29^th March – Good bye to Freddy our car

Today we had to say goodbye to Freddy, our lovely and most faithful car. We are finally back in Lima!

The day passed sorting things out, and clearing and cleaning Freddy. Presses went back to the Museum’s store room, specimens into our preparation area, and so on. Most importantly, Paul re-united with his family – his 2 year old daughter Fabiana was full of smiles! In the evening we all went for a nice cake and ice cream to celebrate our safe homecoming.

30^th March – Digitalising field notes

I have been typing our field notes bit by bit into our database. I started the job whilst we were in Arequipa. Yesterday I used the long drive to type some more in the car. Today I have spent all day doing this, and now as the typing has finished I am focusing on preparing herbarium labels. Our database software has a great interface for designing your labels – but you need to do some technical stuff to get the labels look perfect. It is pretty much like programming language, that is how it feels. Quite nice, very nice balance after all the field work.

Once the label design is correct, the labels need to be proof read. It is good to make sure they look perfect – they will remain with the specimens for years to come!! Sandy sent us acid free paper from UK, so that we can print the labels properly. For long term storage, it is important to use acid free paper. These specimens are going to be five star top quality!

2^nd April – Applying for an export permit

Our labels are ready now! We printed them out, and then cut them neatly.

I sorted the labels into numeric order and then off we went to the herbarium to put them with the specimens! It felt great, we were very excited seeing the specimens all ready to be mounted and processed into the museum.

We had a small party to celebrate us finishing. Lemon pie and passion fruit limonade, yum yum! Here is the crew of the San Marcos herbarium, you can see the beautiful garden just outside:

Celebrations were also due as we handed in our export permit application this morning. We had prepared all the documents, and the museum’s secretary at the San Marcos herbarium had helped us to prepare another document necessary for the application. All that hard work paid off, and now we are just waiting to hear back from the Environmental Ministry.

3^rd-4^th April – Back in the herbarium with plants

Time to catch up with herbarium work. With all our experience now from our field trip, it is great to be back in the herbarium identifying specimens, and studying the material with more time in our hands.

Lima has two other herbaria in the Universidad Nacional Agraria Lamolina (MOL). We visited one of these herbaria today, the Weberbauer herbarium. The collection is rich in types, as many taxonomists used Weberbauer’s high quality specimens to describe new species. Unfortunately, the top duplicates used for describing these species were deposited in Berlin. These duplicates were destroyed during the Second World War, and now the remaining duplicates, many of which are in the Weberbauer herbarium in Lima, are extremely important. If they exist, they can be used to lectotypify the names for which types have been destroyed.

I needed to search through the material to find if some duplicates of Solanum sandianum or Solanum planifurcum might exist. I managed to find three specimens which are types of Solanum names, but none of them were the ones I was after. Good job done though, now these specimens can be scanned and put online for other taxonomists to use.

Here we are in the midst of annotating and databasing the material, with Professora Vilcapoma in the background.

5^th April – Beautiful Lima

It is officially Semana Santa! The museum is closed today, and we are taking some time off to explore the city.

Lima is going through a heat wave. Generally in late March Lima is foggy. The fog enters from the Pacific, and takes over the city. With fog, there is less sun and the atmosphere in the city is cold, humid and dim. This year, however, the fog has not arrived yet despite it being April already. Instead, it is +35 degrees celcius every day, full sun shine.

We took a walk on the beach to touch the Pacific. Emilio Perales, a junior lecturer from the forestry department of the Universidad Nacional Agraria Lamolina, joined us on our walk – and got into a water war with Andrew!

Emilio explained to us how the local public transport system works. Lima’s famous micros are mindboggling to most tourists. Busses do not have numbers or routes, but instead, they are colour coded. The bus system is not that official even – it seems bus lines are just born out of necessity, rather than planned by the council. Anybody can become a bus driver as well, there is no licence involved.

Here are examples of the bus lines: the blue white line:

These busses go from Avenida Arequipa through the Ovalo in Miraflores to Chorrillos via Barranco. It’s a great bus as it takes the more scenic route through Larcomar along the coast.

Another one is the red white bus that comes to Chorillos too, but it takes a different route throught Avenida Tacna.

Then there are the more complex bus lines, like the green bus with black roof, two green stripes, one white stripe, and red at the bottom. Who knows where it goes …

The yellow white bus comes to Chorrillos through Abancay

I wish there would be a guide to these busses, but there isn’t. You just have to learn them as you go. It is quite an anarchistic public transport system. The bus drivers are not licensed either. I suppose you wake up one morning, decide to become a bus driver, hackle for a bus, buy it cheap, and paint it (this is the important part!). The next most important thing you need to become a successful bus line is a fierce assistant. We call these assistants bus pimps. The assistant’s job is to shout the route aloud from the moving bus, by hanging from the open bus door and by making as much noice and hand waving as you possibly can. If you accidentally make an eye contact with the bus pimps, you will quickly find yourself inside a bus on a route to somewhere – they are very keen on getting more customers!

Once you’ve got your head around the general system, you are off. The busses drive extremely arrogantly, which means you get to your destination fast.

People don’t believe me about the colour code when I try to explain it to them, so I hope the blog will help to de-mystify the system to any confused tourists in Lima.

21^st March – Neotypifying, and yet again, neotypifying

Panic over! We found cash and didn't have to wash any dishes. It was the well known classic "going to the bank" method that saved us . Lucky we had some US dollars to change into Peruvian nuevo soles. Still running strong, fuel in the car, food in the stomachs, and money burning in the pockets .

Yesterday we drove all day for nearly 300 km on small mountain roads just to get to Sandia. The reason we so desperately want to collect around here is that there are two species described from around Sandia that need re-typification. This is because the material that was used to describe these species, i.e. their type collections, were destroyed during the Second World War in the Berlin herbarium. To replace the lost types, new types need to be made, and this process is called neotypification.

The two types we wanted to recollect were for Solanum planifurcum and Solanum sandianum. Both species were described by Bitter, S. planifurcum from the outskits of Sandia from 2100 – 2500m elevation, and confusingly, S. sandianum from higher up above Cuyocuyo, a town c. 20 km from Sandia, at 3800 m elevation. Some claim these species are synonyms, and represent just extreme variation of a single species. Today we shall see!

We started our morning from Sandia near S. planifurcum type locality, and luckily found a population just outside Sandia in 2100 m elevation.

We kept collecting populations until 2500 m, and observed variation along the elevational gradient. Further up, all the way to 3200 m we could observe populations of S. planifurcum. Then gradually, things started to change. At 3400 we found what Bitter would have called S. sandianum, just outside Cuyocuyo, in the local rubbish dump. Not a pretty collection locality, I admit, but there is was.

Solanum sandianum seems to have narrower leaves, which are less hairy and shiny above. Flowers vary in colour, but in general they are dark purple rather than pale lilac as Solanum planifurcum. Calyx shape and size, corolla, stamens and style characters seem to vary less. But are the differences in leaf shape, size and indumentum enough to justify recognising two species? We discussed this with Paul and decided that this is a perfect case where molecular sequence data can help us to decide. If molecular data gives evidence that these taxa are not sister to each other, then we will look for morphological differences that could be used to distinguish them. If, on the other hand, molecular data shows these individuals from different elevations along the road from Sandia to Cuyocuyo to be all mixed within a single clade, I think the case is clear for sunking these names for synonomy!

Having done a good days work in collecting along the gradient from Sandia to Cuyocuyo, we were heading back towards Juliaca. As we got closer to the city, we opted to drive all the way to Puno for the night as the city is famous for its beautiful location on the shore of Lake Titicaca.

The roads weren’t great, and again, we arrived to Puno very late at night. We managed to find a hostel without trouble this time. It was time for some relaxation, and winding down after a long drive. Lucky for the boys, there was a footfall game on in the evening, Peru was playing against Chile! Tensions were high, it was 0-1 for Chile for long time, and although Peru managed to score before too long, Chile eventually won. The boys were sad, some tears were shed, but I consoled them by reminding them that there was the beautiful view of Lake Titicaca to see in the morning.

22^nd March – Views over Lake Titicaca

I always thought as a child that Lake Titicaca was a hot place with sandy beaches and tropical fruits all over. Just to clarify, this was not the fault of the Finnish education system at all. I just had manage to form this image in my head that Lake Titicaca was a place for sunbathing.

The truth is very different. Lake Titicaca is the highest elevation lake in the world, and it is not that warm.

Again we had a long drive ahead of us, we had to make some miles to make it across the Andes for the final time. This time we were crossing the Cordillera Occidental to the coastal deserts near Moquegua. It’s a long 7 hour drive from Puno to Moquegua, and this is without any collecting or taking side roads. Of course we couldn’t avoid the temptation to take few sideroads, but just enough to collect few Solanum fragile specimens near Puno.

Solanum fragile is the panda of the Solanum world – it’s flowers are cute as buttons! The calyx lobes are shy but showy, just a little bit recurved as you can see in the picture, and then the stigma! See how long it is, it’s excerted more than the length of the stamens! The species grows high up around 4000 m elevation, in rock crevases – despite this it has all the elegance of a high society lady with light blue petals, large corollas, and the showy appearance!

And of course there was Salpichroa hiding amongst the rocks as well! Salpichroa glandulosa is distinct amongst the genus having very densely hairy leaves.

We dissected a flower in the field, and discovered that the nectary disk at the base of the corolla tube is orange!

The slopes on the western side of the Andes near Moquegua are extremely dry and sandy. At 4400 m elevation there was sand everywhere. We kept looking for our sand loving friend Solanum chamaesarachidium, but couldn’t find it. I doubt it occurs this far west, the only populations known from Peru are in Puno.

The western slopes lower down are home for the Regmandra and the tomato clade of Solanum. We collected Solanum peruvianum along the road at around 2500 m elevation, a wild species related to tomato.

Today finding a hotel was easy – we hailed one from the car!!!! We got to Moquegua late, and we were tired. On a tight street just near the main Plaza of the city, whilst waiting for a traffic jam to clear, we manage to find a hotel on our left with their carrage door just a meter from our car, and that was it! We hailed the owner to open the doors before causing too much of a chaos on the street, and checked ourselves in. Sometimes it is easy, sometimes not…

23^rd March – Flowers of the dry hills

Having slept peacefully, we headed out early to hunt for a collection I had seen in the herbarium in Lima. It was a specimen near Torata near Moquegua, that resembled Solanum arequipense, a species that has remained mysterious since its original description by Bitter. As for some other species of Bitter, the type of Solanum arequipense was destroyed in the Berlin fire during the Second World War. Without the type, the species has remained elusive and despite the name having been used in various floristic accounts, nobody really knows what the species is really like and what entity the name really refers to.

But there it was, just next to Quebrada Torata. This taxon is very similar to Solanum aloysiifolium, species that is found in northern Argentina and Bolivia. My colleague Gloria (see Argentina blog) will find these photos very exciting! Despite the similarity, this species is definetely something different. The leaves vary from entire to serrate, stamens are c. 3 m long, style clearly excerted, with a very capitate stigma.

The calyx lobes are larger than in Solanum aloysiifolium, and most importantly, the fruits remain green when mature. The fruits are speckled with these white small dots, which I first thought to be nothing special. But every fruit, in every individual we have seen, seems to have them.

We also collected another wild tomato species, Solanum chilense. It grows lower down in elevation.

Another new species for the day was Solanum corymbosum, a member of the Solanum section Parasolanum group. These species are related to Solanum section Solanum. They all have small flowers with tiny anthers, but with large stigmas. Solanum corymbosum occurs in low elevation dry habitats, whilst the others occur at slightly higher elevation. Solanum corymbosum has cute red fruits that resemble mini-tomatoes.

In the extremely dry habitats we passed near Omate we collected Exodeconus

and Nolana, both genera of Solanaceae specialised in desert habitats.

The day was getting late, and we were still in the middle of the desert, slowly ascending to the mountains on our way to Arequipa. It was getting dark, and we were aware that we would be arriving late to Arequipa that night. Except that suddenly we realised we were not going to arrive to Arequipa at all: we had a punctured front left tire! We also had a slow puncture in our back left tyre, and although this tyre looked still OK, air was coming out more and more rapidly.

So punctures in both of our left hand side tyres, what could we do? We took our spare out, thinking that changing the flat tyre from the front could get us as far as Arequipa, three hours away. Andrew and Paul took the spare down from its hiding place, and started changing the tyre. In less than 30 minutes, they were putting bolts on and tightening the spare – we were nearly ready to go again! Except that the spare turned out to be flat as well…

There was nothing else left to do except to take the spare and walk to the next village to get pumping. I stayed in the car, guarding our poor Freddy as we call our handsome 4by4. The spot were we had had to stop was a dangerous one – there was not adequate space to easily get pass our Freddy if busses or trucks would turn up. I was equiped with a powerful head torch, and hazards triangle which I put on the road.

By the time boys headed to the village with the spare tyre, it was pitch black. There I was, finally having an opportunity to breath, enjoy an evening by myself and watch the starts on the clear Andean sky. Beautiful! This is how it looked before going totally dark. I stopped taking photos in the dark as star skies never turn up nice but trust me it was beautiful.

Temperatures rocket down during nights in the Andes, so I stayed inside the car, keeping myself warm, waiting for any passersby. Nothing came for nearly an hour, but then I finally saw lights in the night sky, coming from behind the nearby curve. It was a truck!!! I took my headtorch, shone to indicate our poor positioning in the middle of two curves on narrow part of the road, and hoped that they would slow down before passing Freddy which was missing its both left handside tyres.

The truck barely slowed down. It took a milly second to observe the situation and the narrow space before taking its decision to go for it. The truck passed well, which was good news. This meant buses might be able to pass as well, and we knew to expect a bus soon.

Boys returned with bad news: the spare tyre was not only flat but with a massive hole in it.

So with three flat tyres and two OK ones, we had no option than to split our team. Paul with his peruvian fluency offered to head to Arequipa with two tires, so that he could return by next morning with repairs. Luckily a car passed by to give Paul a lift. Andrew and I stayed with the car. How would our night in Freddy go – and would the busses get through? We were nervous, but the stars were giving us comfort.

I left Tiina, Andy and Paul in Cusco and began my slow re-entry into the world outside plant collecting – culture shock for sure! Flying into Lima the world looked very different – big cargo ships, anchovy fishing fleets, dry desert – something I hadn’t seen for what seemed like years, but really was only a couple of weeks.

I tried really hard not to be envious of their journey on the Interoceanica – failed of course, but I will hear about it eventually! They are sure to find great things, can’t wait to see them.

I spent a day and a half in Lima, working in the herbarium again trying to sort out a few mysteries, catching up with friends and generally getting things set up for when the others return. Some of the great old friends from previous times in Peru were in Lima (Blanca Leon and Ken Young from the University of Texas) – we all had a great Sunday walking along the seafront near their apartment in Miraflores.

Although I have now come back to the Museum and am getting to grips with the “real” world, the field trip work does not end yet. All those lovely solanums we collected need to have their data typed up into the database so the labels can be printed out. In order to export our part of the specimens from Peru we must provide complete data labels, too often people come and collect, leave the plants but never send the labels, making the collections a burden for the staff of our sister institution in Lima. Field work needs to be collaborative from start to finish, and the finish is long after one leaves what is considered the “field”!

The Museum hasn’t changed utterly since I left, so picking up the threads of what I was doing before is pretty straightforward. The best bit is that I feel a new excitement for what I am doing in Solanum taxonomy, a new appreciation for the collections we have and the ones we have just made, and have come back altogether rejuvenated – full of new ideas and plans. Seeing plants in their native habitat, doing what they just do, is without doubt once of the most important ways to increase understanding of the diversity and scope of nature. The collections we hold at the Museum are important, of course, but it is the combination of knowledge from the collections and field that really makes for good science - an integrative whole that is more than the sum of its parts.

This is definitely the best job in the world!! Keep tuned in for Tiina's posts from Peru, and once she is back here in London, we will keep you up to date with what we do with the wonderful nightshades we have collected in South America.

from Sandy:

For my last day of collecting with Team Solanum we decided to go down another of the roads out of the Sacred Valley up over the mountains and to the Amazon slope. This one made a loop, so we thought it would be a good idea! Well, it was, but it made for a VERY long day. First we ascended up a shale scree slope on a road (yes a road) to 4578m elevation over the Abra de Amparaes….

We then descended through a wonderful glacial valley, classically shaped as a U – it was full of tiny communities with herds of llamas and alpacas. These iconic Andean animals are related to camels and are hardy enough to withstand the altitude and temperatures – although they are set out to graze every day and brought back to stone corrals every night by the local people. You can see the camel-like faces….

Our first exciting solanum of the day was the enigmatic Solanum “Cusco-branched” – a plant sort of like Solanum probolospermum of the Abra de Malaga, but with dense branched hairs all over its stems and leaves. Is it the same, is it different? We needed to really collect it intensely over the range of elevations to be sure… it seems that this branched hair thing is on the Amazon side (E slopes), with Solanum probolospermum (with simple hairs) on the western slopes. We collected this plant as often as we could over the elevational gradient to be able to see if this idea holds once we get back and compare our collections to those made by others earlier and in different places.

Down and down the valley we went, encountering more and more solanums as we got lower. We also saw lovely waterfalls and fantastic rock faces…..  this is truly a spectacular place. Driving along a one-lane road cut into the rock wall can be heart-stopping of course, but we are getting used to that!

We encountered the junction to begin our ascent up the other branch of the road at about 2500m elevation – and just a few hundred metres up that road, a real prize revealed itself – Solanum sinuatiexcisum, the relative of Solanum fiebrigii we had collected in Argentina. This was a huge herb more than 2 m tall though – quite a different beast.

By this time we were getting a bit nervous about climbing over the pass again (different road though this time) in the dark, so kept our collecting to a minimum…. this of course meant stopping a lot, and getting excited over all the new things we were seeing. One mystery was a small tree with shiny leaves and green fruits that I think might be a new species – I will need to check in the herbarium in Lima once I am back to be sure though, I think I have been calling this Solanum maturecalvans for ages, but it is really different seen alive – this is why field work is so important…. For now it is called Solanum “not-maturecalvans”!

In a small village just before Lares we saw the beautiful solanaceous species Brugmansia sanguinea close up and personal – this is a magic plant, you can just tell can’t you by the lovely flowers!

On and up we drove, racing to get onto the paved road before dark – we saw the locals bringing in their llamas, single file along a ridge…

We made it back to Pisac just as the entire two was closing down at 8pm – a good final meal, a hot shower (the best we have had in Peru yet, in the Hotel Pisac Ayllu) and plant dryer organising finished the day. I will be really sad to leave the team here for the next set of adventures – they are hoping to take a route I have long wanted to go on, but life elsewhere is calling. I wonder what they will find, and I wonder if I will be able to resurface into the NHM again?

After the excitement of our collections along the road to Quillabamba, we began today with a very prosaic collection  - in the garden of our hotel! They had a species of Tiina’s Morelloid clade growing right in their window (one reason we chose this particular hostal) – Solanum polytrichostylum. It was also growing along the stream, so it is defintely native here. It is great that people (not just us!) like solanums enough to cultivate them for ornament – this one is called “suyttu ccaya” in Quechua.

We packed all our stuff (including the plants that had arrived via the encomienda from Andahuaylas) and set off up the Sacred Valley, as the valley of the Río Urubamba is called. The valley is the site of many Inca and pre-Inca ruins and settlements – many of these are famous, but many more are not excavated and are just part of everyday life. We decided to look for one of Tiina’s mysteries up a small dirt road out of the town of Urubamba; the collection locality was a bit vague and was from the 1960s so we didn’t really know what we would find.

Well, we didn’t find the mystery, but did find one of my favourite species, Solanum maturecalvans, at the end of a logging road. Its waxy white flowers seem not quite real, and the crinkled leaf base gave rise to the name of one of its synonyms – Solanum crotalobasis – the rattlesnake tail base! 

Synonymy is one of those things that seems like a mistake – naming the same thing twice, but is really good evidence of how science really works. In the case of Solanum maturecalvans the German botanist Georg Bitter named two plants he thought were different Solanum maturecalvans and Solanum crotalobasis – they were from different places, looked a bit different, and he really didn’t have many specimens to compare in the early part of the 20^th century.  Now I come along, some decades later, and decide that those two type specimens belong to the same species – therefore one (the later one described) becomes a synonym. Not a mistake, just a re-interpretation of the evidence, along with decades more collecting and specimens to look at.

In the same bit of forest we found Solanum maturecalvans we also saw a lovely Jaltomata with blood red nectar – how cool is that!

Coming out of the mountains down through the town we saw Streptosolen jamesonii growing by the side of the road – it is really native to northern Peru and Ecuador, but we collected it anyway. It is a very interesting plant with a twisted corolla – essentially it has an upside down flower.

We then headed up the Urubamba valley to the town of Pisac, the site of another massive Inca fortress.

Here the excavations and restorations are still on-going – it was amazing to see the terracing being restored using ancient techniques, down to mixing the mud used as mortar by foot power!

We got caught in a torrential rainshower, but afterwards explored the hills behind the town and found the wonderful Salpichroa weberbaueri – named for Augusto Weberbauer, the author of the wonderful book The Vegetable World of the Peruvian Andes, who had collected the type specimen.See an earlier post from Lima for more about him.....

A bit of culture, a bit of botany – what a great day!

We decided to have a day off from driving madly across the Peruvian countryside and to explore the amazing ruins of Ollantaytambo. This is a small town with a huge ruin attached that is on the banks of the Río Urubamba.

It was here that the Inca Manco Capac defeated the Spanish army, only to have them come back in more force later and over-run the fortress – he then retreated to Machu Pichu and beyond….  Today trains run from Cusco to Ollantaytambo to Machu Pichu several times daily (last time I was here it was once a day, starting at the crack of dawn! – how times change).

Part of the site of Ollantaytambo is a temple to the sun (or so the guidebooks say) hewn of gigantic stones that were transported from across the river and high in the mountains. This temple was never finished, and one can see gigantic stones left along the trail from the quarry across the Urubamba. Like all Inca stonework, you can’t put a piece of paper between these stones – what is amazing about Ollantaytambo is the sheer size of these blocks (see Paul for scale in the picture). How did they do it?

We climbed high on trails around the entire site, and managed to see some really amazing scenery, take some silly pictures of all of us, and see some interesting plants.

To collect, we went across the river on an old Inca bridge (recontructed of course) and walked amongst terraced fields of maize and other crops.

We of course found some solanums – the msot exciting of which was what we called Solanum “pseudoexcisirhombeum” – like our friend from the high puna, but a bit different.  For a start it has smaller flowers….

Hot off the presses (several days later) – on downloading the original description from the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), we find that it matches this Urubamba plant better than the puna plants from Ayacucho – so we will need to figure out what those are now! Being able to look at the literature in the field is truly amazing…

Landslides are a fact of life in Peru (as you will have seen from earlier posts!) and the Ollantaytambo area is no exception – this river of mud came down the mountain last October or so (we were told be a resident) at night with a huge whoosh. It hadn’t even been raining apparently, a piece of mountain just fell off. Wow.

Ollantaytambo of course is more than just ruins, it is also a lovely village, and prides itself on retaining its Inca heritage. It also has some lovely Spanish touches as well, like these bulls on the rooftop for good luck, along with a bottle of champagne for celebration!

Having a day off from driving was good for all of us – we have recharged our batteries and are ready to go again…  what will tomorrow bring? More solanums we are sure!

We left the humming town of Abancay – having first sorted out how to get the plant presses we had managed to forget in Andahuaylas the day before (it always happens at some point!) sent on to Cusco.  Peruvians have a great system for this, called “encomienda” – we sent money by bus company to the hotel keeper in Andahuaylas, then he kindly packed up the presses and sent them by bus to Cusco – all very efficient and easy.

As usual in the Andes the day began with a steep climb over a mountain pass – this time in dense fog – but we still managed to see some great plants. We stopped to look back at Abancay in the distance and Paul found a lovely Jaltomata (another genus in the Solanaceae) with densely furry filaments that were deep purple, a beautiful contrast to the pearly white flowers. We are not sure what species it is – but colleagues will let us know once we can send them the specimens!

As has been the case for a few days on this not-so-well-travelled part of the Andean range, we ran into a bit of road trouble – another huaico had covered the road in at least three metres of mud – but the machines were out there sorting it out. We only had to wait about 20 minutes or so – nothing really in the grand scheme of things!

Descending into the valley of the Río Apurimac we began to find new and interesting solanums – among them the wonderful species Solanum iltisii – named for the American botanist Hugh Iltis by one of his graduate students. It is a rather large tree with pretty white flowers, but its most peculiar feature is its warty fruits – the “warts” are the bases of hairs that fall off as the fruit matures. I have seen this species in the harbarium – it was great to see it in the flesh!

As we descended twoards the town of Curahuasi, where we intended to spend the night, we began to look for Solanum anomalostemon, a species I had described with my colleague from the New York Botanical Garden Michael Nee in 2009 from herbarium specimens – I was really keen to see it alive! We called in anomalostemon for its very peculiar (for a solanum) heart-shaped anthers; found nowhere else in the genus. Well, we looked and looked, found lots of other things, so were about to give up – but- decided to have a look along the roadside in the landslips to see if we could find it there.  And – amazingly – there it was! Inconspicously sitting at the base of a landslide…  when he saw it Paul yelled out loud; we thought he had fallen and hurt himself….

And it is as odd and I expected –what a strange plant. Tiny and flat, but with large (for a solanum) flowers with these most strange-shaped anthers. We fell to speculating as to what pollinated it….

What a wonderful way to end the day – and just as we got into the car to head into Curahuasi, the snowy peak of Salkantay decided to reveal itself. All was right in the world.

In Curahuasi the townspeople were celebrating Carnaval still (during Lent it seems to be a continual celebration rather than a time of abstinence – a good idea I think!) with the ceremony of cutting a tree decorated with presents.. same sort of thing we saw in Andahuaylas a few days back.  We agreed – a celebration was in order – for the wierdest solanum ever!!

Day 1

Sandy:

In the morning Ayacucho turned out to be a very lovely city – full of charm and character. Ayacucho was the site of a famous battle that turned the tide against the Spanish during the liberation of South America, and the central plaza commemorates this with a huge statue of General San Martin – with Bolivar feted as one of the continents liberators.

The Andes are an active seismic zone, and our hotel had special areas set aside as safe areas, special lights etc. Not sure how effective this all is though, a few years ago a major earthquake devasted the city of Arequipa.

Ayacucho is famous for handicrafts, and we took a bit of time to check it all out. Paul bought a brilliant taxi made from sheep mandibles as a present for his brother – a Lima taxi driver!

We left Ayacucho headed for the town of Vilcashuamán, the geographical centre of the Inca empire. The road was wonderful, we went through a very high section of puna vegetation; the puna is a grassland above the treeline, the common grass is ichu (Stipa ichu).

Amongst rocks we found a plant of the wonderful Solanum excisirhombeum – we had seen this one before, but this time, we found that the flowers below the grass and not expose to the sun were white, rather than purple, like the ones out in the open.

When we descended out of the puna we came into a huge flat (-ish – the Andes are never completely flat!) fertile plain with fields of potatoes, barley, oats and quinua; this last is a staple Andean crop that has become popular as a health food (it is a member of the Chenopodiaceae, the same as lamb’s lettuce in the UK).

We collected some new and interesting things along the way, as dusk fell we found Solanum polytrichostylum – a tall spindly thing with large flowers and purplish stems. It was growing alongside some apparently wild tobacco plants – quite a display.

The rest of the drive to Vilcashuamán was in the dark, pretty hair-raising on twisty Andean dirt roads; once there, we were charged 2 nuevos soles (about 50p) for entrance to the city by a group of children – real business minds there! We arrived almost too late for any food, but found a place to stay where they let us put up the plant dryer – phew! What will it look like in the morning?

Day 2

Sandy:

Vilcashuamán turned out to be a town built on the ruins of the Incas – the church sits on top of the Temple of the Sun, and a pyramid supposedly used of sacrifices sits right in town. We spent a bit of time looking around, then headed back on the same road we had come on (collecting where we had driven in the dark).

We sped along on the bits we had collected before, but once on the unknown road again, we began to collect again. We went over a high pass on national route number 3 (a dirt road), where we found another Salpichroa growing amongst rocks (also in a sheep pen!), but no solanums.

As we were collecting we saw three male china linda (a sort of falconid bird whose English name I can’t remember) chasing one poor female all over the place. Eventually they seem to have left her alone, as we saw her sitting quietly by the side of the road later.

Descending from the puna into the valley of the Río Pampa (the border of the departments of Ayacucho and Apurimac) we hurtled through vegetation zones, one of which was Solanaceae heaven. Here we found one of our problem children – Solanum probolospermum (the name says it all!) – a woody vine with flashy purple flowers. It looks all the world like Solanum crispum of English gardens, but it belongs to Tiina’s group of Morelloid solanums…. Hmmmm.

The find of the day, however, was the wild tomato species Solanum chmielewskii – previously only known from three collections from the department of Apurimac! Ours is the first record for the department of Ayacucho and a range extension for the species. Finding out the ranges of species is another reason for collecting, especially in areas that are not well-known. We were all pretty excited!

We made it down to the Río Pampa as it was getting to be dusk, so another night drive was in order. The river was huge…  such power flowing through the narrow gorge.  Quite impressive.

Up we went to the town of Chincheros (now in Apurimac) in the dark, hair-raising again, especially as there had been landslides (in Peru called huaicos, from the Quechua word) earlier in the day and the lorries made two-way traffic difficult if not impossible. We made it though, to a lovely town with a great hotel and a well-deserved sleep!

Day 3

Tiina:

As it was so late in the evening when we were approaching Chincheros yesterday, we spend all day today exploring around the area.  We traced our way back to Rio Pampas, descending along the narrow mountain road collecting plants at every opportunity. The Rio Pampas valley is very diverse, but there are nearly no collections of solanums from this area. The valley crosses a large elevational gradient, and includes low elevation dry forest habitats as well as more moist montane forests higher up. This makes is just the most amazing collection locality!

The most amazing species we saw today was something we all first thought very common. We are not sure what the name of this species is, or indeed if it is something never described before. Nevertheless, we first thought the plant we saw was just another Solanum americanum. The widespread Solanum americanum, not to be unkind, isn’t the most beautiful plant in the world. It has minute white petals and the tiniest of anthers. The plant we saw today, which we now refer to as “pseudoamericanum”, was a little more exciting than the usual Solanum americanum. It had equally small flowers, white petals and small anthers, but that is where the similarity ends. It has a very large stigma, and in a close up picture the disproportionate size of the stigma becomes evident.

And here is a picture of Solanum americanum for comparison:

If you look carefully, you’ll see that “pseudoamericanum” has longer calyx lobes, which are not reflexed in fruit. The fruits of “pseudoamericanum” are green when ripe, whilst in Solanum americanum fruits are shiny black, and calyx lobes are clearly reflexed. Also, “pseudoamericanum” has branched inflorescences with spaces between each pedicels, whilst Solanum americanum has simple inflorescences where flowers all arise from a single point. These differences are fixed within the species. In fact, both species occur in the Rio Pampas valley in the same elevational zone. I can’t wait to get back to Lima to study more material of “pseudoamericanum” in the herbarium. Whilst we were in Lima, I saw other specimens of “pseudoamericanum” but was not sure at the time about differences between it and Solanum americanum. All of the “pseudoamericanum” specimens are from similar habitats from Southern Peru – this fits well with what we saw today. We just need to confirm if this has been described before or not through a good study of some type material.

For lunch we stopped on a side track in a patch of dry forest. Earlier in the week we had bought a cheese in the high mountain village of Castrovirreyna. That was where I got seriously ill with altitude sickness… Having finally got over the bad memories of the serious altitude sickness I had whilst in Castrovirreyna, we opened up the cheese ready to enjoy the local delicacy we had bought. When we bought the cheese, the shop lady told us *with a big smile* that the cheese was made out of llama milk. Andrew and I took this seriously, despite the lady’s big smile. Both of us tasted the cheese with high expectations – after all, this was the first llama cheese we had ever tasted. I noted immediately how wonderful the llama cheese was. Andrew agreed. By this point both Sandy and Paul were looking at us with chuckles, telling us that what we were eating was just a normal cheese made of cow’s milk. What a disappointment! Life will never be the same again…

Whilst having our lunch, we spotted a veritable forest of wild tobacco, Nicotiana glutinosa. Apparently in loves landslides, we found it growing all over the recently eroded road side. The species comes in various colour forms all up and down in the Andes. This population had lovely coral coloured flowers.

All in all today has been a great day. We have expanded distribution areas for many species, adding important data points for further analyses. We particularly want to use the data we are collecting for modelling species distributions. For this work, adding the data points from today and yesterday will be extremely valuable. Rio Pampa has been a black hole in terms of species distributions, but now finally we have some data!

Day 4

Sandy:

We began our day in the middle of a cloud – it had descended over the mountains at night – so we set off for Andahuaylas in dense fog. The highway is in the process of being paved, not a simple undertaking in these steep mountains.

We ascended over the pass between Chincheros and Andahuaylas, up into the puna again, to about 4100 metres. There we saw some really interesting cultivation – one set of tiny fields at 4100 m elevation had six different Andean crops – potatoes, tarwi (a kind of lupine), ullucu (a tuber related to beetroot, very distantly), faba beans (broad beans, a European import in colonial times, but very much prized) and two crops I had been looking for the whole trip – mashua (tuberous nasturtium with bright orange flowers, Tropaeolum tuberosum) and oca (a tuber bearing oxalis with yellow flowers, Oxalis tuberosa). A real hotspot of cultivated plant diversity!

We stopped to look for our high elevation friend Solanum excisirhombeum in an amazing spot dense with the high elevation cactus Austrocylindropuntia (what a name!); we didn’t find it, but did find a tiny bulbous adder’s tongue fern, Ophioglossum, that Paul collected; the entire plant is abuot 2 cm tall, a true miniature!

As we descended into the Andhuaylas valley we began to see solanums again – and the road was now paved. The construction was impresssive, as was the maintenance, these areas are prone to landslides, so constant clearing up is required.

The new paved road is a boon for the local people, who now have a nice, non-muddy track by which to take their animals to pasture – for divers though it has its hazards!

We arrived in Andahuaylas in the early afternoon, and decided to spend some time checking out the town. It is the Carnaval festival tomorrow, so the place was buzzing with activity, dancing and traditional music. Each province in Apurimac sends one to many dance/music troupes to compete, the winner goes to the finals in Lima at the end of the month. It was all fantastically colorful and exciting. Sets of people were dancing around a tree laden with gifts like blankets and pots and pans, when it came down (a chop happens every circuit) a mad scramble for the goodies ensues. It has to be seen to be believed.

Andahuaylas is famous for, among other things, being the birthplace of Jose Maria Arguedas, a Peruvian author who wrote about traditional village life in the Andes. Last year was his centenary. One of his books is entitled Yawar Fiesta – it is about the traditional festival of this part of Peru which involves a fight between a condor and a bull – the condor represents the Andean peoples and the bull the Spanish colonists. The whole thing symbolizes the conflict between the two cultures. A statue on the plaza comemorates the festival (the Solanaceae treelet behind it is Brugmansia, or floripondio, commonly cultivated at these elevations).

We must leave town tomorrow before 9 am, as the streets will completely shut for the traditional parade – it would be nice to stay, but the solanums of the rest of Apurimac and Cusco beyond beckon.