Schriften zu Genetischen Ressourcen - Genres

K. PISTRICK
During my first visit to Gatersleben, Dr. Hanelt made three important statements:
“Yes, we need someone in the herbarium and you could work on the taxonomy of a
cultivated plant.” Then he asked something about my holidays and I told him that we
had found Agrostemma githago L. in the Slovakian Karst. ”Nice”, he said, ”we have a
project there with František Kühn from Brno and you should take part in collecting
missions as you already know an important indicator of landraces.” The third point
was that as a new colleague I would be expected to contribute to the new second
edition of the Mansfeld’s Encyclopedia. A few weeks after I had started to work at the
institute, Dr. Schultze-Motel assigned many unfamiliar and as yet unassigned crop
plant families such as Loranthaceae, Ochnaceae, Droseraceae or Zygophyllaceae to
me for treatment. During the following years he persistently asked me about my
progress in the “Mansfeld” as did Dr. Hanelt for new results of my Raphanus-work
and for interesting observations from the field characterisation and botanical
determination of the materials collected in Slovakia and Georgia.
Fig. 2: Rudolf Mansfeld (1901-1960) at the German-Chinese Biological
Collecting Mission to North and Northeast China in 1956
If you receive a filing card with the six words “Pontederiaceae - Eichhornia crassipes
- Wealth of India” it is hard work to produce the final contribution for the “Mansfeld”.
During this struggle you may learn that the water hyacinth (Eichhornia crassipes
(Mart.) Solms) is not only a pretty ornamental plant and troublesome weed in the
tropics, which were for us from Eastern Germany almost inaccessible at those times,
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