Rick
Well-Known Member
I like Risk's comment "There is such a huge amount of variation (and inter-relatedness) in gratrixianum and villosum. But if this is a large flower I would consider it more of a villosum variety instead of a gratrixianum."
My gratrixianum somehow looks like a villosum at least its pounch and petal
I recently gave a presentation put together by Averyanov on slippers of Indochina (centered on Vietnam).
There are a couple of slides that show myriad forms of villosum/gratrixianum like flowers. Every new mountain and valley he goes to from Saigon to Hanoi has a different form. He labeled them as "clinal variants", with a continuous gradual shift in forms from one part of the country to another in a South to North transect. He also did an East to West transect starting in Thailand, Myanmar through Laos to Vietnam. That transect started out with inigne/exul like forms gradually morphing into more "gratrixianum" like plants.
One thing I've not been able to get from photos but in my GH looking at actually flowers is the size differences. My exul, insigne, and "gratrixianum/affine" flowers are very small in comparison to the villosum I have. The villosum is 2X the size of these other flowers. I don't know if my villosum is abnormally large, but it would take a whole different pollinator to deal with it compared to the other species, and pollination isolation is what makes a species. If you have two flowers that have the same color/pattern, but greatly different in size, that changes the pollination dynamics and subsequent genetic isolation.
Without knowing the collection site of this plant it could be virtually impossible to ascribe a definitive identity.
Not all dark haired brown eyed Caucasians are Italians! (even if they want to be:wink