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RESEARCH ARTICLE (Open Access)
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Common leaf spot of lucerne and the dawn of mycology and plant pathology in Australia

Malcolm J. Ryley https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3699-1240 A *
+ Author Affiliations
- Author Affiliations

A Centre for Crop Health, University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, Qld 4350, Australia.

* Correspondence to: cropdocs61@gmail.com

Historical Records of Australian Science https://doi.org/10.1071/HR23010
Published online: 12 December 2023

© 2023 The Author(s) (or their employer(s)). Published by CSIRO Publishing on behalf of the Australian Academy of Science. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND)

Abstract

As the number of livestock increased in the years following English colonisation of Australia in 1788, the need for nutritious fodder, including lucerne (Medicago sativa), grew. One of the first diseases found on lucerne was a leaf spot which was collected in 1879 by George Bancroft, a physician and naturalist, in a suburb of Brisbane. The Queensland Government Botanist Frederick Manson Bailey sent a specimen to the prominent English mycologists Miles Joseph Berkeley and Christopher Edmund Broome who in 1883 formally described and named the fungus Sphaerella destructiva. That fungus is now known as Pseudopeziza medicaginis, the causal agent of common leaf spot of lucerne. It was one of over 300 fungi that were included in a 1880 paper co-written by the Reverend Julian Tenison-Woods and Frederick Bailey. At that time almost all of these fungi which had been collected in Australia were identified by overseas mycologists, particularly Berkeley and Broome. It can be argued that their 1880 paper was the first significant one published in Australia which focussed on fungi. Just a decade or so later Australian scientists, in particular Daniel McAlpine, were describing new fungal taxa on their own.

Keywords: alfalfa, common leaf spot, Frederick Manson Bailey, lucerne, Medicago sativa, Pseudopeziza medicaginis, Reverend Edmund Tenison-Woods, Sphaerella destructiva.

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