Vanhouttea hilariana

1. Feature table
2. External link
3. Publication and etymology

This vanhouttea has never bloomed for me yet.  I anxiously await its flowers.  There is always the possibility that it will displace Vanhouttea brueggeri as my favorite vanhouttea.  You never know until you actually see the flowers.

If you like vanhoutteas and live in a climate which is not quite as warm as subtropical, it is important to keep one or two representatives (a cutting or a seedling) of each species in a sheltered location during the winter.  As of this writing (June 2007), I have Vanhouttea brueggeri, V. lanata, and V. hilariana only because there were such cuttings and seedlings in sheltered locations.

It's not easy to grow vanhoutteas indoors.  This is often the result.

V. hilariana is one of the "free calyx lobe" vanhoutteas, as opposed to the species like V. lanata, in which the calyx completely encloses the flowerbud (to see what is meant, check out the picture on the V. lanata page).

Because most vanhoutteas do not bloom easily outside Brazil, we have a page showing a comparison of the leaves of four vanhouttea species.

A seedling plant

This shows a young plant of V. hilariana.  There are two noteworthy features of this plant.

• The seedling has a swelling at the base of the stem, similar to that of other vanhoutteas and paliavanas, and somewhat resembling the "swollen-stem" tuber of Sinningia barbata.  This could be a proto-tuber: perhaps the common ancestor of all the Sinningia tribe had accumulated some of the adaptations necessary for tuber creation.  This may also just be a thickening sometimes seen at the stem base of shrub species.  It is unlikely to be the residue of a tuberous ancestor, however, since the free-calyx-lobe vanhouttea clade, to which V. hilariana belongs, does not have any members with tubers.
• The leafbacks have some amount of red, with the backs of the top leaves being entirely red.  This photograph was taken in 2003, and the plants I have now show no trace of red on the backs of their leaves.  Some sinningias (e.g. S. reitzii) exhibit that sort of development too, with deep red leafbacks when young, with the amount and intensity of the red diminishing with age.  This is the only time I have observed it in a vanhouttea, however.