Notes on Madagascan Euphorbiaceae III: Stachyandra

Abstract

Whilst I was working through a pile of undetermined material at the end of the Euphorbiaceae in the Kew Herbarium in 1964, my attention was drawn to two specimens, one sterile and one fruiting, collected by the Rev. R. Baron in northern Madagascar. These had lain there undisturbed since 1892, when they had been received at Kew, apart from a pencilled note at the bottom of each sheet, "near Croton?". These were Baron 6431 and 6441 respectively. They clearly had nothing whatever to do with Croton, since the growthpattern was monopodial and the leaves were opposite and decussate, and, furthermore, digitately compound. The most striking feature, however, about them was the curious stipular sheath terminating each shoot, to which the petioles were adnate for almost all their length, so that the leaflets appeared to arise from the top of a terminal bud. I brought these specimens to the notice of Mr Airy Shaw, who up to that time appeared to have been unaware of them, and I made drawings showing their diagnostic features which I sent to Paris. I later received a letter from Mme Tardieu-Blot, then a Sub-Director of the Laboratoire de Phandrogamie at the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle, to the effect that she had been able to question the doyen of Madagascan forestry and botany, Monsieur R. Capuron, concerning them. He considered them to represent the same unnamed species as one with which he was already familiar, having encountered it many times in the field, albeit always in a sterile condition, where it often occurred in pure stands. He opined it to be referable to the genus Androstachys Prain (Capuron 1957). Mme Tardieu also sent my drawings to her fellow Sub-Director, the late J. Leandri, then on vacation in Corsica. I received a rather non-committal reply from him expressing surprise that there was so little material available from a region 'qui a 6t6 explor6e soigneusement par les meilleurs botanistes malgaches'. He had, however, some years previously made brief mention of Capuron's plants in his account of Androstachys for the 'Flore de Madagascar et des Comores' (Leandri 1958), but did not refer to this fact in his letter. In 1965, Airy Shaw published a short informal note on the Baron specimens when he established the family Androstachydaceae as a precursor to his revision of Willis' 'Dictionary' (Airy Shaw 1965).