"Stachys cydni: A New Species" Bentham, in The Flora of Turkey has described some sterile specimens of Stachys as being Stachys inflata. Kotschy; however, performed field studies between 1988 and 1997 in the Bolkar mountain region of Turkey and called the same species from the same locality, Stachys cydni. It was this controversy which drew the attention of two Turkish botanists, Yusef Gemici, and Erkuter Leblebici to repeat the previous studies and publish their works in a paper entitled "A New Species From Southern Anatolia: Stachys cydni Kotschy ex Gemici & Leblebici"; Tr. J. Botany 22 (1998) 359-362. The following account is a summary of their investigations and evaluations. Gemici and Leblebici went to the Bolkar Mountains and an area which is known as Manastir to begin their collections. They collected 15 whole plants and 100 seeded plants for their work. As they germinated the seed and grew their plants a comparison began between their collected materials and those from herbarium samples by previous investigators. In their initial comparisons their collected species more resembled species of S. Kotschy which is native to Iran instead of the S. inflata as described by Bentham. As their work progressed, closer examinations led to even more discrepancies, but this time there were differences between the collected species and that of the S. Kotschy. This series of observations meant that they indeed were looking at a new species rather than that of Bentham and Kotschy. They put together a chart which illustrates the various characteristics of the different anatomical features of the three species (S. inflata, S. kotschy, and S. cydni ) and in reviewing their data, were clearly able to visualize the differences. The new species differed from S.inflata in that it had "cauline leaves, petiolate not subsessile to sessile, narrowly ovate-elliptic rather than lanceolate to narrowly elliptic, floral leaves which were longer than verticillasters instead of subsessile and shorter than verticillasters, the calyx was campanulate instead of inflated, the teeth were erect rather than incurved, the corolla was pale rose in color and 15mm in length instead of pink and 17mm in length, the tube was included from the calyx rather than subexerted and the nuts were ovate triangular, not obovate". The differences in the S. cydni and the S.kotschy included items such as, "verticillasters were distant not approximate and rarely remote, cauline leaves, and teeth which were triangular-lanceolate rather than just lanceolate". These differences led them to the conclusion that the new specie, S. cydni belonged to the section "Ambleia Bentham" which is a group which are " suffruticose perennials without basal rosettes, xerophytic, indumentum tomentose with dendroid hairs, leaves lanceolate, bracteoles linear, herbaceous, calyx regular, campanulate, teeth subequal, mouth with a ring of hairs, the corolla tube included not exerted or subexerted, and the nutovate-triangular not obovate -ovate". INDEX © BOTRESEARCH USA 1998-2007