Euphorbia (Euphorbia viguieri)

Euphorbia
Euphorbia viguieri

That sure looks more like a Euphorbia neohumbertii... usually E viguieri has much larger, thicker spines along the column than that. What do you all thinK?

This picture was taken at the Myriad Botanical Gardens in Oklahoma City, OK.

I know that you are quite knowledgable about these kinds of plants. Truly, I have no idea. I was going by the marker, which you can clearly see in the photograph. Is it possible that even a botanical garden can mislabel a plant? Egads.

Hard to really tell from the image, but I would tend to agree with palmbob........and yes botanical gardens are also allowed to make mistakes. :-)

E. viguieri
http://www.euphorbia.de/e_viguieri.htm

E. neohumbertii
http://www.euphorbia.de/e_neohumbertii.htm

I take a lot of photos of plants from the Huntington Gardens- a pretty prestigious garden and a LOT of plant experts come through there all the time... yet tons of stuff is mislabeled there. It is amazing to me that is so. I have gotten in 'trouble' on multiple occasions putting plants on the site here and having someone who really knows that plant inform me of my error. I know palms well, and I can tell you there are dozens of completely mislabeled palms at the Huntington, and myself and other palm nuts have even pointed this fact out to the staff there, to no avail... so you can imagine the errors in identification must be very common throughout all botanical gardens all over the world. There just aren't enough experts on their staffs to know all about everything, and not enough $$ to do anything about corrections when they are uncovered. Oh well.

Well, actually I'm inclined to think it's a E. viguieri. I lost my E. neohumbertii this last winter, but the spines on mine were dark and almost hairy-like. The leaves were much smaller also. Of the two varieties of E. viguieri I have one has the larger stiffer spines with white on the leaves and the other has smaller spines with red on the leaves. They also have at least a half dozen other varieties of this species (E. viguieri).

But I'm no expert. So, I'll leave it up to them.

-Ron-


This message was edited Sep 1, 2004 3:14 PM

been looking up a lot about this plant and the photo just doesn't match any of the varieties... it is still probably E neohumbertii, but at least it's NOT an E viguieri

Just received this note from Frank (the Euphorbia man of www.euphorbia.de). Here is what he says:

"you can trust the label. This is a true E. viguieri - suffering on a mosaic virus. Typical in E. viguieri are the reddish starting leaf stalks (green in E. neohumbertii) the lighter green leaves (compared to E. neohumbertii) and the complex rebranching, flatted, smooth thorns (single, cylindrical and rough thorns in E. neohumbertii)."

-Ron-