7.

Type species.

Papaver somniferum L.

Notes.

The sections of Papaver s. str. have been thoroughly dealt with in a series of monographs; see summary below. The sections have also been compared, for example, by Kadereit (1988 b) and phylogenetically explored, for example, by Carolan et al. (2006).

As circumscribed and reviewed here, the genus Papaver includes 59 species and 14 subspecies and most of the changes, compared with the cited reference studies, have taken place in the large section Rhoeadium Spach. The distribution of the genus is shown in Fig. 4, where anthropogenic occurrences are excluded. The genus ranges from the endemic species P. gorgoneum on the Cape Verde Islands (Kadereit and Lobin 1990) through Central Europe and the Mediterranean area. Latitudinally, it occurs from Central European Russia and the western Tian Shan southwards into the Arabian Peninsula. Eastwards, the genus reaches as far east in Central Asia as Kyrgyzstan with the species P. laevigatum M. Bieb. (Sennikov and Tojibaev 2021) and P. macrostomum extends eastwards to Assam along the foothills of the Himalayas (Fig. 4).