Ceropegia buchananii (N.E.Br.) Bruyns

Bruyns, Peter V., Klak, Cornelia & Hanáček, Pavel, 2018, An account of Ceropegia sect. Chamaesiphon (Apocynaceae) in Moçambique with new records and two new species, Phytotaxa 364 (2), pp. 111-135 : 119-120

Ceropegia buchananii (N.E.Br.) Bruyns ( Fig. 7)

Ceropegia buchananii was described from material collected by John Buchanan in the Highlands of Malawi in 1881. It has also been recorded in D.R. Congo, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe ( Bullock 1963) and further records were given for Zimbabwe by Percy-Lancaster (1997). Plants are usually robust, with a stout stem and comparatively large leaves arising from a flattened, discoid tuber up to 20 cm in diameter.

Ceropegia buchananii (represented by the collection cited below) is related to other species from tropical and West Africa such as C. kituloana Bruyns in Bruyns et al. (2017: 36) and others in the ‘large-flowered tropical group’ ( Bruyns et al. 2015).

The only known Moçambican collection (cited below, Fig. 7) was made on the northern slopes on Mt Namuli. Here it was locally very common in a small, flattish patch on a steep slope, where the soil was slightly deeper than in the surrounding, stonier areas. Each plant consisted of a few, usually prostrate, quite thick stems (3–6 mm thick), each bearing 4–6 very large leaves (to 10 × 5 cm). Some individuals were in full flower, with 30–45 flowers open at once in a quite dense, hemispherical cluster. Of these flowers, some had a pale brown background colour inside, while others were very dark brown with striking transverse stripes and bars of pale yellow. They emitted an excrement-like but not very strong odour.