Poa bulbosa L.

3.Poa bulbosaL., Sp. Pl. 1: 70. 1753. Type protologue. Habitat in Gallia. Type specimen. Hasselquist s. n. (lectotype, first step, designated by Meikle 1985, p. 1742, as LINN, without a specific sheet indicated, second step designated by Soreng (in Cafferty et al. 2000, p. 255): LINN-HL 87.57). Description. See subspecies descriptions. Fig. 4 includes illustrations of Poa bulbosa var. bulbosa and var. vivipara. Distribution and ecology. Widely distributed in western Europe through Central Asia to China, India, and North Africa; introduced elsewhere. Conservation status. None. Comments. Three sheets in LINN are original material Linnaeus had from Hasselquist’s herbarium for the preparation of Linnaeus’s Species Plantarum, and Linnaeus marked each of them with the symbol “ ᴓ ” denoting their Near East origins. However, Linnaeus wrote “ Habitat in Gallia ” noting “ Loefl. ” material of var. γ. The lectotype LINN- 87.57 is normal-flowered, with a single flowering culm from a small tuft with spreading vegetative shoots. This specimen seems typical of Poa bulbosa normal-lowered plants. The other two sheets, LINN- 87.58 and LINN- 87.59, are bulbiferous, representing Linnaeus’ variety “ β. panicula densa foliacea: foliolis in panicula angustissimis. ” (as annotated by J. E. Smith), from erect and much taller tufts, and are here suggested to be P. iconia var. iconia. These two sheets likely came from a single Hasselquist collection. Before dying in Turkey, Hasselquist collected only in Rhodes and Chios, Cyprus, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, and Turkey, where P. iconia var. iconia (bulbiferous) is common and var. pelasgis (normal-flowered) plants are occasional to infrequent. Poa iconia is not known to occur further west than the Aegean Islands and adjacent Greece, although P. bulbosa normal-flowered plants also occur in all those regions and much more widely, including the classical region of Gallia. The species is characterized by lemmas of normal spikelets that are softly pubescent with round hair tips on the keel and marginal veins, and sometimes between the veins, combined with a dorsal tuft of callus hairs, varying from sparse and short to longer than the lemma, and bulbs that are relatively short and onion-shaped (vs. elongated pyriform). Given the variability of forms in the species, we opt to treat most bulbiferous material as var. vivipara within subspecies bulbosa, allowing for other subspecies to be recognized (i. e., subsp. perligulata with varieties). Bulbiferous specimens too difficult to identify to species are determined by RJS as P. bulbosa aggregate (“ aggr. ”), could be P. bulbosa var. vivipara, P. bactriana bulbiferous forms, P. iconia var. iconia, P. sinaica var. vivipara, P. timoleontis var. dshilgensis, or hybrids between some of these species. Soreng and Tasenkevich (2025) tried to clarify published chromosome numbers applicable to P. bulbosa, concluding (as have others: Tzvelev 1976; Edmondson 1980; Portal 2005) that reported diploid counts most likely apply to other bulbous taxa.