Feedback request: Glechoma hederacea (K001189170)

[oldnick]

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Specimen #402786

Taxon:	Lamiaceae: Glechoma hederacea L. ("Ground-ivy")
Filed in taxon folder:	Lamiaceae: Glechoma hederacea L. ("Ground-ivy")
Collected by:	William Bertram Turrill F E Turrill
Collection date:	8/4/1933
Locality:	Great Britain, VC17 Surrey, West Clandon, TQ05, Clandon, waste ground near the station
Institution:	Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (K)
Accession number:	K001189170
Image: © Kew
fruits/flowers:	mature flowers
notes:	full hermaphrodite

Inferred details are marked.

Documented by oldnick on 4^th December 2015.

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User comments about this sheet

oldnick wrote

Turrill's numerous specimens of this plant seem to be intended to represent the occurrence of female flowers in a normally male-sterile species. This specimen has large (male?) and small (female?) flowers. By labelling this plant 'full hermaphrodite' he perhaps implies the male plants have produced viable pollen. He uses the name 'micrantha' for plants with all small (female) flowers. Viable seeds are apparently very rare in Britain, though CTW2 (1953) doesn't say so and refers to female plants as quite common.

[Roger Horton]

"Hermaphrodite and male-sterile forms of flowers occur, the latter usually with smaller corollas than hermaphrodite flowers, and much-reduced, pollen-less stamens that are often included in the corolla tube." - from a very detailed paper by Hutchings & Price, 1999, in Journal of Ecology.