Vavilov s.n., Chekhosarai (1924)

Vavilov herbarium specimen, Chekhosarai (1924), epitype of var. asperrima
Vavilov s.n., Chekhosarai (1924)
The epitype of var. asperrima as photographed for McPartland and Small (2020), Fig. 6b (CC BY 4.0)
At a Glance
Classification	Other
Accession Type	Reproduction
Location
Country	Afghanistan
Province/State	Kunar Province
Locality	Chekhosarai
Collection
Method	Herbarium specimen
Sourcing Type	Historical
Date	1924
Harvest Date	1927
Collector	N.I. Vavilov
Specimen
Repository	N.I. Vavilov All-Russian Institute of Plant Genetic Resources
Catalogue Number	WIR 599, 3952
Collector Number	Vavilov, N.I. s.n.
Scientific Name	Cannabis sativa subsp. indica var. asperrima (Regel) McPartl. & E.Small
Identified By	J.M. McPartland & E. Small (2020)
Occurrence Record	View occurrence record

Vavilov s.n., Chekhosarai is a herbarium accession of Cannabis sativa grown in 1927 from seed that Nikolai Vavilov collected in 1924 at Chekhosarai, now Asadabad, in Kunar Province, Afghanistan. The sheet is held by the herbarium of the N.I. Vavilov All-Russian Institute of Plant Genetic Resources (WIR). In 1976 Ernest Small and Arthur Cronquist designated it the lectotype of C. sativa subsp. indica var. kafiristanica. In 2020 John McPartland and Small designated it the epitype of var. asperrima.^: 429: 100

Collection and locality

Vavilov gathered the seed at Chekhosarai during his 1924 expedition to Afghanistan. His assistant Tatiana Serebriakova sowed it in 1927 at the Pushkin Experiment Station, Detskoye Selo, St Petersburg.^: 100: 7 Detskoye Selo, the former Tsarskoye Selo, is now the town of Pushkin.^: 18 Small and Cronquist cite the sheet as Vavilov Inst. Herb. # 3952, from seeds sown in 1927 of Vavilov 599, naming the seed by Vavilov's number 599 and the sheet by the herbarium's number 3952.^: 429

McPartland and Small point out that Asadabad lies in Kunar Province and not in Kafiristan, the present-day Nuristan Province, so the plant that typifies var. kafiristanica did not come from Kafiristan.^: 22

The label

The paper's photograph of the sheet shows its label. The label is handwritten, the plant's name in Latin and the rest in Russian. It names the plant Cannabis indica Lam. var. kafiristanica Vav. Below the name it reads Афганистан. Чехосарай. 1924 г. ("Afghanistan. Chekhosarai. 1924") and Репродукция: Детское село ("reproduction: Detskoye Selo"), followed by the year 1927, written 27 г. and the name N. I. Vavilov, once with семена ("seeds"). The number 599 stands in the left margin beside the plant's name. A red slip printed TYPUS is pasted on the sheet beside the stem.^: 101

Typification

Vavilov and D. D. Bukinich published Cannabis indica var. kafiristanica in 1929. Two specimens at WIR carry the name. Small and Cronquist chose this one as the lectotype when they moved the variety to C. sativa subsp. indica in 1976.^{: 429: 21–22} The other, WIR 599, 3953, is a pistillate plant from Chekhosarai under the same seed number, also grown at Pushkin in 1927. McPartland and Small cite it as the paratype.^{: 22, 80}

In 2020 McPartland and Small placed var. kafiristanica in synonymy under C. sativa subsp. indica var. asperrima, a name that Eduard Regel published in 1879 and that has priority. They designated as its lectotype a sheet collected by A. Regel near Karakol, Kyrgyzstan, on 1 October 1877 (LE). They designated this Chekhosarai sheet the epitype, noting that Vavilov's specimen is much better preserved.^: 100–101 They call var. asperrima the Central Asian wild-type.^: 100

Specimen and identification

The plant is 30 cm tall and staminate, with closely spaced internodes, nine pairs of opposite branches low on the stem and three alternate branches near the top. Its leaves have five to seven broad, dark green, coarsely serrated leaflets that overlap one another and measure up to 46 × 18 mm.^: 22 Small and Cronquist called it a very young plant and noted that it was illustrated in the 1929 publication of the name.^: 429 Tropicos, the Missouri Botanical Garden's database, files the sheet under Cannabis sativa var. asperrima with the type status epitype. GBIF republishes the entry.