DNA work, the Internet, eMail and more field work have come together in the last couple of years to bring to light 'possible new' and 'new' trillium species.

DNA work is proving some relationships between plants and disproving others.  One of the new DNA works used the Trillium and Paris complexes.  The author of this work, Susan Farmer, published her work in Systematic Botany 27(4):674-692. 2002.  Two items of interest came from this one article.

First, Trillium rivale has been reclassified as Psuedotrillium rivale.  Susan's article is very interesting, and very technical.  Following is a short non-technical description of the reasons for the reclassification of T. rivale. 

"On a molecular level, Trillium rivale was so distinct from both Paris s.l. and Trillium, that everything either had to become all one genus -- or we had to do some splitting. I tend to be a splitter -- I like nice discrete boxes, not a single box with a lot of "exceptions."

Morphologically, you've got the spotted petals which are unique in the family, the pollen is trillium-like, but the cotyledon is paris-like. There's those heart-shaped philodendron-like leaves. The folks on the list claim that it's never in the 3-leaved state without a flower unless it's been damaged by herbivore. Then there's that elongating pedicel; nivale does that too, but I don't think it elongates to the point of pressing the fruit into the soil." Per.comm. Susan Farmer 2/7/2003

Second, Trillium ovatum v. hibbersonii may not be related to Trillium ovatum.  This would move it to species status as Trillium hibbersonii.  The plant identified as hibbersonii has not, at this time, been properly named thru the describing and publishing process.   The name hibbersonii is the name currently being used to identify this plant.  Hibbersonii is the latinized version of Hibberson, after Mr. Hibberson who found the original plant material in the 1930's on Vancouver Island, BC.

There are two more sub-species of Trillium ovatum, T. ovatum v. maculosum and T. ovatum v. oettingeri.  There is some thought floating about the trillium world, based on some field work and a masters thesis done in the 1970's, that T. ovatum v. oettingeri just might be a species unto itself.  Living specimens, field work and DNA work will be required to prove or disprove this line of thought. 

T. ovatum v. maculosum also has some very unique characteristics. DNA work should help in telling us if these characteristics will be unique enough to provide species status for T. ovatum v. maculosum.

The Western Petiolate Species Comparison page lists all of the above mentioned trillium.  The columns show the differences between each of the sub-species of ovatum and also a column for Psuedotrillium rivale, aka Trillium rivale.