Milla clade in the Brodiaeoideae subfamily (formerly Themidaceae)

[Lee Poulsen]

Since I have always liked the Milla clade (subsubfamily) of the Brodiaea family, I did some internet searching to try to find out what species were out there, and found more than I bargained for. Here is a summary of what I found.

The Milla clade are the Mexican genera:
Bessera
Dandya
Jaimehintonia
Milla
Petronymphe

The rest of the subfamily are the Western US genera:
Androstephium
Bloomeria 
Brodiaea 
Dichelostemma
Muilla
Triteleia
Triteleiopsis

In the past 15 years or so, there have been some new species found in this clade and a lot of DNA analysis done, which has necessitated creating a new genus, Xochiquetzallia (since all of the later found Dandya species ended up not being closely related to the first Dandya species that was found), and splitting Bessera elegans

into three separate species, and Milla biflora

into 7 separate species. (Apparently Milla biflora

has always been a problem since what was long thought to all be one species was found in a huge variety of climates and locations from the dry areas of southern Arizona all the way down through Mexico and into Guatemala, unlike all the other species in this clade, which are all fairly localized in where they're found. And when they sampled the DNA of various accessions, they kept landing all over the place in the resulting DNA "family trees" (cladograms).) The three color forms of Bessera turned out to be three separate species. (The purple one is B. ramirezii, and I think B. elegantissima is the carmine one.) I tried to put together all the cladograms I could find into one big family cladogram so you could see how they're all related to each other. But some of the papers are very recent and not everything has been DNA tested yet (like the former Milla biflora

species; I just lumped them all together).