Blog - A change of name

We've been working on Begonia luxurians for 10 years. It is a very photogenic species, and popular amongst house plant collectors for its lush leaves.

We've been particularly interested in how its compound leaves evolved and the strange ‘whorl’ of leaflets formed at the petiole attachment point. We've done some SEM, some transcriptomics, and a few years ago won the genome sequence in a raffle. This January we uploaded a paper to BioRxiv describing the genome and analysing its repeats. 

Our paper in BioRxiv

However, a spanner has been thrown into our publication plans as everything has to be relabelled.

A series of three photographs and an SEM image showing the relevant characters that identify Begonia luxurians
Begonia luxurians, growing at RBGE, the strange ‘whorl’ of leaflets at the petiole attachment point, the young leaf showing 12 leaflets and the bumps which will develop into the ‘whorl’.

In June 2023 Dr Peter Moonlight and Eliane de Lima were following the trail of Friar José Mariano da Conceição Vellozo, the eighteenth century author of Flora Fluminensis. This book described 1630 Brazilian species, including many Begonias. However, the book did not have clear illustrations of all the species and all the specimens were lost. This meant that the identity of the species was a matter of some dispute.

Peter and Eliane followed the route of the friar looking for the Begonias he described. Flora Fluminensis describes a compound leaved Begonia found between Paraty and Cunha in Northeastern Brazil, that he called B. verticillata based on the Latin verticillus, meaning "a whorl". The illustration shows a plant with 11 leaflets – typical of Begonia digitata which is not found in this region.  Along the friar’s route Peter and Elaine found B. luxurians, exactly where B. verticillata had been described. It was clear that this must be the same species. The very distinctive compound leaves of B. luxurians fitted the Friar's description of B. verticillata. The leaflets are not strictly whorled but truly peltately compound, therefore the ‘whorl’ might refer to the ectopic leaflets at the petiole attachment point.

Two images displaying the type specimens that describe Begonia verticillata: one consists of an illustration from Vellozo’s book, the other is a dry, pressed herbarium specimen
Begonia verticillata Vell. A, Lectotype illustration, Manuscript mss1198659_049 in the National Library of Brazil; B, epitype, B.C. Kurtz et al. 29 (CEPEC [#69041]) from CEPEC Herbarium, Jardim Botanico do Rio de Janeiro

Begonia luxurians Scheidw. was named by Scheidweiler in Otto and Dietrich’s Allgemeine Gartenzeitung in 1848. Friar Vellozo’s book with his description of B. verticillata was written around 1790, but not published until 1829, after his death. However, this is still earlier than Scheidweiler’s description of B. luxurians, so under the rules of botanical nomenclature it is Friar Vellozo’s name (Begonia verticillata) which must be used.

The official change is reported in Peter and Eliane’s paper published in the Edinburgh Journal of Botany and will be added to the World Flora Online database this midsummer. That should give us enough time to re-label all the figures and tables in our paper.

Publication referred to in this blog

P. W. Moonlight and E. J. de Lima (2025) The identity and typification of the Begonias from Vellozo's Flora Fluminensis. Edinburgh Journal of Botany Vol. 82

L Campos-Dominguez, E Kongsted, L Cure, M Downie, A Martinez-Martinez, C Fan, L-N Dong, Y-H Tseng, A-Q Hu, K-F Chung, J Pellicer, IJ Leitch, A Bombarely, AD Twyford, CA. Kidner (2025) Genome dynamics across the radiation of a mega-diverse genus. biorxiv

Note: we apologise for the lack of italics in scientific names of organisms mentioned in this text, primarily in first paragraph (known as summary) and image captions. This is an system limitation in our digital infrastructure and web developers are looking to resolve it promptly.
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