Hyacinthoides clan

Dear Kirk,

Now that the flood of replies to your question have finally died down. Perhaps I could provide a few observations.

It is rather risky to make broad conclusions about the African members of the Sans.hyacinthoides based entirely on the leaves. The differences that N.E. Brown cited include those of the flowers. Have you seen the flowers for the plants you mention? There are differences in the length of the flower tube and the articulation (jointing) of the pedicel. The drying reddish leaf margin, I like to call a bicolor margin, is typical of most Sansevieria species. The few species that lack it, such as Sans.trifasciata and Sans.parva, are the exceptions.

Sans. conspicua differs from Sans.hyacinthoides by having flowers with a much longer floral tube and pedicels articulate near the base. It has even been confused with Sans.kirkii but it has an elongate thyrsose inflorescence not a capitate one like the latter.

Sans.hyacinthoides and Sans.raffillii both have the pedicels articulate near the middle but Sans.raffillii has much larger and firmer sheaths (bracts) on the floral stems.

In my informal species list you may notice that several names have already been reduced to synonymy of Sans.hyacinthoides by recent reviewers of the South African species.

Frans Noltee has already suggested that Sans. 'Mason Congo' (GC 133-78) from Zaire is synonymous with Sans.hyacinthoides on his nursery website.
http://www.cactus-mall.com/fnoltee/index.html

Here is my previous posting on the topic:
http://www.mallorn.com/lists/sansevierias/dec98/msg00038.html

Sans. macrophylla hort. is not a validly published name.

Do you have the N.E. Brown Sansevieria monograph?

Cereusly Steve

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Hello Group --

With the understanding that Mason-Congo may be a cultivar of hyacinthoides,
I've been looking at some of my plants and noticing certain similarities.
For example, plants which I have labeled macrophylla, conspicua, aff.
conspicua (Zimbabwe), hyacinthoides, Mason-Congo, and to some extent,
raffillii var. glauca, all have leaves which are relatively broad, faintly to
strongly mottled in leopard spots, slightly to extremely pruinose (in fact,
S. aff. conspicua [Zimbabwe] is truly the most blue of all my 150+
sansevierias), rougher textured on the underside than on the upper surface,
and have drying, reddish margins.  This is also true of an unnamed plant I
collected in Tanzania last year. This leads me to suspect that maybe they are
ALL varieties of hyacinthoides.

Any comments?

Kirk


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