twisted taxonomic adventure story.
I will not try to claim this piece is going to be able to answer every single question that exists, it will no doubt even raise some additional questions, but it will certainly make a good start at painting the scene. At the very least when this is completed I anticipate that no one will have any question remaining about what the original macrogonus looked like or lack awareness that it became "lost" in plain sight due to the later appearance of peruvianus on the scene and the aftermath from that mistaken entry in Flora Brasiliensis.
2) I also plan to incorporate a list of image links to macrogonus images on this site and elsewhere, and to add a number of additional images, inviting others to contribute anything pertinent in order to create a database overviewing the good, the bad, the ugly and the seriously confused plants being sold with this name.
During the course of this project I paraphrased my way through a host of translations into English including German, French, Italian, Latin & Danish. Paraphrasing felt much better than a direct translation that often clearly read like the speaker was using a different language than English (which of course many were).
If I missed the mark in that process I welcome corrections, suggestions and fine-tuning.
If some ambitious person wants to participate, this would greatly benefit from a full translation into German, French, Italian and Danish. Or into any other language on the planet. I imagine that a lot of Czechs and Russians for example would enjoy reading this in their own languages.
This will begin appearing here as I transfer the material from the PDF that this work presently forms. I'm going to have to do this in pieces due to not having more than some small windows of time right now but perhaps that will better enable commentary or corrections to occur. I could have put this on the troutsnotes.com website but a public forum has a much greater capacity to encourage public input.
Feedback and input is greatly welcomed but please do bear in mind that I am starting at the beginning and progressing to modern times in roughly chronological order so answers may well be forthcoming within the later pages.
The end result is intended to serve as a overarching meta-review and analysis of the taxonomic literature involving Trichocereus macrogonus.
I hope people enjoy it. I suspect that it may hold a number of surprises for many of you. At the least I anticipate most people are going to have some fun in reading this.
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