Talk:Watt s.n., Suni (s.d.)
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Evidentiary scope
The red-ink note places the plants in a field and calls the crop very poor, so the sheet records cultivation at Suni. It gives no variety or local name, no use or purpose and no date. It does not say whether the plants were male or female. It establishes neither a continuing population nor a living germplasm holding, so it does not by itself support a landrace classification. The accession is classified as Other. No conservation priority is assigned.
Georeferencing
The stamp names the settlement and the river but no collection point, so the coordinate is Sunni's own point in OpenStreetMap (way 49395713), 31.24, 77.12, used as a locality georeference rather than as a reconstructed collection point. The two disagreements set out on Talk:Watt 13958 (1890) apply here too: OpenStreetMap tags the town Karsog tehsil in Mandi district, and it stands at about 677 m against the stamp's 3,000 feet. Its altitude of 3,000 feet converts to 914 m. The stamp and the 1911 gazetteer of the Simla hill states spell the place Suni. The Shimla district administration lists the tehsil as Sunni. The infobox places the locality in Shimla District on that basis. The gazetteer gives no elevation for Suni itself, only a range for Bhajji State, of which Suni was the capital, from 2,000 feet in the Sutlej valley to 9,400 feet on the Shali peak.
Entered under R1 of the coordinate ruling of 18 September 2026, which georeferences a historical accession to the place its label names, at two decimal places, with the mapped object named above. The point locates this sheet to about 3 km, and the article's prose is unchanged. Éloise 06:11, 18 September 2026 (+07)
Editorial treatment
Title and collector. The sheet has no field number and no date, so the title uses s.n. (no number) and s.d. (no date). No name appears on the sheet except in the herbarium stamp Herb. George Watt. The title follows that name in the way botanists cite unnumbered herbarium material. The sheet does not say who gathered the plant. The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh catalogue and GBIF give George Watt as the collector, but they do the same for Watt 13958 (1890), whose label credits Dr Cooke. The infobox therefore leaves the collector blank.
No year. The date line of the stamp is blank. Watt gave his herbarium to the University of Edinburgh in 1892 (Burkill 1931, p. 229, cited on George Watt), but a gift is a custody date and does not bound this sheet. The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh also holds sheets under Watt's name gathered after 1892, for example his number 13495 from Kulu, dated 18 October 1894 (E00024577).
The hand. One hand in red ink filled the stamp and wrote the note. Its letter forms match George Watt's field hand on his own labels, for example the pencil label of his number 10206 (E00670954) and the ink label of 13681 (E00670955). This is a reading of the handwriting, not a statement on the sheet. The writer of a label is not necessarily the person who gathered the plant.
Relationship to Watt 13958. Watt 13958 (1890) (E00248818) records the same place and altitude. In other respects the two sheets differ. E00248818 carries Watt field number 13958 on a tag tied to the plant, the date November 1890 and the credit Colld by Dr. Cooke in a formal hand. It is stitched with thread. This sheet has no number, no date and no collector's name. It carries a field note and is held with paper strips. The two sheets of Watt 9393 (1888) both carry that gathering's field number. Whether the two Suni sheets come from one gathering is unresolved, so they are recorded separately. Watt's own label for his number 10206 records him on the Descent to Suni from Basantpur on 11 October 1890. The 1911 gazetteer puts Basantpur halfway between Naldera and Suni on the road from Simla (Bhajji State, p. 6). The label places Watt on this road in 1890 but does not date this sheet.
Transcription. The last two letters of Himalayas in the stamp are faintly inked. The small detached strokes in the red note are the writer's letter endings and stops, not quotation marks. A blind-embossed stamp of the Royal Botanic Garden is impressed near the lower right corner of the sheet.
These notes were recorded during accession preparation. Source citations remain in the article. Éloise 05:15, 17 September 2026 (+07)