The title of the talk(s) was given as, “Haworthia, why controversy?”

I have come to the U.S.A. on invitation and the reasons I accepted this invitation are manifold. Primarily I feel a sense of responsibility and duty to the subject, secondly I feel a sense of obligation as my interest in the genus owes much to the USA for the role J R Brown played in stimulating my interests in the genus, and thirdly I felt I ought to dispel the discomfort of the culture shock I had experienced in the U.S.A. when I visited it in 1982.

I have wanted to give talks that will in some way enrich the lives of the people who hear them, and this seems to be a very arrogant wish against the limited wisdom which an ordinary individual can acquire about anything in a life-time. But I am concerned about the confusions and controversy, which seems to be associated with the plants I enjoy so much. Classifications and taxonomy have acquired such a negative connotation, and yet they are both fundamental to the whole experience of knowing and growing plants. Without good classification there is no way of organising our thoughts and communicating with one another about the plants.

My interest in Haworthia dates back to my childhood and a deeper interest developed from plants of H. limifolia, which an uncle had collected in Natal. Living in Natal myself, I started to collect plants by corresponding with other collectors and nurseries. It soon became obvious to me that most of the plants seemed to be very ordinarily the same. I was by then a qualified entomologist researching the biology of Noctuid moths, and my study was taking me into the realm of classification and identification which formed the basis of my master’s thesis. My career took a turn and from a government research post I moved to commercial agriculture until fortuitously I landed up as Botanical Assistant to the Curator of the Karoo Botanic Garden in Worcester. There I was given the job of curating collections and given access to the Compton Herbarium and all the Collected Works of G G Smith. I very quickly learned that there was little relation between the available published works on Haworthia and the diversity of the plants I was seeing in the field.

Six years later I could produce a book which was an illustrated checklist of names which I thought could be used to usefully explore the Haworthia further, and also to provide a firmer basis of John Pilbeam’s book on Haworthia and Astroloba. My handbook was revised in 1983 and then in 1985, Col Scott’s book was published which virtually ignored anything which either Pilbeam or I had done. This book seemed to undo any progress which had been made to stable nomenclature in Haworthia and I was very disappointed to find my work categorised with the confusion that collectors have since found themselves in. My conviction is that publishers, editors, other writers, and other collectors whether really serious or not, have simply failed to properly identify the sources of confusion and address them in an ordered way. In my talk I would like to deny any responsibility for any confusion and try to acquire some credibility by pointing out that my work is based on:

1. Extensive fieldwork and thus familiarity with the plants in their native state
2. A knowledge and review of all the literature (I may be the last person who can say I have read all the literature)
3. Extensive experience with pattern recognition in biological systems
4. Knowledge and experience of classification and identification in many plant genera
5. A very comprehensive physical herbarium record located in three different herbaria
6. A clear species definition for the work
7. A long period of validation and testing over a period of 35 years from my first publication on the subject, to the present

When a recent catalogue stated that there was confusion in Haworthia classification, what they were actually doing was confessing their own downright intellectual laziness, and inability to discriminate between writers who are themselves confused and those who are not.

In reading Gould’s book I was also reminded of my childhood belief that the continents of the world had once been joined because they so obviously fitted together. It was interesting to observe that it is only in the last ten years that this hypothesis is accepted as a probable explanation because tectonic plate studies provide an explanation for how this has happened. However, it is the denial of continental drift in the absence of a prior knowledge of this mechanism which is curious to me and I do not think that is science. This has strengthened my view that science is not a matter of education and qualification, profession or position and an impressive CV. It is an attitude which is grounded on common sense and organisation of scepticism.

In order to have this attitude about species, we do need to have a reasonable idea of what a ‘species’ is. Unfortunately science seems to have failed us here as good definition of the term seems either hard to find or impossible to understand and we have to go our own way to do so. Firstly we have to consider that the work should be seen to be a postulate of the biological sciences for a concept of a basic building block for the understanding and classification of all living things in a unified system. Thus it is not for us to hi-jack it, and use to classify things in our individual minds on a basis of limited information, limited material and limited understanding of biological systems, for our own limited purposes.

Unfortunately available definition of the term is poor. The Collins Dictionary defines ‘species’ as those groups into which a genus can be divided, and it then defines ‘genus’ as a group which can be divided into species. The Websters’ Dictionary inserts the work ‘logically’ before ‘divided’. Very few botanical revisions and classifications actually address this question of definition, while on the other hand there seems to be intense intellectual discussion of a biological species concept against other concepts. I cannot see much sense in this. Generally the zoological concept of a species as ‘a group or groups of individuals capable of interbreeding or potentially interbreeding’ is basic to the classification system. This fails in plants because of interfertility across even generic lines. I have simply devised my own definition as ‘a group or groups of individuals interbreeding or potentially interbreeding which vary continuously in space and in time’. This brings us face-to-face with the actual problem of having to determine where these continuities are in space and in time. The problem is that it is the continuities that are obscure and confusing and difficult to describe and circumscribe. Knowing this can make a big difference to how we organise our scepticism about a classification and what we should look for to determine the credibility of writers who can do no better than to confuse themselves and the rest of us.

All too often the view is expressed that classification is an art form and that it expresses the opinions of the individual. If imagination, phantasy and ignorance are the qualifications for the work, then indeed art is what one may get.

In truth classification is and has to be a science in the sense that it has to be based on physical and measurable data. That data has to be accessible to all. Statements must be verifiable and if they are contested, new data should be presented to verify the new and proven statement. This gives rise to a structure of knowledge and information in which the names we use are meaningful and informative. In the case of Haworthia there is a problem (which is not incidentally unique) in that there are very few tangible characters on which classification can be based. Even the characters which differentiate genera in the larger context can be disputed. Therefore, the key to understanding species in Haworthia has to be based on geographic distribution and the spatial relationships and continuities which are observed in the field. Unfortunately again, the strictures of the nomenclatural system and its controls to stabilize names, does sometimes make it a little difficult for the classification to really express how species are related in the field. I have recognised that there is often continuity of varying degree between many different species, and that often I am simply recognising significant nodes in a fairly turbulent sea of similarity. The botanical code requires that names may not necessarily be co-incident with principle nodes. My approach in my first Handbook of 1976 was to try and find as great a relationship between nomenclaturally valid names and the variation in the field. I know I achieved this in very large measure and I have tried to build on that foundation ever since. However, there seems to be no way that the nomenclatural code, whatever its pretensions are to ensuring stability, can do to prevent the structure of the classification from being rattled, shaken and even broken. The onus lies entirely at the door of the individual who should recognise how important it then is for organisation of scepticism.

In my slide presentations, I have pointed out that the genera in the tribe Aloideae of the FamilyAsphodelaceae (following the new dispensation for the classification of plant families by Dahlgren) are not properly understood. What hypotheses have been put forward have been based on some very very poor character definition and analysis. The obvious sub-divisions within the genus Haworthia have been completely ignored and if this is the case I cannot see how any attempt to resort the genus can have any credibility.

I have shown a ‘flow-chart’ showing how the species of the ‘retuse’-type species are linked in a cobweb-like diagram. I pointed out that there are main role players in this web and that the species can be understood in the context of names which relate to geographic centres. My slides were selected to show some of the pathways in and between different centres. This was also to emphasise that a classification has to encompass all plants both known and unknown. In this way there is a predictive element. It is new collections and new methodology which test the classification and its predictions. This process is how an hypothesis is tested and how a classification is shown to be a product of a sceptical and inquiring mind; rather than the artistic product of an individual, driven by some undefined motive underlying a pretension to really understanding what has been done, and what needs to be done.

The title of this article could also be “Haworthia is people”, but titles are difficult. This one is prompted by an article I saw in Readers Digest. The article was about the impact of the (in?)famous Kinsey Report on human sexual behaviour. The closing sentence was.. “As far as Albert Kinsey was concerned, the watchdogs of science were asleep at the switch”.
I find myself in a curious role. How many writers have a long trail with so many followers crossing it behind? I can actually vaguely remember meeting G.W. Reynolds as a four-year old. Looking back I regret that I did not make more of the contact I had with people who were part of Haworthia and my interest. These included G.G. Smith, Prof. Compton, R.A. Dyer, Miss Verdoorn, W.G. Armstrong, G.J. Payne, Meiring, Beukman’s daughter, Mrs Taute’s family, Doreen Court (daughter of Mrs Morris), Gordon King, Grace Blackbeard, Frank Stayner, J.W.Dodson and so many others. Why did I never write to J.R. Brown to whom I owe so much?
Who else has stretched their interest over so long a period and found their trail becoming so criss-crossed behind. Looking over my shoulder I see quite a string of prospective and aspirant writers on Haworthia. I see myself occupying the same kind of place in their minds that the people above have done in mine. Not being dead yet, makes me realise that while alive and available for comment and information, there is no call.
What my disappointment has been, is that despite so many interested people, there have been very few that I have felt to be kindred to. If I consider where I started, I have also to consider where I end. If I consider what I learned, I can consider what I can teach. To my dismay I seem to have learned too little, and tried to teach too much.
Now I have written a second book to examine myself as much as what those on my trail are doing. I do not want to throw in the towel like Smith did, and neither do I want to leave unfinished business. What unfinished business is there? Haworthia has not been fully explored nor explained.
1. Exploration.
a. I myself have many records which are not part of the herbarium record and neither are they part of the source from which collectors have drawn. There are also records gleaned by others which are available to some collectors but not to me. One reason is that I have actively discouraged collection and avoided undisciplined and unprincipled collectors like the plague. A principle of science is ‘No secrecy’. I would like to observe this and have tried to keep locality records on the basis of “well you never asked”. It is not nice to mention names and I will not do so, but there are several persons who have really exceeded the bounds of the rational in their collecting activity. Conservation agencies are, in my experience, helpless to do anything other than create a climate which deters honest people from venturing to pluck so much as a leaf. Less conservative, conscientious and sensitive souls function without qualm at the other extreme. Do I hide the records or do I appeal to the Haworthiophile community to institute their own code of conduct?
b. Records can also be ‘intellectual and experiential individual property’. I saw that in the ‘Aloe’ era, that there were collectors where this concept was manifest at extreme levels. Persons with no insight or understanding of what Reynolds had done in terms of record, were accumulating, obscuring and losing data which could have enriched that considerably. This is, and has happened in Haworthia too. For a decent book to be written on Haworthia there has to be a decent physical record. Several people have fiddled and faddled with Aloe since Reynolds, and have made several big changes. In the light of knowledge and record, the changes they have made are trivial. These fiddlers have not done more than what Reynolds did, and neither have they even reached the experiential level that he had.
2. Explanation.
a. I have tried to see classification as a scientific process based on facts and undisputeable observation. It is very evident that it is not treated like that. In the subgenus Haworthia, classification is just imagery. What I have done is to place this imagery in the real physical world of geographic space, based on a life-long experience of ‘classification’ of this kind, and thus inferred from my knowledge of other genera. In order to question the image I have, the viewer has to stand either where I have stood, or to seek a better and higher viewpoint.
b. Science is driven by question and answer. Answers generate more questions. Science is knowledge and knowledge is only really referrable to that which is true. The philosophy of science is expressed at an intellectual level that few of us are able to reach and I do not pretend to.

So what has this to do with dogs? Science is driven by publication and peer review. A scientist becomes recognised by publications and responses to those publications. A scientist and science writer is kept on the track of truthfulness and knowledge by the responses he gets. These responses by competent and peer scientists constitute the watch tower of truthfulness, credibility and authority. These place beacons along the path of knowledge which is surely the one we wish to travel.
My complaint, first expressed in 1986, was against reviewers. My strongly held view was that instead of providing direction, they were doing the opposite. I thought the dogs were asleep, untrained or just turning a blind eye to the scene. Where nomenclature is concerned, it is another matter. There is another hungry breed here which scavengers for scraps. I have indulged in ‘polemic’ because it is is the mechanism for attack and defence of doctrine. The doctrine I have tried to defend appears to be a fantasy of my own. I have felt the absence of competent and wakeful watchdogs and have tried to fill the role myself – in vain. So that is the dog I have been, apparently barking at the dark – alone.

I often wonder why I have written and still continue to write about Haworthia. The plants have had a special fascination for me since childhood, but it is not that I really enjoy these plants more than I do many others. The interest for me lay in the problem of identification and naming and I was continually asking where a particular plant seen illustrated or growing came from and what was it and why did the names seem to differ. As an entomologist I came to question all these names and their meaning, and to wonder about the classification. After all, it is the names that we use as individuals or as groups of people to grow, collect and communicate about the plants we interest us. So classification and names are just as basic and fundamental to us as a group of hobbyists as they are to botanists pursuing academic and intellectual truths. The history of Haworthia was clouded with conflict before I started writing and the pattern has continued despite what history should have taught us. I have personally made my best effort to generate a stable and sensible set of names for a community that I would like to be part of. This community I wanted to encompass was that of the ordinary collector, the more dedicated collector, the horticulturist, the commercial grower, herbarium and field botanists, and conservationists.

It has been immensely frustrating to see my ideal so thwarted and to find it so difficult to communicate what I consider to be simple ideas to all the sectors of the community I want to share with. Now at the closing of my life and what career there has been in Haworthia I feel the need to make some final effort. A motivating factor has been the recent publication in the German journal Avonia, of twelve new species and varieties of Haworthia by Ingo Breuer. If I ask what significance this has for the community I perceive out there, I cannot answer the question except to suggest that it may be the commercial value. I cannot see any other sense in it. The field collection has been done by South Africans who are not accredited by Nature Conservation to do the collecting, neither by any institution that supports their activities as far as I have been able to establish. Is it a product of bona fide research and does it justify the tacit support given by individual botanists who are involved in the writing of forewords and introductions? Regarding the classification involved, I throw up my hands in despair because none of these new taxa suggest to me the taxonomic significance that the descriptions or the describer may attach to them. It is quite probable that the collectors have some individual motivation and are not working through local institutions that could thwart their private goals.

Few members of my imaginary community seem to share my concerns. As a writer, editors are the main vehicles for publication and I have expected them to function as a filter to separate the reasonable from the unreasonable. The kind of reaction I receive from them is that everyone is entitled to an opinion and that the reader can make what he/she wills of any classification put before him or her. An editor has also said to me “I think the “problem” is that most people who like plants that I am addressing with the Journal are just hobbyists. Some are more serious than others. They want a good name, pretty plants, field trip notes, good books to pore over, but not necessarily devour. They don’t want to be confused, to the contrary, most want a hard and fast true answer… as if there is only one or ever will be”. However, I cannot agree. My conclusion from so many years of frustration and intellectual isolation, is that the problems lies in how we have all been led to regard botanical names and their meaning. Readers are already confused and editors are co-responsible. This is what I would like to address in this article.

After describing Haworthia limifolia var gigantea in 1962, I wrote “Haworthia as a problem genus” in 1970 and that article was published in this Journal. In effect what I said then was that there would never be order unless the species were to be seen as morphologically and geographically distinct entities. I also said that new species and varieties were not discussed adequately in terms of distribution or variability. Among my comments was it would take detailed and intensive coverage of the area before a sample could be taken as representative.

Since I wrote that article there has been a vast volume of water under the bridge and many new writers have come and gone or are still busy gnawing away at the carcase. The taxonomic situation in Haworthia is as confused now as it was in 1970 and before. Why? I think the answer is simple, and sadly so. The roots of taxonomy are in a foundation of shifting sand because a botanical name does not mean the same thing to everyone. As one editor put so succinctly…” There is no doubt that SPECIES should have a meaning, preferably one that is universally accepted so that everyone is on the same level”. Albeit that this conclusion was only reached after a long struggle to get this editor to distinguish between a species description and the definition of the word “species”.

This is a point that I have been struggling to make for a long time and it has amazed me that botanists talk about different kinds of species, biological species, phylogenetic species, chemical species and many more kinds of kinds. The word “species” has always meant to me “life-form”. Most people will agree that it is the basic unit of biology and yet there is this curious and incongruous use of the phrase “biological species” which suggests that there are species that are not of biology. Can one progress through a university curriculum and postgraduate study to a doctorate and still have no idea of what a species is or might be? My observation is that this is fact.

If botanists have not been able to establish a definition and agree on species definition, it is patently obvious that we have all the ingredients for an unholy mess. If there be any doubt about this, I would refer readers to all the literature on Haworthia, including my own. One botanist remarked that I was being silly insisting on a definition when the subject was one of continuous debate! Classification is largely a non-science. It is simply a descriptive activity ensconced in a web of legislative rules, articles and recommendations of a formal nomenclatural code. Anybody can become and be fully accepted as a taxonomist with absolutely no credentials, on the presentation of a description, a latin synopsis and the citation of a type. If in addition they can quote the clauses and articles of the International Code and throw in some latin phrases here and there, their stature is elevated. There is a whole field of literature which deals purely with the technicalities of the code and has no relation whatsoever to the plant species for which it was fabricated. It is a vast playing field. The tragedy is that there is no protection for the passive observer or interested party who should feel secure in the knowledge that there is logic and reason in the whole process of naming and communicating about plants.

Currently there are two trends in present time to remedy this unfortunate situation. Both are aimed at taking the subject to abstruse intellectual heights that will positively close the door and make it impossible for the uninitiated to participate. The one trend is to rely on the so-called science of cladistics and the other is to enter the realm of the sub-microscopic and analyze the genetic material on which the (still undefined) species rest. Neither trend is to address the underlying problem.

In my opinion cladistics should be seen clearly for what it is. It is multivariate analysis where character states are chosen and modified as subjectively as in conventional methodology to produce a two-dimensional “tree”. This tree is presumed to be the representation of the evolutionary processes in the plants being discussed. This is the element of time. But in this model the element of space (the branch ends) is restricted to one dimension. DNA methodology is primarily based on examining the sequence of nucleotide bases (amino acids) on a piece of the total protein strands that constitute the chromosomes or cellular protein that drives genetics. It is said that these amino-acid sites represent characters and thus looking at say 1000 sites (“characters”) is immensely superior to the guesses we make when we look at say flower colour or bract shape which we could choose to identify a “species”. The argument loses sight of the fact that these 1000 sites on a single gene sequence are but a fraction of the genome DNA (Sahtouris writes that the genes probably account for less than 1,5% of any single genome), whereas flower colour or bract shape may be the end-products of the interaction of many genes or of the entire genome. The end model is also only the same two-dimensional one of cladistics.

I have suggested that species follow a pattern that many natural systems do. My suggestion is that species are fractal. This means that they possess or exhibit variability that cannot be explained or plotted in linear or smooth curvilinear fashion. But I also define the word “species” – a dynamic system of living organisms in a group or groups of individuals that are morphologically, genetically and behaviorally continuous in space and time. This definition is not proposed as a fairy wand as one critic suggested. It is anything but. It does not make taxonomic decisions easier. It means that there is now a definition and standard in place against which one can question and evaluate species descriptions and taxonomic decisions. We have to see individual plants as members of systems and act on the fact that a name tied to a single dead herbarium specimen is less important than the meaning of the name referring to living forms. More incisively then, it makes it incumbent on the taxonomists to view species as systems in a greater whole of biology. There is a still greater objective and that is to see species as these life forms that give meaning to a creation science otherwise demands that we examine only mechanistically. It would mean that the classification process could be placed back on a proper scientific foundation and exclude individuals who pursue new names for atavistic pleasure, for egocentric and commercial goals, or for particular communities.

My experience has not been limited to Haworthia. I have to say this because inevitably when I meet another taxonomist the attitude is assumed that I am working in a strange and unique field. Also, condescendingly, that I am grubbing around in my own tiny space quite ignorant of the deep thoughts and knowledge of the inner sanctums of science. Generally the genus Haworthia is seen to be taxonomically intractable and largely so simply because it fascinates amateur collectors (and amateur taxonomists). I wish I could demolish this myth for once and for all. It is only intractable because botanists have been so self-satisfied and mollycoddled by lack of peer review in their backroom havens of herbaria that they have seldom really had to face the realities of natural variation. They have worked secure in the knowledge that there is no definition and that under these circumstances one opinion is a good as another. In the general forum of human behavior, someone who comes in from outside with a plucked flower in the hand is almost seen as demonstrating an above natural interest in flora and a flair for botany. With a bit of early encouragement the individual could presumably have been a great botanist. Haworthia is difficult perhaps because it is so well collected and so widely grown.

For a journal editor to say that readers are not interested in the problems of nomenclature and do not want to be confused is a denial and renunciation of responsibility. It is to say that readers are asleep and they should not be awakened; that they have been educated to an untruth and they should be left there. Furthermore, this is any case what we feed them and we have a vested interest in maintaining untruth. There is no general close interest in plants that extends to proper nomenclature. Very few people in the vast mass of society actually have a latin binomial anywhere in their vocabulary. As an oddball who has grown up and lived with such names it has been a constant war to have them seen as keys to knowledge. Instead of respecting this fact, it is common for people to proudly deny knowing the scientific proper names for living things.

Classification and nomenclature has become a laughing stock in society and a subject to be avoided. Unfortunately someone has to take it seriously and give it meaning. I have tried to do this for Haworthia for sincere and honest people who deserve better than the untruth and misinformation that is laid before them on a daily basis. My community has dwindled away to nothing. Where I was myself a lost sheep, I now feel like a shepherd with no flock!

Harry Mays

Editor, Alsterworthia International

Woodsleigh, Moss Lane, St Michaels on Wyre, Preston, PR3 0TY, UK

hmays@freenetname.co.uk

.