草木春秋©植物图鉴

Lycoris is an eastern Asian genus of Amaryllidaceae superficially resembling the South African Nerine and sometimes confused with it in the horticultural trade. However, the two genera are not closely related and are placed in different tribes (Meerow et al., 1999).

Various Lycoris species have been grown as ornamentals in China and Japan for many centuries, and now show much evidence of hybridisation and selection. Much of the work on their taxonomy has been done in these countries, and accurate information has been hard to find in western gardening literature. These notes were accumulated in an attempt to determine the species cultivated in Australian gardens.

Lycoris seeds are often hard to germinate and the seedlings take 6-12 years to reach flowering size. Therefore these plants have usually been propagated vegetatively; for example, Chung (1999) found that eight sampled populations of L. radiata across South Korea were a single clone that had been spread and planted by division. This has allowed the spread of sterile triploids and F1 hybrids at the expense of less attractive wild types while at the same time discouraging more elaborate breeding programs of repeated crossing and selection.

As with many other Chinese plants, Lycoris first became known to European botanists from imported nursery stock which included cultivars and garden hybrids. These cultigens were often mistaken for wild species and given Latin binomials. For example, Lycoris radiata was first described from a sterile triploid clone which is far more common in cultivation than the diploid, later described under the name var. pumila.

Much information on chromosome numbers in Lycoris was summarised by Bose & Flory (1963). The majority of species were divided into two groups according to their karyotype by Liu & Hsu (1989), one with a haploid genome of 11 acrocentric chromosomes, and the other with telocentric and metacentric chromosomes totalling 11 'arms'. These groups may not be monophyletic, and did not align well with the subgenera of Traub & Moldenke (1949) which were based on floral morphology.

However, there are other species whose karyotypes are mixtures of acrocentric, telocentric and metacentric chromosomes including haploid genomes corresponding to each of the above groups. It is hypothesised that these species originated as hybrids, produced either deliberately or accidentally when species of differing provenance were brought together in gardens. Experimental hybrids of L. chinensis X L. sprengeri and L. chinensis X L. haywardii have similar karyotypes. L. caldwellii, L. houdyshelii, L. incarnata and L. squamigera are allotriploids in which one diploid genome is unreduced (Liu & Xu, 1989). Thus, a comparison of karyotypes may provide some evidence to distinguish the "natural" or "wild" species from those believed to have originated as garden hybrids.

In many of the langiages and local dialects of China, Lycoris species have common names that translate as "stone garlic", referring to their onion-like bulbs which are, however, quite inedible. All species are poisonous, containing the alkaloid lycorine: L. radiata is called chung kwai fa in Cantonese, implying the grim jest that anyone who eats it in mistake for garlic will fall prey to Chung Kwai, who captures ghosts.

The descriptions below are based chiefly on Xu et al. (1985) and Traub & Moldenke (1949).