Today we spent the day databasing specimens in the local Trujillo herbarium; all herbaria have 1-4 letter acronyms, standard codes so we all know what collection we are talking about – the one for the herbarium in Trujillo is HUT. It is a small collection and has been built up over the last few decades by a series of local botanists – the one I knew the best was Abundio Sagástegui, who sadly died a few years ago.

The collection is rich in material from this area of Peru – and has a lot of gems. For example – I described Solanum clivorum in 1992 and have only seen a few specimens. Here at HUT we saw eight new ones, thus expanding our knowledge about this species’ distribution hugely! 

Space is at a premium at HUT – Tiina and my computer tried to share the desk – Tiina eventually won!

Maria used the other computer to database specimens, balancing it all on a stool…..

Trujillo is a beautiful city, with old colonial architecture and wonderfully painted buildings. We managed to become part of a parade to celebrate the local team having won the national women’s volleyball championship – brass bands and all.

The Plaza de Armas is the heart of any Peruvian city – the one in Trujillo features brightly and freshly painted buildings, now mostly government offices (it is the capital of La Libertad Department) and a fantastic mustard coloured cathedral.

The taxi count in Trujillo’s city centre is phenomenal – we counted about 10 taxis to every private car, and no buses – perhaps the streets are too narrow

Trujillo was named after the birthplace in Spain of the conquistador Francisco Pizarro, who led the expedition that defeated the Inca rulers of Peru. It has a long and distinguished history since that founding in 1536, and has been the site of many important events in Peruvian history; it was the first Peruvian city to declare independence from Spain.

But Trujillo's history began long before Europeans came onto the scene – it was at the centre of both the Moche and Chimu cultures, pre-Inca coastal peoples who constructed monumental pyramids of adobe (clay bricks) and mud. One thing I love about Peru is that wherever you are, the history stretches far back into extraordinary events and cultures, but those cultures are also alive and evident today.

Many of the houses on the Plaza retain the original (or restored) Spanish colonial balconies made of wood from which women would watch festivities safely hidden from view

So after a day’s hard work in HUT, we re-identified about half of the Solanum collection, added new and exciting locality records to our field trip planning and made new friends.

Although many of the collections we entered into the database were already represented by duplicates from elsewhere (because plants are big, botanists usually collect several examples and share them with other collections), I still think it is important to have the specimens from small local herbaria like HUT in a main project database – it gives visibility to institutions that otherwise sometimes go un-noticed and lets other botanists know that there is treasure to be found in these small collections!

Sandy, William and Paul outside the door to one of the rooms housing the HUT herbarium

Tomorrow collecting begins in earnest – our route has been planned using the information we have derived from the collections we saw today, plus those already in the database, and from the knowledge of where people haven’t been!

If all goes well we will go from the deserts of the coast to montane cloud forest near the town of Cajamarca, where we will find another small, but rich herbarium to work in the next day. What will be our most exciting find? It’s bound to be something we don’t expect……

One of the things scientists do today that never happened in the past is to request official permission to conduct scientific research in another country. It might seem a bit bureaucratic and overly pernickety, but the issue of permits for collecting is an important way in which tropical countries rich in biodiversity manage their natural resources – probably the most important of which is biodiversity itself.

In Peru, all permissions for collection are managed through the Ministry of Agriculture, and there are clearly laid out rules for how to apply. I already have a permit for collecting Solanaceae – but this year I needed to sort out a permit for new work to be done under the Museum’s science initiatives.

The Museum's Natural Resources Initiative has three strands:

• Critical Elements managed by Richard Herrington of Earth Sciences
• Neglected and Emerging Diseases managed by Tim Littlewood of Life Sciences
• Crop and Pest Wild Relatives (CPWR), managed by me – we jokingly call it the rocks, pox and crops initiative!

Crop and Pest Wild Relatives

Our main idea in the CPWR strand is to use the data from our and other collections to look at the distributions of crop wild relatives and the wild relatives of major crop pests, then use these data to model both plant and insect responses to the changing environment, taking into account the evolutionary relationships of each of the groups, a sort of orthogonal axis.

We have chosen to begin with the rich Solanaceae dataset I and collaborators have amassed over many years of databasing specimens in herbaria all over the world and manage through Solanaceae Source – it means the plant layer is done already! We will then begin to digitise (image, database and geolocate) all the Museum’s specimens of three major pest groups – beetles (relatives of the Colorado Potato Beetle, one of the worst pests of potato), leafhoppers or jumping plant lice (devastating pests of all kinds of crops), and fruit flies (big pests of tomato and aubergine). We also will do a new kind of collecting, where entomologists and botanists go in the field together – we will collect all the insects associated with particular Solanaceae species (well, really from any we see), thus compiling data on who lives where and on whom.

Hence the need to collect insects on Solanaceae in Peru – the centre of diversity for both wild potatoes and tomatoes. And the necessity of obtaining a legal permit to export the specimens so they can be compared with our collections and identified; I completed all the paperwork last night, and submitted it all at the Ministry today.

The importance of doing this now is that we are taking advantage of my current collecting trip to Peru for Tiina and my joint project on endemics, and two Museum entomologists are joining us in the middle of May – Erica McAlister (curator of flies and well known from her flygirl blog!) and Diana Percy (researcher on leafhoppers) will test out our collecting protocols and get the first field data for the initiative. It is exciting, as it feels like things are really starting!

Changes in Peru

Lima is a funny place – it is big, chaotic and has a very energetic, almost frenetic feel. It is in the dry coastal zone of Peru, so rain never (or very rarely) falls – the only moisture is fog from the sea. Getting to the Ministry involves wild taxi rides through crowded streets – dodging accidents and traffic jams. I lived in Peru in the 1980s, at a difficult time for the country; it was in the grip of the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) terrorist threat then.

Today Lima is a more open, vibrant place – and things are really happening. Even the huge multistory tower that is part of the Social Security complex next to the Peruvian National Natural History Museum looks like it is due for changes – the sign says 'Soon this tower will be at your service. After 30 years'. This building has stood empty since the early 1980s, towering over the museum gardens. So, let’s see if things really do change!

The Seguro Social tower - ready for a long-delayed makeover!

We head to the north on Sunday – passing through the herbaria of Trujillo and Cajamarca to enter data from specimens of endemic species into Solanaceae Source. Then the fieldwork blog will really be about field work at last!

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.

from Tiina:

Today was a day of goodbyes. First we had to say goodbye to Sandy who is flew to Lima to catch her flight back to London. She has to teach in Spain in a week’s time, so it’s time to get things ready for the next trip. We have had great weeks together collecting Solanum and talking Solanaceae research with our colleagues in Peru and Argentina. Now the challenge is to continue our field work successfully with just three of us left!

We drove to Cusco to drop Sandy off at the airport. Cusco is a large city in a small valley, and by now the city has spread to the surrounding hills. As we navigated through the old and curvy streets of Cusco to get to the airport, I took a photo of the beautiful scenery over Cusco taken from the northern hills.

We continued our day after sad goodbyes to collect in the surrounding hills of Cusco. It was wonderful collecting in such a historic place – we were basically collecting around old ruins! The whole area of Cusco surroundings is full of ruins, where ever you look. Each stone seems to have a carving or human made shape to it. One large rock that I went around turned out to have stairs carved into it! Here is a great sight of the caves in the ruins of Qenqo with Andrew and Paul.

Amongst these wonderful areas we found a new Salpichroa species we haven’t seen on this trip yet, Salpichroa gayi. Unlike other species of Salpichroa, it has very unusual yellow-purple flowers. The corolla lobes curve very unusually at their tips, which we only spotted once we looked at our close-up photos in the evening!

Another species we collected near Cusco was Solanum probolospermum, the usual suspect. This species is very common all through the department of Cusco west of the Eastern Cordillera. It’s a climbing species that scrambles on top of shrubs and roadside vegetation. It has attractive large purple flowers, and usually softly pubescent leaves. During our collections we have observed that the species varies enormously in habit and leaf shape, as well as corolla colour, shape and size. You might ask if there is nothing it doesn’t vary in… We are asking the same question by now. Despite all this trouble the species is giving us, here is a nice shot of the individuals we found growing in sunny hillside in Cusco. Sandy will be happy to see Paul is learning how to use our wonderful camera increasingly well!

After a nice stroll around Cusco, it was time for second goodbyes. This time we are saying goodbye to the western side of the Andes. We are moving on to our next grand tour – a triangle route to the city of Puno through Puerto Inambari. This trip will take us through the Eastern Cordillera via the highway Interoceanica that goes through Peru all the way to Brazil. The road crosses the Andes at a pass at 4750 m elevation – can’t wait to see the views! After the high pass the road descents to the Amazon basin to 500 m elevation or so. This route will allow us to collect in the humid eastern slopes of the Andes where many interesting species of solanums live. We will take the Interoceanica highway all the way to Puerto Inambari which is way into the Amazon. You can see the pencil pointing to the city on the map above. Here we will turn south-east, where we turn south east towards Puno. The road from Puerto Inambari to Puno will take us over the Andes once again back to the western side.

So goodbyes it was to the western side! We started off on the Interoceanica at four in the afternoon, with km0 saying 4700 km to São Paulo. It’s very tempting to think we could drive to São   Paulo for a lovely dinner, sushi perhaps as they have famously good sushi bars there, but perhaps we have to leave that for another day L. No need to be sad for too long though, there will be great plants to see J!

We were aiming to stay the first night of our tour in a city called Ocongate, which is roughly three hours into the highway. The area we passed is full of small Andean villages, where most people speak Quechua, language very different from Spanish or English. Some of the local villages we passed had wonderful names – but we just didn’t know how to pronounce them! To give an example, here is a picture of a road sign to one of the villages:

In case you are still trying to cough the name out, here is how it goes: cc is pronounced with a dry throat sound of “kha”. As there happen to be two double cc in the village name, it becomes a little problematic. Definitely not a word to pronounce whilst eating your dinner! So once you know how to pronounce double c, then it all goes smoothly, or does it?! We are still awake and trying!

From Tiina:

Today we started early again – destination was Paucartambo and beyond. Paucartambo is on the western side of the Andes west of Cusco, and beyond Paucartambo in the Amazon lowlands is Pilcopata. We wanted to collect on the montane forests again on the western side (Solanum heaven!), but in order to do this we needed to drive over a pass to cross the mountains to the other side.

The slope to the east from Pisac to Paucartambo is not as steep as in Abra de Malaga. The pass this time is ONLY 4000m high (everything is relative!).

The road from the pass down to Paucartambo descents slowly, and past Paucartambo the forest is still relatively dry. Paucartambo itself is a lovely village with a really organised looking market – labelled as to types of produce – here is the “tuber section” – where they sell potatoes and other Andean tuber crops – Sandy went in and had a long conversation with a woman about her potatoes – so many different types!

It only gets really humid once you get to the point where the road forks to Tres Cruces, where the Manu National Park begins. We got as far as the forking point and had to turn back in order to get home in time. We did find Solanum “morel-malaga” again – a sign that we had reached the humid eastern slopes again.  This individual of “morel-malaga” was a giant: the stem was 2.5 cm in diameter at the base. Again it was growing in a landslide site in very disturbed rocky soil. Everything was the same as in the previous collection we had made in Abra de Malaga, but just bigger!

Manu  National Park is wonderful. It’s massive, stretching from the high elevation moist pre-puna to the lowland Amazonian rain forest. We couldn’t collect in Manu despite how wonderful it looked – collecting in Peruvian national parks requires a special collecting permit, which we don’t have, so instead of collecting we chatted to the park rangers that were at the main reception were we stopped to turn around. They recognised Sandy by her name, as she has collected along the Paucartambo – Pilcopata road before. What a temptation to be that close to the park and not to be able to go in and collect! Maybe we’ll get to see it one day… we promised the rangers we would be back…..

from Tiina:

Staying at an Inca ruin has been a great experience, and today we made it even more special by heading over the clouds to the Amazonian side of the Andes.

Early in the morning we got to the pick-up, ready packed with lunch to drive along the road from Ollantaytambo towards Quillabamba. The road crosses the eastern cordillera at c. 4400 m elevation at Abra de Malaga, and the road then turns down towards the Amazon basin. The Amazon basin side is much more humid than the inter-Andean slopes we have seen thus far, but Paul, Andy and I had never seen these humid montane forests before so we were very keen!

Heading off on the road from Ollantaytambo towards the pass we were looking out for Solanum sumacaspi. This is a species of the Geminata clade of Solanum, a tree with remarkably glabrous leaves. Solanum sumacaspi only occurs in the Urumbamba valley, and only few collections of it are known. Luckily we did find it in flower AND fruit, which was fantastic. Sandy has described the species but never seen it in the wild, so this was a moment to cherish!

Close to Solanum sumacaspi we also found Solanum probolospermum, one of my morelloid solanums. This species is nearly like Solanum pallidum, except that Solanum probolospermum has only simple unicellular hairs, whilst Solanum pallidum has branched hairs. We are yet to find out what the exact limits of these species are – more on that later when we get to see Solanum pallidum itself in Puno hopefully!

We found more and more Solanum probolospermum when we went up the road. It was great to observe the large variation present in the species in terms of growth form. In some populations, we also observed some fantastic mutations – flowers with six corolla lobes, fasciated corollas, and super-numerous inflorescences. It was all a bit too much for Paul, who started doubting our taxonomic expertise when we said it was the same species. Observing natural variation can be mind boggling at times!

Once we crossed the pass and started going down the eastern slope of the Andes, the air became more humid and clouds surrounded us. The humidity from the Amazon basin hits the Andean mountains on the eastern slopes, which creates moist montane forest habitats as well as special pre-montane rain forest habitats lower down. This time did not have time to go as low as the pre-montane forests unfortunately. Just as well, as many solanums are found growing in the higher elevation montane forest habitats. First, we found a fantastic species of Morelloid solanums, which we have named as “morel-malaga” for now. This species shows very unusual characters for Morelloids: it has enlarged pedicel apices, calyx with reduced calyx tube and tiny lobes, and most unusually, oval-shaped fruits. We observed this species growing along the eastern side from 3600 to 3450 m elevation, at which point we had to turn around to get home in time. As usual for solanums, this species shows great variation in habit and size, but it clearly likes disturbed microhabitats such as landslides. On our return to herbarium in Lima, we’ll keep our eyes open for this species, as some of the field characters such as pedicel size and fruit shape are not obvious on dried herbarium specimens.

Second find of the day was Salpichroa didieranum. Generally Salpichroa flowers are c. 1-2 cm long, but this species has long yellow tubular flowers up to 12 cm long! Paul was well pleased, this genus is his favourite!

Best thing of the day was a bunch of mad cyclists we saw. They passed us when we were collecting our final “morel-malaga” populations in the humid montane forest. It was raining at this point, the moisture was engulfing us in a thick fog, and we could barely see more than 30 meters ahead. First we saw one mad cyclist passing by. He was ecstatic with joy, rolling down the slope, and before we knew it, he had disappeared in the clouds. Second cyclist followed, this time he greeted us with joyful “hello” with a hint of Irish accent. At this point we thought these were just eccentric tourists. But then followed a whole crowed of them – cyclists coming down the hill, some silent some screaming for joy rolling down the hill in rain! What a bunch of mad but happy people, I wish I could do a similar downhill cycling route one day! I bet they just kept rolling down until they got to the Amazon lowlands!