Two great publication projects about European orchids are being prepared which will meet high expectations. At the 16th Orchid Conference in Sundheim (near Kehl, Southwest Germany), Wolfgang Eccarius offered a first look into his project of a monography about the genus Dactylorhiza – the planned publication year will be 2015. Among the about 50 participants of the conference, coming from Germany, Switzerland, France and the Netherlands, was Karel Kreutz who is working on an opus of 6 to 7 volumes about all the orchids in Europe, which is expected to be published probanly in 2016.
At the beginning of the meeting, Helmut Baumann showed a series of impressive videos showing pollinators of different orchid species. Helmut Presser presented photos of his latest Greece journey, Peter Goelz showed pictures taken at two different locations of Ophrys kreutzii in Turkey and the Essink couple shared impressions from Rhodos.
In my contribution about “Colour polymorphism with Dactylorhiza – Evolution as a continuing process” I presented my studies about Dactylorhiza fuchsii and the calcifugiens location in Northern Danmark. After a partly controversial debate, Wolfgang Eccarius talked about the specific difficulties of his Dactylorhiza project. The common genetical methods to differentiate between species, such as the construction of cladograms by means of an analysis of the DNA’s ITS regions, may be used only with great caution in this case, he said. “This doesn’t function at all”, if a species has developed from two species. Therefore, he intends to base his book of about 600 pages on a rather broad concept of species. At the beginning, there was a comprehensive study of literature, including about 1100 protologues (original decriptions). “This fact alone implies that the nomenclature of this genus will be a giant challenge”, Eccarius said. In order to concentrate on the essentials, he only wants to present species and subspecies in length, without ignoring varieties. “I succeeded in looking into all typesheets”, Eccarius said – with one exception: “I’m still missing the typesheet of Dactylorhiza incarnata subsp. baumgartneriana. The typesheet cannot be found in Stuttgart, where it is said to be.” This subspecies, described by B. and H. Baumann, R. Lorenz and R. Peter in 2003, later described by Kreutz und Sebastian Sczepanski as Dactylorhiza kafiriana subsp. baumgartneriana, is named after Harald Baumgartner, the organiser of the Sundheim Orchid Conference.