Apteranthes (Caralluma) tuberculata type specimen

 

Apteranthes (Caralluma) tuberculata

Herbarium sheet from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew¹ 

UPDATE: 16/9/2024

David Goyder of Kew Gardens (specialist in Angola, Madagascar and the Apocynaceae) has kindly looked into this for me. It seems the Kew Herbarium specimen is a combination of the specimens from Fleming and Stocks. The top row seem to be from Stocks. As the flowering specimen and "SEE SPIRIT COLLECTION" envelope are clearly from Stocks, the type specimen is Stocks 596. The catalogue should now reflect that Fleming's specimens are also on this sheet. I haven't altered the article below yet.

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The herbarium sheet above is the holotype specimen that was used to define the species Caralluma tuberculata when that species was first described by the Kew Gardens botanist Nicholas Edward Brown in 1892.² The plant was renamed Apteranthes tuberculata in 2002 but this herbarium specimen still decides what plants are included in that species. If a plant is too different from this herbarium specimen it must be a different species.

When I saw this specimen I realised I had seen the handwriting before and it did not look like the handwriting or style of label used by the plant collector it was supposed to be. The collection was credited to Dr John Ellerton Stocks and given the collection number 596.¹ 

I believe it should be credited to Dr Andrew Fleming, a less well-known collector who also worked for the English East India Company in what is now Pakistan. He collected far fewer plant samples than Stocks but his main job at the time he collected this plant was a geological survey.

When referenced in botanical articles, a herbarium sheet is called by the name of the collector and the collection number. NE Brown referred to the Kew Herbarium specimen as Stocks 596, so it must have been misfiled at some time before 1892. This one should be called Fleming 78. I believe I have some convincing proof.

The origin of the name Caralluma

Stapelia adscendens, from Plants of the Coast of Coromandel ¹ 

Picture file from the BHL Pro Flickr albums.

What is the origin of the name of the genus Caralluma? In short, we don't know. That will not stop me writing about it.

First, I will quote from Wikipedia. I wrote this part of the entry, so I think that it is allowable.

In 1795 William Roxburgh published the name Stapelia adscendens for a plant found in India. He commented that the name for the plant in the Telugu language was Car-allum and that the succulent branches are edible raw, though bitter and salty.¹ The name Caralluma was coined by Robert Brown for a new genus in an article published in 1811. At the time he only described one species in the genus, the plant that he renamed Caralluma adscendens.²

In 1996 Helmut Genaust published the suggestion that it was sensible to conclude that the generic name is derived from the Arabic phrase qahr al-luhum, meaning "wound in the flesh" or "abscess," referring to the floral odour. Genaust was unaware that the genus Caralluma existed east of Palestine. He specifically ruled out its existence in India, where it was first described and named. Genaust presumed that the name would have first been applied to Caralluma europaea in North Africa.³

So, it is clear that the name is from the Telugu language from southern India, but what does it mean? Neither Roxburgh nor Brown seem to have recorded that and did not give the spelling in Telugu script.