Hello!
I'm Daniel Falck, a gardener in SW Finland, and a member of a small research team delving into the "secrets" of
Clematis, especially, and a bit in Ranunculaceae, in general.
Our paper was just published. It was 5 long years in making.
Here is a link to where you can download it.
We took a cladistic look at the placement of
Clematis within Ranunculaceae and, more specifically, tried to see what kind of infrageneric relationships are to be found within
Clematis. Our research didn't focus on the species level... so our results should not be taken at that. We used both morphological data and DNA sampling, and ran analyses on them both separately and combined.
I though it might be interesting to share the results here since many of you grow some of these plants.
First of all, we didn't find any evidence for
Anemone s.l. being one genus. It seems that such genera that have recently been lumped into
Anemone, like
Pulsatilla and
Hepatica, really are separate. Some other research published this year question this lumping as well. This obviously needs more research done.
Within
Clematis, we found twelve clades that seem to correspond quite well with the sectional division of the genus, at least conceptually. We didn't find any evidence for subgenera (this rank has been used quite often in the classification of
Clematis). A lot of the species distribution within these "section-like" clades is very different from the traditional, solely morphology-based classifications. In comparison to these, Magnus Johnson's view (1997/2001) on the genus is closest to our results, even if there are some major differences.
If nothing else, the very technical article is good reading for getting sleep! Have fun!
