Flora-Fauna

Gagea reticulata (Pall.) Schult. & Schult.f.

(Nouvelle Flore du Liban et de la Syrie, vol. 1, Pl. LXIX nº 1; 1966)

• Life-form & habit: Small bulbous perennial geophyte, extremely variable in size, usually 3 to 20 cm tall or sometimes taller. Plants often appear almost stemless because the cauline leaves may arise from the subterranean part of the stem. Flowering stem produced directly from one bulb, not from between two paired bulbs. The flowering bulb is often accompanied by a second bulb producing a long basal leaf. Bulbs enclosed in strong brown, coriaceous tunics prolonged upward into a reticulate sheath or sometimes into irregular fibres. Base of tunic and sheath sometimes surrounded by fine or slightly thickened ascending roots.

• Leaves: One radical leaf, rarely perhaps two, produced from an independent bulb. Cauline leaves flat, linear to linear-lanceolate, very variable in length and width, often emerging from the underground part of the stem; when the stem is more clearly aerial, the cauline leaves and similar bracts form a loose involucral cluster below the flower or flowers. Leaves and bracts may exceed the inflorescence and can reach about 5 mm wide.

• Inflorescence & flowers: Flowers solitary or arranged in a few-flowered umbel of 2 to 5 flowers. Pedicels thick, rigid, longer than the flowers. Perianth glabrous or appressed-pubescent. Tepals narrow, 10 to 20 mm or more, green outside with yellow margins, yellow inside, long acute-acuminate. Stamens variable in length, about half to two-thirds as long as the perianth; anthers short, linear-oblong.

• Fruit: Capsule obovate-oblong, about three times shorter than the tepals.

• Phenology: Flowers from February to April on the coast; in the mountains flowering may extend to June or even July.

• Habitat & elevation: A highly plastic species occurring from coastal and lower-montane sites to middle and high mountain localities. In Lebanon it is recorded from the coastal belt, the lower mountain zone, the middle mountain zone, the high mountain summits, the Beqa'a and Baalbeck region. It is therefore not confined to one ecological belt, but appears in open, rocky, grassy or lightly wooded habitats across a broad altitudinal range.

• Lebanese distribution: Widely recorded by Mouterde from Khaldé, Beirut, Hazmiyé, Mkallès, Nahr-el-Kelb and Tripoli on the coast; from Rochmaya, Souq-el-Gharb, Baabda, ‘Aley, Beit Méri, below Beit Méri, Mar Moussa between Bhannès and Dhour Choueir, Bikfaya, Jabal Terbol and Ghiné in the lower mountain belt; from Jabal Barouk, Sofar, Jabal Kneissé, Laqlouq, Hasroun and Hadeth in the middle mountain belt; also from the summits of Lebanon, Qoubaiyat, Zahlé, Ksara, Ta‘naïl, Rayak and Baalbeck. The Qornet Chehwan material falls very naturally within this same lower-montane Beirut-Metn area, close to Mouterde’s records from Mkallès, Beit Méri, below Beit Méri, Mar Moussa and Bikfaya.

• Native range: In the broad modern sense, POWO treats Gagea reticulata as native from southeastern and eastern Europe to the western Himalaya and the Arabian Peninsula.  Mouterde gives a similarly broad range: North Africa, Balkans, western Asia, central Asia, Russia and Siberia.

• Conservation notes: Not apparently rare in Lebanon in Mouterde’s treatment, since he records it from many districts and ecological belts. However, the small spring geophyte habit makes it easily overlooked, and local populations can be vulnerable to urbanisation, soil disturbance, road widening and loss of semi-natural rocky grassland, especially in the Metn and Beirut mountain zone.

• Diagnostic remarks: Mouterde’s Gagea reticulata is recognized by its brown coriaceous bulb tunics prolonged into a reticulate or fibrous sheath, its flowering stem arising directly from a bulb, its flat cauline leaves and bracts often forming an involucre, and its solitary to few-flowered inflorescence with narrow, long-acuminate yellow tepals. He explicitly warns against applying the western forms fibrosa and rigida to Lebanese and Syrian material: true fibrosa has a much thicker network of dilated roots around the bulb, while true rigida is described as always lacking aerial cauline leaves, a condition not fitting the usual Lebanese plants.

• Taxonomic notes: This is a difficult complex. Mouterde considered the Lebanese and Syrian material very close to typical Gagea reticulata, only weakly approaching fibrosa or rigida through the occasional development of a small root network around the bulb. He also noted that earlier authors had a tendency to unite all acuminate-tepalled Gagea under a broad reticulata concept, but he regarded this as arbitrary and kept G. circinata, G. dayana and G. procera separate.

In modern databases, the situation is not fully aligned with Mouterde. POWO accepts both Gagea reticulata and Gagea rigida; it treats G. rigida as native from the eastern Mediterranean to Iran and the Arabian Peninsula, and places names linked to Mouterde’s G. procera, including Gagea commutata var. procera, under G. rigida.  Euro+Med and modern Caucasus/Iran-oriented treatments tend to keep G. commutata away from the Levant, centred instead on the Caucasus and adjacent regions. Therefore, for Lebanese plants like the Qornet Chehwan specimen, the safest working identification is Gagea reticulata sensu Mouterde, or, in modern cautious wording, Gagea reticulata / G. rigida complex, pending a focused regional revision.