During the next two weeks, Philipp Hühn from the University of Mainz, Germany, is visiting the State Herbarium of South Australia. He is interested in Camphorosmoideae, a subfamily of Chenopodiaceae (treated as Amaranthaceae in the APG system, but accepted as a separate family in Australia). Genera of Camphorosmoideae are distributed mainly in Australia (12 genera, c. 150 species), the most well-known are Enchylaena R.Br., Maireana Moq. and Sclerolaena R.Br. Philipp will be examining specimens for his thesis, supervised by Gudrun Kadereit, and sampling our Herbarium for molecular analyses of the group. Quite a task with over 18,000 specimens in the collection! — Welcome Philip.

Flora treatments for Chenopodiaceae are available online for South Australia (new 5th edition, 17mb pdf), New South Wales (PlantNET), Victoria (VicFlora) and Australia (1984, 24mb pdf). In Tasmania, the family is treated as Amaranthaceae (390kb pdf).

Maireana campanulata. Photo: Seed Conservation Centre, Botanic Gardens & State Herbarium.