OPTIMA Newsletter 38

y heavy forest fires. Besides, its slopes
have been plagued by marble caves since
classical antiquity, and its southern foothills
have long fallen victim to the metropolis’
expanding urbanisation.
The flora of Mount Pentelicon has been
explored by many botanists in the past, and
several plants, described from its heights,
commemorate the mountain’s name in their
epithet. Most of these names have by now
ended up as synonyms, but Silene pentelica
remains, along with Centaurea attica subsp.
pentelica.
Contrary to the flora of Mount Hymettus,
that of Pentelicon had never been
separately listed. Sfikas has now thankfully
filled that gap with his modestly produced,
simple list, based on published sources with
the essential complement of his own collections.
W.G.
69. 68BArmen L. TAHTADŽJAN (ed.) – Konspekt
flory Kavkaza, tom 1. – Sankt-
Peterburgskogo Universiteta, St. Peterburg,
2003 (ISBN 5-288-03293-9). 202
pages, 12 maps; hard cover.
The Caucasus is a floristic cornerstone,
linking and at the same time separating the
Mediterranean, Irano-Turanian, Central Asian
and European floristic domains, drawing
from and impinging on them all. The knowledge
of the flora of the Caucasus, its genesis
and relationships, is crucial, in particular, for
the understanding of the plant world of the
Mediterranean-Oriental region. Grossheim’s
pioneer work, “Flora Kavkaza”, was so far
the only comprehensive Flora of the whole
Caucasian region, and sadly, its second edition
has remained a torso. On the other hand,
modern critical country Floras for Armenia,
Azerbaidjan, Georgia and the Russian northern
Caucasus, taken together, provide complete
but inhomogeneous coverage. What is
needed, then, is harmonisation, homogenisation
and critical updating of the extant information.
Publications
This is precisely what the Conspectus of
the Caucasian flora, Armen Takhtajan’s newest
if not last great enterprise, has set out to
achieve. Adopting as its base Grossheim’s
(meanwhile refined) system of natural floristic
regions that cut across national boundaries,
it must necessarily depart from local traditions
and strive for a synthesis. The task is
awesome, complicated by many factors related
with the natural and cultural multiformity
of the area: think of the many languages
using several alphabets in which the basic
information was published, of the disseminated
herbarium holdings, of the difficulty
of communication in general, and you will
see what I mean. There is only one place on
the world where all threads run together: the
Komarov Institute in St. Petersburg.
This first volume is rather thin, and
even thinner is the portion devoted to the
checklist proper: just 45 pages, on which
111 species (the Pteridophytes and Gymnosperms)
are treated. Make a quick count: 2.5
species per page on average; and then make
a guess: 3000 pages yet to come? The treatment
is ambitiously detailed, it includes all
that you might expect to see in a Flora except
keys and descriptions. For all species
that are not common and widespread sources
are cited in full, detailed distributions are
given, and often lengthy comments are made
on questions of occurrence, delimitation of
taxa, synonymy and typification, whatever.
The larger part of the book is devoted to
general and introductory matters. There is a
sizeable chapter on the history of botanical
exploration, which includes such useful
features as maps of Tournefort’s travelling
routes, Güldenstedt’s and Marschall von
Bieberstein’s collecting localities. (However,
I miss a reference to H. W. Lack’s
important work on Karl Koch’s expeditions.)
Also of considerable interest is an
exhaustive list of Russian, Ukrainian and
Caucasian herbaria with relevant holdings,
of which only a minority are registered in
the “Index herbariorum”. Then there are invaluable
bibliographical lists, not only with
2009 OPTIMA Newsletter No. 38 (39)