The Pachypodium Project "Table of Contents" is repeated here to further assist any discussion. Please feel welcome to comment on any thing that might assist the project--one naively undertaken and more difficult than imagined.
One notation I should make is that I am not a Botanists but a graduate student in Landscape Architectural Design who also is a "Master Gardener" for the State of Virginia. I am quiet dedicated to growing plants from orchidstosucculents.
I understand "enough" about Botany to employ it to an aim; namely conservation. I am eager to learn more. My education in Philosophy and History as an undergraduate and Landscape Architecural Theory and Design further this aim.
The landscape and the floraofSouthern Africa and Madagascar are so special reasonable effort should aid to conserve the plant life, such as the genus Pachypodium, as much as it is economically possible for the Malagasy people.
I realize that the form of Botany employed in this Project on Pachypodium is, perhaps, traditional and classical excepts with its unequaled emphasis on ecology within the literature. Its fault, perhaps, lies in not having a cladistic analysis available of all species; although Sennbald et al has undertaken a cladistic study of subtribe Wrightieae (Apocynaceae) that included two Pachypodium species.
Cladistic analysis, a system of biological taxonomy based on the quantitative analysis of comparative data. It reconstructs "cladograms" that summarize the "assumed" phylogenetic relations and evolutionary historyofgroupsoforganisms (Taxa) and phylogeny. It is based on evolutionary development or natural historical taxonomy based on the application of the Theory of Evolution.
Sennbald et al. analyzed some of the Apocynaceae family and some of the Asclepiadacaeae family, which was timely considering that the two families had not been combined yet. The nature of this analysis was not to distinguish the species of Pachypodium but to understand the relationship between different genera, especially the relationship between Adenium and Pachypodium. The result indicated a "paraphyletic" nature for the tribe Wrightieae, meaning that all members of Wrightieae share the same common ancestor, but that Wrightieae does not represent all the descendants of this ancestor. Apparently this has implications for Pachypodium where it is more closely related and one of four monophyletic clades that include Funtumia, Mascarenhasia, and Holarrhena. These four genera are placed into two tribes, so that they are not intimately related. Pachypodium is placed under the tribe Echitae subtribe Pachypodiinae. This placement excludes Adenium, though it shares the subfamily Apocynoideae with Pachypodium, it is placed in the subtribe Neriinae under the tribe Wrightieae.
This is the extent of the cladistic work mentioned in Rapanarivo et al.
One aspect of this study by Rapanarivo et al. is that the "plant" is very much a tangibe being. One is never not with a sense that he or she is "with the plant" in this study. Its virtue is its applied ecology where the "plant" is very much its habitat and environment. Any ecological analysis becomes more than charaters of the plant for an anlaysis. Its role is the immediate landscape and climate as much literature, its analysis, its field-work, etc are important. Rapanarivo's work adheres to the effectiveness of Field Studies and along with traditional Linnaeus Taxonomy, which to Rapanarivo et al tends to dominate the work on Pachypodium. What is not really treated here is a system based on
This article Pachypodium, my first, is divided into shorter "subsections" and "subsubsection" and possibly "subsubsections" to manage the great level of detail dissimulate in this article. The Project is as follows:
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