Comments By Myron Kimnach, Los Angeles
"I worked in botanical gardens for many years, 11 at UC Berkeley and 25 at the Huntington. At Berkeley in the 1950s Paul Hutchison (the botanist) and I (the grower of the succulent, fern and orchid collections) built up a large collection of epiphytic cacti there. I corresponded with Charles Lankester and Clarence Horich of Costa Rica and they both sent many species to UCBG. I published some of them as new species or wrote about those that were very little known. I went to the Huntington in 1962. Epiphyllum cooperi. It's a complicated story, and, unfortunately, the two articles that relate it are not very well known. In 1964 a Mexican botanist, Helia Bravo, described Epiphyllum crenatum var. kimnachii, listing many wild herbarium collections from Oaxaca and Chiapas. I also collected many of these plants in Mexico and studied many collected by Thomas MacDougal. These all differed from var. crenatum in having many small bracts with spines at the base of the flower and the outer petals emerged for some distance below the apex of the flower. Var. crenatum (Mexico through Honduras) on the other hand had only a few bracts and no spines at the base of the flower and the outer petals all originated at the apex of the tube. 'Cooperi' (known only from cultivation) differs from var. kimnachii only in having the outer petals at the apex of the tube. It was originally claimed that 'Cooperi' was a hybrid between an Epiphyllum and a Selenicereus, but in 1997 an article was published in Haseltonia by Metz, Fröhlich, Kimnach & Meyerowitz that reported that through DNA analysis it had been shown that there was no trace of Selenicereus in 'Cooperi'. The plants used in this test were the original clone of 'Cooperi', wild forms of var. kimnachii and var. crenatum, and two species of Selenicereus. So definitely the name ×Seleniphyllum must be dropped. One has a choice of several names for 'Cooperi'. First, it is only a minor variant of var. kimnachii and is only known from cultivation, so in my opinion it's best to give it cultivar status as E. crenatum var. kimnachii 'Cooperi'. That's a long awkward name and one can of course call it Epiphyllum cooperi, but that name is not likely to be accepted botanically due to the close relationship with E. crenatum. Myron Kimnach"Clive Innes stated that he "re-made" the cross between E. crenatum and Selenicereus grandiflorus, obtaining several plants identical with 'Cooperi', supporting the theory that it is in fact a hybrid. However, he never managed to present any plants. Clive Innes, unfortunately, did mix up facts on several occasions in the past making his reports somewhat doubtful.
Read more about this topic: Epiphyllum Crenatum
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