Talk:Trillium

Image
Discussion of the image previously on this page has moved to Image_talk:Trillium.jpg. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Angela (talk • contribs) 12:17, November 12, 2003 (UTC)

Stupid question, I know. But I just shot a better shot of a Trillium in Oakville, ON, Canada: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Trillium7099.jpg How do I link that into the article? I apologise in advance for asking a newbie question. But I have tried to find out. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mwillems (talk • contribs) 12:26, May 14, 2007(UTC)

Picking trilliums
Can the legality of picking trilliums be cited? I searched for any reference to it being illegal in Oregon and can find nothing in Oregon statutes or administrative rules. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Bcostley (talk • contribs) 09:35, April 21, 2008 (UTC)
 * see https://secure.sos.state.or.us/oard/displayDivisionRules.action?selectedDivision=2750 for Oregon which does not list Trillium, but many, if not most, states in the East do list them as protected. Hardyplants (talk) 04:43, 24 May 2008 (UTC)


 * British Columbia was listed as a place where picking trilliums is illegal; that law was repealed in 2002. Fbax (talk) 18:46, 28 June 2009 (UTC)


 * This seems to be a widespread myth. As a child in Oregon, I heard that picking Trilliums would "kill the plant", but not that it was illegal. Picking trillium may harm them more than most other plants, but I doubt that trilliums are the only plant that can be seriously harmed by picking. The myth seems to be quite specific about trilliums though. The article currently lists (with "supporting" references) Minnesota, Michigan and New York as states where picking Trilliums is illegal. The reference for Minnesota reveals that there is a restriction on selling Trilliums and collecting plants on public lands or on private land without the landowner's permission; this law also applies to several other plants that are likely to be exploited commercially. However, private landowners in Minnesota are free to pick and sell Trilliums growing on their own land. The reference for Michigan is not available, but appears to only cover Trillium undulatum, which is a protected species there. The reference for New York discusses Trillium erectum, which is "exploitably vulnerable" there, along with at least one other Trillium species (T. grandiflorum). British Columbia's repealed law covered T. erectum (the only native species there), but still allowed private landowners to pick/kill their own trilliums.


 * There are some species of Trillium that are threatened and protected by legislation (and many non-Trillium plants are also threatened and protected); collecting plants on public lands without permission is often addressed by legislation. Laws protecting certain species of plants may still allow some leeway with what private landowners do with the Trilliums (or other protected plants) growing on their own land. I don't believe there are any jurisdictions where "picking trilliums is illegal" applies across all trillium species and to all land owners. The illegality of picking trilliums appears to be a myth, and I will be attempting to edit the article to reflect this in the near future.Plantdrew (talk) 04:30, 30 October 2012 (UTC)


 * Trillium reliquum and some other species are listed as endangered by the Federal and state governments and are protected by the Endangered Species Act. --Walter Siegmund (talk) 16:39, 30 October 2012 (UTC)


 * Yes, this was my point. There is a widespread myth that picking ALL trillium species is illegal. Some species are in fact legally protected, but this information is being presented selectively in this article to reinforce the impression that (in at least Michigan and New York) ALL species are protected when it's only those that are specifically listed.Plantdrew (talk) 20:08, 30 October 2012 (UTC)


 * I found a working link for the Michigan reference. The reference states "all species of Trillium are protected by state law"; however, it appears the author of this reference has fallen for the myth. There are 4 threatened/endangered species of Trillium, and 1 which is extirpated (which should be eligible for automatic protection if rediscovered, but is not actually on the MI T/E list). 4 other species are not listed. Elsewhere on the web, I see that all Trilliums are protected by Michigan's Christmas Greens Act of 1962 (which may have been repealed), but this law still allows (non T/E listed) Trilliums to be picked with the landowner's permission.  The situation in Michigan appears to be similar to the most restrictive laws in other states. T/E listed species are absolutely protected. Other species may enjoy some level of protection, but there are circumstances (e.g. on your own land) where picking trilliums is not illegal.Plantdrew (talk) 20:57, 30 October 2012 (UTC)


 * I think the Christmas Greens Act was superseded by the Natural Resources and Environmental Protection Act of 1994 . So it's still illegal to pick most(if not all- the words suggest all trillium species) trilliums in Michigan. vanis314 (talk) 16:08, 7 September 2014 (UTC)
 * And that still seems not to apply to trillium picked on land that you own or where the owner has granted you permission to pick. With a "bill of sale from the owner or other evidence of title", you CAN pick trilliums. Plantdrew (talk)

Propagating the common white trillium
My mom used to transplant her white trillium plants from place to place on our property (3 acres at the 1,100 foot level in the Willamette Valley) by digging them up with shovel and bucket, and physically moving the entire plant, watering them in the summer when it got really hot. Instead of dying, the trillium plants persisted. Our property has a lot of trillium plants growing naturally, even though the whole mountainside was the site of a forest fire 120 years ago.

But as interesting as that may be, are there any cases of people planting and growing trillium plants?

Can trillium plants that are grown in pots or vases be sold in the United States? 216.99.198.20 (talk) 02:36, 3 March 2011 (UTC)


 * Wikipedia is not a forum. Please see WP:TALK for an explanation of how to use article discussion pages. Thank you, Walter Siegmund (talk) 06:20, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

Trillium species in Asia
The following sentence is rightly questioned by @Hyperik: "Less than a dozen species are found in Asia." Although I believe the statement is true, I can not provide a proper reference. Should the sentence be tagged as "citation needed" or perhaps it should be removed altogether? Tom Scavo (talk) 16:01, 31 July 2019 (UTC)


 * I moved the sentence to a subsection for convenience but the statement is true nonetheless for the following reason. The Plant List gives 50 accepted names, not counting lower taxa. Of these, 39 are known to correspond to North American species, which leaves 11 names, all of which have been shown to correspond to Asian species by including one or more suitable citations per species name. QED — Preceding unsigned comment added by Trscavo (talk • contribs) 16:12, 4 August 2019 (UTC)

Subgenus Sessilium nomenclature
The current description for the name-change of the subgenus Phyllantherum to Sessilium is wrong. Freeman didn't inadvertently validate Sessilium, he just accidentally ignored it, following the lead of other mid-century botanists. The cited paper explains this more fully. You might have conflated this with Freeman's incidental validation of Phyllantherum. The real reason for the change to Sessilium is simply that Rafinesque described Sessilium before he described Phyllantherum, even though, in characteristic Rafinesque fashion, he then proceeded to ignore his own prior work (as did pretty much everybody else). But regardless, I don't think we want to get too bogged down in the weeds in this encyclopedia article with the reasoning for the various recent name changes. None of the changes represented scientific disagreements, but rather mere corrections of historical errors in following a code of nomenclature. I'd propose that we consistently refer to the sessile-flowered subgenus, if we must refer to it with a name at all, with modern terminology (as subg. Sessilium), referring the reader to Phyllantherum once (since you occasionally still see this name used.) But given that separating out Sessilium results in a polyphyletic subg. Trillium, should we even be wading into this mess in the first place? And then what about subgenus Delostylis? Doppelbrau (talk) 01:16, 13 September 2019 (UTC)


 * Thanks for bringing this up. I may have misinterpreted Reveal et al. but in any case, I don't really have a strong opinion on which name to use. I do think there's value in using subgenus nomenclature to organize taxa so I would be averse to dumping it altogether. Tom Scavo (talk) 01:29, 13 September 2019 (UTC)

Bad link
There is a bad link here. I don't know how to fix links, sorry! The type specimen T. cernuum described by Linnaeus was actually T. catesbaei,[9] This footnote 9 links you to the footnote section, but that footnote link goes nowhere (not bad link, just goes nowhere).


 * The link is not bad, you're just clicking on the wrong thing. When you hover over "Barksdale 1938," the actual link to the reference should appear. Works for me. Tom Scavo (talk) 13:30, 16 September 2019 (UTC)

New taxa
Documenting some edits to the taxa list so others can weigh in if necessary. T. delicatum and T. hibbersonii were added and removed. Neither of these taxa are recognized by even a single naming authority (TPL, WCSP, IPNI, or POWO) so there is no basis for inclusion. T. tennesseense was moved to a more prominent position in the taxa list. The IPNI recognizes this name but both WCSP and POWO list the name as a synonym. TPL does not list the name at all. I'm inclined to move the material on T. tennesseense back to where it was. Tom Scavo (talk) 14:58, 17 September 2019 (UTC)


 * Since this topic covers multiple changes, I'll split them up in the talk page under separate headings. Doppelbrau (talk) 02:00, 19 September 2019 (UTC)

Inclusion of taxa
Are we really restricted to only mentioning taxa from semi-automatically generated databases, as the above comment seems to imply? I find that to be a very strange policy, and I can't find it mentioned anywhere. I can understand using these occasionally-curated databases for resolving synonymy arguments where the disagreement is between name usage for the same entity. This is well-documented on the Wikipedia:Plants project page. However, this is a distinct question from assessing the basis for the inclusion of a taxon. (And by the way, TPL is superseded by POWO - it makes no sense to list them separately. TPL is no longer updated. This has been the case for many years now.) Doppelbrau (talk) 02:06, 19 September 2019 (UTC)


 * If a specific name is accepted by an independent naming authority, it is mentioned in the main article. (Infraspecific names are treated in subordinate articles by convention.) T. tennesseense, T. delicatum, and T. hibbersonii are not accepted by an independent naming authority, so they require special consideration (which is what we're giving them now). The latter name is a good example why some sort of ground rules are necessary, otherwise we'll end up with more confusion than there already is.


 * I think we're talking past one another, assuming this comment was left by Tom Scavo. You're just re-stating my problem with the page, not addressing my concern. Also, the 'independent naming authorities' used to justify inclusion aren't even independent. They are literally maintained by a single institution, Kew (albeit with input from other institutions). Could you direct me to the Wikipedia policy page that states, "If a specific name is accepted by an independent naming authority, it is mentioned in the main article." The closest thing I can find, as I said earlier, is a thoughtful discussion on resolving heterotypic and homotypic synonyms, but this, of course, is distinct from establishing grounds for article inclusion. TIA. Doppelbrau (talk) 18:41, 22 September 2019 (UTC)


 * Yes, I made the previous comment (I simply forgot to include a timestamp). It was meant to be background information for the interested reader. I acknowledge the issues you've raised with respect to the inclusion process. That said, the process has worked perfectly well for the first 48 species of this genus, so it has served its purpose. I guess we'll just have to deal with each new species on a case-by-case basis. Tom Scavo (talk) 20:07, 22 September 2019 (UTC)

Trillium tennesseense
I think we should include this species. Shouldn't the fine people of Tennessee be aware of a new and interesting discovery? I'm fine with noting that some databases regard it as a subset of T. lancifolium. As you noted, this is implied by POWO, for example, reducing it to synonymy within that species. We should trace that back to the source database that actually made the synonymy claim, though: USDA-NRCS. We should also note that the unknown editor of this database did not bother to give a reason for this reduction, or else we'd be dishonestly emphasizing one anonymous edit to a government database over other works. The other databases you list as rejecting T. tennesseense are either deprecated (TPL), or equivalent (WCSP, POWO, and IPNI are all Kew products that cross-reference one another; they are not independent works.) Additionally the Kew databases list the Melanthiaceae entries as "UR", meaning that they are "under review", and should not be taken as final naming decisions. Regional floristic works also accept the taxon (Weakley's Flora, for example), molecular databases (e.g. NCBI's taxonomy browser), and the USFS (they even wrote up a news article announcing its discovery). I don't understand why these focused secondary sources, authored by specialists and educators, should be discarded in favor of anonymous changes to a USDA database, which again, is ultimately the only source for the three claimed source-databases for the name's rejection (TPL, WCSP, POWO), which are actually just one source (Kew). Doppelbrau (talk) 02:34, 19 September 2019 (UTC)


 * Let's be clear. An entry for T. tennesseense already existed in the main article prior to the edit. The only question is whether this content should be moved to section "North American taxa" or kept in section "Other taxa". There are two reasons for not moving this content. First, the name Trillium tennesseense E. E. Schill & Floden does not enjoy the same level of acceptance as the other names in section "North American taxa" (for whatever reasons). Second, the inserted footnote is a hack that disrupts the flow of the species list. OTOH, section "Other taxa" is explicitly designed to handle non-list content. I'm inclined to revert this edit (but include the newly added citation). Tom Scavo (talk) 14:06, 19 September 2019 (UTC)


 * After doing some more research, I think it's possible to write a decent standalone article on T. tennesseense, which would address the second concern in the latter paragraph. This tips the scales for me. I'm okay with leaving this entry in section "North American taxa" as long as the footnote hack is removed. Tom Scavo (talk) 12:39, 22 September 2019 (UTC)


 * Okay great! I'll make the list more visually in-line with other lists. I assume this is what you mean by a footnote "hack"? I'm not trying to "hack" anything. Are you referring to the superscript markup tags? These markup tags are from Wikipedia's own help page resources. Doppelbrau (talk) 18:21, 22 September 2019 (UTC)


 * I just created a stub for Trillium tennesseense. Please add content to the species-level article. Do not clutter the main article with details re T. tennesseense. Thanks. Tom Scavo (talk) 18:49, 22 September 2019 (UTC)


 * I'm still confused, re: "hacking". Is this resolved? Am I being accused of something? The only detail I left on the Trillium page for T. tennesseense was a short note justifying its inclusion on the list, since that was previously in question. I've removed this note already (since that's been resolved). Thanks, and I suggest using a humble tone on Wikipedia talk pages rather than an imperious, commanding one. (I sometimes fall into this trap too, no worries). Doppelbrau (talk) 19:06, 22 September 2019 (UTC)


 * No, you are not being accused of anything. I carelessly used the word "hack" to refer to some wiki markup that has since been removed. The original issue regarding T. tennesseense has been fully resolved (at least from my point of view). Thanks. Tom Scavo (talk) 19:21, 22 September 2019 (UTC)

Trillium hibbersonii
T. hibbersonii is a name regularly referenced in Trillium horticulture. I don't understand why my edit explaining that modern plant taxonomists regard it as a form of T. ovatum was removed. I could see horticulturalists looking to this page, which purports to list all the species, and being confused by its absence. Doppelbrau (talk) 02:46, 19 September 2019 (UTC)


 * The citation provided for T. hibbersonii included a link but that page does not provide a description so I'm not sure what we're talking about here. I'll guess the name T. hibbersonii is used as a shortened version of T. ovatum f. hibbersonii, which is recognized by IPNI and accepted by WCSP and POWO. Forma hibbersonii is discussed in the article on T. ovatum. Recommendation: Do not include Trillium hibbersonii in the main article. Optionally redirect that search phrase and/or add a citation to the article on T. ovatum. Tom Scavo (talk) 12:56, 19 September 2019 (UTC)


 * My edit did not claim T. hibbersonii was a valid name. In fact, it did the exact opposite, so I don't understand the relevance of citing naming authorities, which, again, are not authorities, but rather mere databases. Your guess is incorrect about T. hibbersonii being an abbreviation. It's a nomen nudum that pre-dates the form designation. The citation that you removed showed, for example, that this name, despite it formally being incorrect, is in current use in the horticultural community. I'll go ahead and put it back in the article where it is more likely to be found, instead of on a page where you'd have to already know about it's synonymy to find it there. Doppelbrau (talk) 18:14, 22 September 2019 (UTC)

Trillium delicatum
This is a newly discovered species, so it would be very strange to find it in the four redundant databases cited above. Since the only source for its description is a single primary source, I feel like we're stuck either (1) ignoring an exciting discovery or (2) relying on that source and being transparent in the article with respect to its newness. I'd go with (2), personally. Wikipedia is supposed to be up-to-date. Doppelbrau (talk) 02:46, 19 September 2019 (UTC)


 * T. delicatum already dominates the article on T. decumbens so it is not being ignored. The question is how to treat it in the main article. Despite its lack of acceptance by independent naming authorities, perhaps we could list it in section "Other taxa" and link to the article on T. decumbens. Tom Scavo (talk) 14:36, 19 September 2019 (UTC)


 * on the contrary, Wikipedia is supposed to reflect what reliable secondary sources say, not the latest primary research. Read WP:PSTS. We should be very cautious about including newly named species until its clear that they have general acceptance. Peter coxhead (talk) 15:13, 22 September 2019 (UTC)


 * Thanks for directly addressing my question, . That's very helpful advice and I'd agree with that cautionary principle in virtually every other case (including, for example, the recently published Trillium georgianum). But in the case of T. delicatum, though, doesn't it seem absurd to ignore such an obviously distinct new species? (have you checked the article?) It would be like finding a population of six-legged blue giraffes in a hidden valley on Papua New Guinea and pretending that they must just be typical African giraffes until a few decades go by and somebody finishes their review article on giraffes. The morphological distinctions, much less the genetic and ecological considerations, are just so glaring. Doesn't common sense factor into the decision for species-inclusion, especially in the absence of any published dissenting opinions? Doppelbrau (talk) 18:54, 22 September 2019 (UTC)


 * FWIW, I would support appending the following text (with a single citation) to section "Other taxa": "Trillium delicatum is the proposed name for a putative new species that resembles T. decumbens in general appearance." Tom Scavo (talk) 13:46, 23 September 2019 (UTC)

improper use of "sp. nov."
We're not coining new names in this Wikipedia entry. "sp. nov." should not be used - instead you should refer to the authors of those species. This otherwise gives the impression that you are trying to take credit for their work. Doppelbrau (talk) 23:54, 12 December 2020 (UTC)


 * Thanks for pointing this out. It is done. Tom Scavo (talk) 02:47, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

To add to article
To add to this article: the etymology of "wakerobin." 173.88.246.138 (talk) 02:50, 16 November 2021 (UTC)
 * I believe that common name was first applied to T. erectum but I don't have a good reference. Tom Scavo (talk) 10:24, 16 November 2021 (UTC)