Durringtonia (Durringtonieae), a New Genus and Tribe of Rubiaceae from Australia

Abstract

In undertaking fieldwork for an ecological study of the vegetation of Moreton Island, northeast of Brisbane, in 1973 and 1974 while a staff member of the Queensland Herbarium, Lorraine Durrington (now Dr L. Tan) made collections of a peculiar, quite insignificant-looking and rare plant in a swamp on the island. She was unable to place it after extensive study at BRI and consultation with colleagues locally and eventually overseas at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew (K). This is not surprising since many parts that we now know are critical for its identification were unavailable when the plant was sampled. Searches on subsequent field trips, even in the same swamp, failed to relocate the plant, so she made no reference to it in her published account (Durrington 1977). Durrington then left Botany for a career in medicine and the plant's identity remained an intriguing mystery. During his vacational botanizing on Moreton Island in October 1982, Philip Sharpe, another ex-BRI staff member involved in the study of this unplaced taxon, found flowering plants of it in Eager's Swamp, site of the original Durrington collections. On close examination of his specimens, we found the flowers remarkably different from anything we were aware of in Queensland plants. They were apparently female only and hence from a possibly dioecious species. From a scientific point of view, there was a pressing need to identify this plant. The only site it was known from was within an area covered by a mining lease for sluice extraction of heavy minerals and mining in the near future was anticipated. Sharpe, therefore, led an expedition of botanists to the swamp in November 1982 to observe plants in their natural habitat, to determine the abundance of the taxon and in particular to search for male plants or at least male flowers. As a result, fertile material of both male and female plants was collected at Eager's Swamp but the taxon was not found at any other locality on the island after searches in several likely spots suggested by Durrington's vegetation map. The material collected showed that this taxon was new to science.