Veronica kurdica Benth.

Albach, Dirk C., 2025, From just a few to the most type-rich herbarium for Veronica L. (Plantaginaceae) - The effect of digitization of the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle herbarium in Paris, Adansonia (3) 47 (7), pp. 47-130 : 68

Veronica kurdica Benth.

Prodromus systematis naturalis regni vegetabilis 10:473 ( Bentham 1846).

TYPE CITATION. — Iran, Zanjan: “in alpibus Elamont”.

LECTOTYPE (designated here. — Superseding the lectotypification by Fischer (1981: 128): “ Alp. Elamont Aucher-Éloy-Herbier d’Orient No. 5089”(likely collected 30.VIII.1837), K[ K001070215* ].

ISOLECTOTYPE. — BM[ BM(997939!* ], G[ G00768521* ], P[ P03529307* , P03529309* ], W[ W0053058! ].

Nomenclatural note. Veronica kurdica is a prostrate, suffruticose plant from the Alborz and Zagros Mountains in Iran, easily confused with alpine forms of V. orientalis . Bentham (1846) gave two collections as original material, J. Brandt from “montibus Kurdistan ” and Aucher-Éloy no. 5089 “in alpibus Elamont”, which is nowadays Mt. Alamut near Teheran. The herbarium of Brandt is unknown with later material probably at LE (https://kiki.huh.harvard.edu/databases/botanist_index. html), where Bentham is unlikely to have seen it. Therefore, Fischer (1981) chose the Aucher-Éloy collection as lectotype. However, Bentham is unlikely to have seen the specimen in Vienna. In the description, Bentham (1846) did not mention an herbarium specifically but “v.s.”, which likely refers to the same herbaria as in the preceding species (K, G) with the one in Kew being the more complete specimen. A phylogenetic analysis supported the monophyly of the species including V. kurdica subsp. filicaulis ( Doostmohammadi et al. 2022) .