Paliavana gracilis Mauro's plant My plant Update Another plant Feature table External link Publication and etymology This picture shows my first flower of Paliavana gracilis on October 5, 2011.  Compared to Mauro's plant below and the picture on his web site, it has only faint striping. As I was moving the plant around to prepare for photographing the flower, the stem with the flower broke off. See the bottom of the page for a side view of this flower.

 

Mauro's plant The photograph at the right was taken in the greenhouse of Mauro Peixoto in Mogi das Cruzes, São Paulo State, Brazil, in April 1999.  The plant is therefore an autumn bloomer, since April in the southern hemisphere corresponds to October in the northern hemisphere. As can be seen, this a shrub and probably not a good light-garden candidate.

This photograph shows flowers and flowerbuds on the same plant.  There are several interesting things to be seen in this picture.

The flowers are campanulate and thus probably bee-pollinated.  The "campanulate flowers" feature has been used to distinguish paliavanas (non-tuberous sinningias with campanulate flowers) from vanhoutteas (non-tuberous sinningias with tubular flowers).

The calyx lobes are long and narrow and separate for most of their length.  There are two good calyx examples visible in the picture after the corolla has fallen -- one in front of the stem at center right, and the second just to the left of the stem at the bottom of the picture.  They give a good image of the spiky calyx lobes.

The developing flowerbud at the lower right of the picture, with the flimsy calyx lobes hovering around the unopened corolla, and the even less-developed flowerbud just underneath the left purple flower show that this species is a member of the "free calyx lobes vanhouttea clade", even though it's a paliavana.  As it happens, the plant right next to it, visible in the left half of the photo, is something different.  See the flowerbud at the upper left in the picture.  The calyx completely encloses the developing flowerbud.  This feature and the white wool surrounding the flowerbud mark this as Vanhouttea lanata.

See?  All that technical stuff comes in handy sometimes.

My plant [OBSOLETE]

I have a plant of P. gracilis (however: see below), but don't know much about it yet, however, so stay tuned.  With a name like gracilis, it should be pretty good.

Just avoid the temptation to say graCILis.  Accent is on the first syllable: GRAcilis.

Plants grow better when you pronounce their names right. Honest.

Update

Unfortunately, it turned out that the proper pronunciation of the name of my plant was Vanhouttea lanata.  Even though it did not have the characteristic woolly stems and leafbacks of Vanhouttea lanata, it did have, when it bloomed in November 2007, woolly calyx lobes and the calyx lobes completely enclosing the developing corolla, a feature characteristic of the V. lanata - V. brueggeri - Paliavana tenuiflora group, and not of P. gracilis, which is a member of the "free calyx lobes vanhouttea clade".  A picture on the Paliavana tenuiflora page shows what is meant by "calyx lobes completely enclosing the developing corolla".  An idea of what the flowerbud would have looked like if the plant were P. gracilis and had free calyx lobes can be seen in a picture on the Vanhouttea pendula page.

The real gracilis

This plant was grown from Brazil Plants seed (sown 22 Feb 2010).  It has the sprawling habit of paliavanas.  This picture was taken in August 2011.  Two months later, it bore one flower, seen at the top of the page.

Feature table for Paliavana gracilis

External Link For some habitat pictures and information, see the page on Mauro Peixoto's web site. Publication Paliavana gracilis was first published by Martius (1829) as Gloxinia gracilis.  Alain Chautems transferred it to Paliavana in 2002.  Chautems points out that the original publication cited as locality (what is now) Rio de Janeiro state, where P. gracilis has never been collected since, and mentioned a tuber, which no subsequently collected or cultivated material of P. gracilis has ever exhibited.  He therefore suggests that the original publication was actually that of a form of Sinningia speciosa, whose wild-type "slipper" flowers bear a resemblance to those of P. gracilis. Jon Lindstrom and I each had a plant we thought was P. gracilis but turned out to be Vanhouttea lanata.  Martius, almost 200 years ago, had a plant he thought was Something gracilis, but most likely was Sinningia speciosa.  Do we see a pattern here? Etymology: Latin gracilis ("slim, slender").  See the pronunciation guide.