Feedback request: Thymus pulegioides (K001028648)

[oldnick]

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Specimen #378954

Taxon:	Thymus chamaedrys Fr. ("Large Garden Thyme")
Filed in taxon folder:	Thymus chamaedrys Fr. ("Large Garden Thyme")
Collection date:	2/8/1853
Locality:	Great Britain, VC29 Cambridgeshire, Chippenham, TL66, Chippenham Pit
ex herb:	Mr William Gardiner ?
Institution:	Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (K)
Accession number:	K001028648
Image: © Kew
notes:	[County Cambs? Collector C C Babington? see message board]

Inferred details are marked.

Documented by oldnick on 23^rd September 2014.

Edit history

date	user	change
01/10/2014	oldnick	Added note: [County Cambs? Collector C C Babington? see message board]
01/10/2014	oldnick	Deleted locality: GB AMBIGUOUS Chippenham, Chippenham Pit
01/10/2014	oldnick	Added locality: GB VC29 Chippenham, Chippenham Pit
01/10/2014	oldnick	Deleted collector: Mr William Gardiner
01/10/2014	oldnick	Added provenance: exherb Mr William Gardiner
27/06/2015	xmhcman	Deleted provenance: exherb Mr William Gardiner
27/06/2015	xmhcman	Added provenance: exherb Mr William Gardiner

N.B. reporting of the edit history is currently fairly unclear and misleading. Most edits made to specimens appear as a pair of 'add' and 'delete' entries, which may not be together in the list. There are also often 'minor' edits, which are made automatically (rather than due to user activity), for example to merge synonym names.

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User comments about this sheet

oldnick wrote

William Gardiner's last specimen seems to have been 1851, and h@h gives date of death as 1852; as for Chippenham, he apparently didn't collect south of the border. Yet the handwriting matches http://herbariaunited.org/popupsiginfo.php?sigid=829 . I find no other collections by him of this species, which is 'very rare and scattered in Scotland' [Stace 2]. Is this collector a different W Gardiner of Dundee?

[Roger Horton]

May be a red herring: If this were Chippenham Cambs., then according to Babington's Memoirs he and the 'Cambridge Club' were there on this day. A few William Gardiner specimens turned up in Babington's herbarium but their labels do not resemble this one. Babington visited a 'gravel pit' at Chippenham several times. He also had a few Gardiner specimens in his herbarium (e.g. 270788) but the labels do not resemble this one.

[oldnick]

Yet I find the label you refer to is very similar, and the sample I refer to also

[oldnick]

Roger Horton has now turned up a Babington sheet in the Cambridge Herbarium, closely matching this one. It seems possible that Babington sent this sheet to Gardiner, presumably unaware of his demise, and there was then a labelling mix-up. This lends weight to the the likelihood that the Chippenham Pit on the label is the Cambridgeshire one, and I'm editing accordingly.