It’s been 3 days and I’m still obsessing over all the wattle in the house.
Look at how variant these 3 plants are!
Because I’m a nerd of all things I stared researching wattle and how interesting is this:
As we all know, Acacia, commonly known as wattle, is a large genus of shrubs and trees in the subfamily Mimosoideae of the pea family Fabaceae. Initially it comprised a group of plant species native to Africa and Australia, with the first species A. nilotica described by Linnaeus.
But did you know that an international controversy erupted in the early 2000s when it became evident that the genus as it stood was not monophyletic, and that several divergent lineages needed to be placed in separate genera?! It turned out that one lineage comprising over 900 species mainly native to Australia was not closely related to the mainly African lineage that contained A. nilotica—the first and type species (which is the species name with which the name of a genus or subgenus is considered to be permanently taxonomically associated, i.e., the species that contains the biological type specimen). This meant that the Australian lineage (by far the most prolific in number of species) would need to be renamed. Botanist Les Pedley named this group Racosperma, which was inconsistently adopted.
Australian botanists argued that this would be more disruptive than setting a different TYPE species (A. penninervis) and allowing this large number of species to remain Acacia, resulting in the two African lineages being renamed Vachellia and Senegalia, and the two New World lineages renamed Acaciella and Mariosousa.
This was officially adopted, but many botanists from Africa and elsewhere disagreed that it was necessary.
Following this controversial decision in 2005, the Australian component of Acacia s.l. now retains the name Acacia. At the 2011 International Botanical Congress held in Melbourne, the decision to use the name Acacia, rather than Racosperma for this genus, was upheld. Other Acacia s.l. taxa continue to be called Acacia by those who choose to consider the entire group as one genus.
This is actually, seriously, fascinating to me! I love a good Wiki Wattle Wormhole!