Two new species of Philodendron (Araceae) from Amazonian Peru

During the course of work at the Nancy Botanical Gardens by the senior author and by Marcela Mora, two new species were discovered in the collection of plants originally collected by French botanist, Serge Barrier in 1979 and 1980, during his studies with indigenous populations in northern and eastern Loreto Department of Peru. Barrier’s original living collections have been at the Nancy Botanical Garden under the care of Genevieve Ferry since they were accessioned in 1979. Marcela Mora is a specialist with Philodendron. She visited the aroid collection in Nancy in 2006 while she was writing the Lucid key to Philodendron (Mora, 2008) during an internship at Kew Gardens. David Scherberich, who has had a long association with the Nancy Botanical Garden, first brought the plants to the attention of the senior author. He is now manager of tropical collections in Lyon Botanical Garden in Lyon, France where both species are also in cultivation. Genevieve Ferry has not only managed to keep these rare species alive all these years but was responsible for studying and vouchering the plant collections.