1.) The leaf tips were more acute in D.villosa and more obtuse in
D.montana.
2.) The leaves of D.villosa were sometimes semi-erect while those of
D.montana were pressed to the ground.
3.) D.villosa were usually larger, with rosettes up to 7cm in diameter
(mostly 3-5cm) and wider petioles + lamina.
4.) Young scapes were present and apparently those of D.villosa had
sparse, long, simple, white hairs on the base of the peduncles while
the D.montana had glabrous or gandular-haired peduncle bases.
The above were often not enough since there were lots of
intermediate plants. Once the flower scapes develop it should be easier
to tell them apart and the seed shape should be definitive. I've never
seen hybrids between D.villosa and D.montana, but if they do exist it's
at the Caparao!
To make things even more complicated, growing among these 2
species we sometimes found D.montana var."d.s.". It's not hard to tell
these 2 D.montana forms apart if you have seeds and flower scapes, but
if only the rosettes are present it may get a bit tricky. Var.montana
usually has larger + wider lamina and petioles.
We also found G.aurea thickly covering a streamside together with
D.villosa, which was quite a surprise since I hadn't found G.aurea at
the Caparao in '93. Also by streamsides grew U.reniformis and U.tricolor.
Neither was in flower, but I remember that the local U.tricolor are very
small as a whole and their flowers are a light lilac-blue.
Unfortunately we didn't find any G.lobata. Like G.violacea, this
species usually grows as an annual in the wild, but can sometimes survive
the dry season at wetter sites. It is now the end of the dry season/
beginning of the wet season, but if there were any G.lobata still
alive, we didn't see them. The locals told us it hadn't rained for the
past 5 months. Apparently, Linilson and I were the only ones frustrated
with the constant rains. We had to content ourselves with collecting
mosses at the site where I'd found G.lobata 2 years ago, hoping seeds
will germinate in cultivation.
Our last stop was a small village called Araponga, located at
1000m of altitude in the midst of a mountain range which seems to have
numerous names. Last month I saw herbarium of a fantastic D.villosa-like
taxon which was collected at Araponga last year at around 1400m. It
resembles the beautiful D.villosa-like taxon found in the northern part
of the state around the town of Grao Mogol (which I've visited 4 times),
having a column of dead leaves and very long flower scapes.
Access to the trails which led to the higher parts of the
mountains around Araponga (where this D.villosa-like taxon probably grew)
could only be made by car through the dirt roads. Because of the rains,
we were only able to drive along one of these which took us to a trail
that climbs one of the highest peaks in the area. The bottom half of the
trail was mostly through farms while the top part was through rainforest.
We didn't know how high the peak was and we couldn't see the top because
of the fog and the forest, so we gave up at 1550m, not knowing if we were
far from the top or not, where we hoped to find open vegetation.
Our only other attempt to find CPs in that area was on a
bromeliad-covered cliff behind the town. We hoped to find the elusive
U.nelumbifolia, which I've been hunting down for the past few years. It
grows inside bromeliads just like U.humboldtii. We searched all of the
bromeliads (a giant, very beautiful species) we could reach at the base of
the cliff and found nothing. So we left Araponga pretty frustrated. Maybe
I'll try going back there in December, if it stops raining. Plants of the
D.villosa complex flower around Spring (Southern Hemisphere), so if I
don't go there soon, I might have to wait 'till next year to catch them
in flower.
Just as a last reminder, we collected seeds of various CPs
mentioned above and we should have seeds from both D.villosa forms (from
Ibitipoca and Caparao) in about a month or so. If any of you are
interested in trading CPs, please write to my friend Fabio Pinheiro at:
Rua Brasileiro de Campos 108
Jardim Marina 03560-160
Sao Paulo, S.P.
BRAZIL
He's the one in charge of our CP trade and I pass all my seeds to
him. If you are interested, send him a CP list and he'll send a list of
the seeds we have available for trade. We have seeds of numerous
Brazilian Drosera, Utricularia, and Genlisea. In fact, we still have
seeds of the giant G.uncinata (the one that has peduncles sometimes
almost as thick as a pencil and up to 80cm in height) which I collected in
July. A few G.uncinata are about to begin flowering in cultivation, so we
should have even more seeds in another month or so.
Fernando Rivadavia
Sao Paulo, Brazil