I was looking up some descriptions of new species of Ceropegia on Friday night. I found one on Researchgate from 2015 for a species called Ceropegia terebriformis. The specific name terebriformis means "drill shaped" and refers to the tightly spiralled top of the corolla looking like a modern drill bit. It was only found once. The living plants they had collected grew very well for a while but all died. No uses were recorded.
The piece was originally published in the Flowering Plants of Africa. Modelled on Curtis's Botanical Magazine, it is a series of volumes made up of plant descriptions with coloured illustrations by botanical artists. The first volume was published in 1921 as the Flowering Plants of South Africa and it is now on its 66th volume.
Bester, SP & Condy, GS "Ceropegia terebriformis" Flowering Plants of Africa (2015) 64: 108–117
You can read the entire Volume 64 on Docplayer.
I was looking through the introduction and they mentioned the many uses humans have found for Ceropegia:
"Members of the genus have further been utilised by humans for various aspects including as a source of food, for medicine, as tanning agent, some are used in rituals, and for horticultural purposes (Collins 2011) in most cases driven by the wonderfully bizarre expression of the flowers."
I immediately scrolled down to the references and found that they had actually cited my article on the ethnobotany of the asclepiads:
COLLINS, P. 2011. Notes on some edible, medicinal and magical xerophytic, tuberous or succulent asclepiads and a firework (part 2). Asklepios 112: 25–28.
As far as I know, this is the only citation of my work in academic literature. Unfortunately, only the two parts were ever published in Asklepios, though I had written the whole article at the time. The second part that was published finished abruptly half-way through the entries for Ceropegia but obviously the authors thought that there was enough there to show the variety of uses.
It had been niggling me for the last ten years that my whole article was never published. So, just in case anyone ever tries to follow up that reference in the Flowering Plants of Africa, I have put the entire article as it was in 2011 up on the Internet Archive. Previously unseen, never before published material! Finally those numbers randomly scattered through the text of the printed articles have a meaning as the references are all included at the end.
Internet Archive:
I also put it up on Researchgate but their online reader is not as nice:
I am still working on a new version but I was a little ambitious in broadening the ambit to the entire subfamily Asclepiadoideae. The asclepiads have a lot of useful plants with references scattered far and wide.
