Revisionula incompleta Ornithogalorum Austro‐Africanorum (Hyacinthaceae)

For the well advanced Flora of Namaqualand edited by A. LE R OUX a state of the art list of accepted Ornithogalum names, recently the second genus in size among southern African Hyacinthaceae (after Lachenalia ) and now the largest one, is needed. The present sketchy revision is the preliminary harvest of 20 years of occasional encounters with this genus in the field and subsequent observations on cultivated plants, which could solve quite a number of questions and the preliminary lumping of taxa in the last revision (O BERMEYER 1978). The present treatment is intended to be an addition to O BERMEYER 'S revision. Its backbone is the enlarged species list. Synonyms are only repeated if there are corrections or additions concerning further type specimens. The keys are still based on O BERMEYER 'S. In the recent Ornithogalum list for southern Africa by R EID 1993 only four species are added to O BERMEYER 'S revision. One of these additions is reduced to synonymy in the present paper, whereas all the 54 species recognized by O BERMEYER 1978 are tentatively maintained. Additionally 26 species are resuscitated from synonymy and 40 new species are described, mainly from the winter‐rainfall region (western Cape and southern Namibia). Thus with a total of 123 southern African species Ornithogalum is again the largest genus of Hyacinthaceae in southern Africa. More details about differences with O BERMEYER 'S treatment concerning name changes, resuscitations, and the infrageneric taxonomy proposed are presented in a detailed summary at the end of the paper. In order to place correctly a synonym excluded from Ornithogalum , the genus Physodia S ALISB . 1866 is resuscitated, and four new specific combinations are proposed.