Introduction

There is a large woody climbing plant found in the forests of the Western Ghats of Tamil Nadu and Kerala, Southern Peninsular India, that has been referred to in recent floras (Ramamurthy, Reference Ramamurthy, Nair and Henry1983; Mitra, Reference Mitra, Sharma and Balakrishnan1993; Sasidharan & Sivarajan, Reference Sasidharan and Sivarajan1996; Mohanan, Reference Mohanan and Daniel2005; Karthikeyan et al., Reference Karthikeyan, Sanjappa and Moorthy2009) as Desmos viridiflorus (Bedd.) Saff. The species was first described by Beddome in his Icones Plantarum Indiae Orientalis as Unona viridiflora. The Icones were originally issued, in 15 parts of 20 plates each, in the period 1868–1874 (Stafleu & Cowan, Reference Stafleu and Cowan1976). The copy in the library of the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew has annotations indicating the dates when the parts were received – for that part relevant to Unona viridiflora this is January 1872. Other institutions may have received copies earlier but, in this case, the exact date becomes immaterial as I shall demonstrate below. In the original publication Beddome did not cite any specific collections but wrote: ‘This very fine species has only been observed on the banks of the Sholayar (3000 feet elevation) in the dense moist forests in the heart of the Anamallays in flower in March.’ Bhargavan (Reference Bhargavan1983) reported the presence of potential type material of Unona viridiflora Bedd. in the Madras Herbarium (MH, now the herbarium of the Southern Regional Centre of the Botanical Survey of India based in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu). There are two herbarium sheets, MH 417 and MH 418, both of which are flowering specimens. The first has a collection label indicating the specimen was collected by Major R. H. Beddome, at Anamallay in 1871. The second sheet has no label but has an annotation in the bottom left stating ‘A gigantic climber flowers green Anamallays banks of the Sholayar 3000–3500 ft’ with a final, indecipherable, word. Comparison with manuscript material in the Archives of the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew indicates that the annotation is in Beddome’s handwriting. In the Kew herbarium there is Beddome 223 (barcode no. K000691353), with a date of December 1871, but no other information. The specimen is an exact match to Beddome’s original plate (t. 158), and must have been the artist’s reference material for it. There is also Beddome 69 collected from the Anamallays in 1871 at BM. Given the good agreement between the annotation on MH 418 and the protologue, this specimen is chosen as the lectotype. The date on the Kew specimen, December 1871, seems unlikely to be the collecting date if the description was published in January 1872; it may be the date the specimen was received at Kew.

Unona viridiflora Bedd. was transferred to Desmos Lour. (Safford, Reference Safford1912). However, Beddome had used a name that had already been validly applied to a South American plant. This means that Safford’s Desmos viridiflorus must be considered an avowed substitute for the later homonym Unona viridiflora Bedd. with priority dating from its date of publication in 1912 (ICBN [McNeill et al., Reference McNeill, Barrie, Burdet, Demoulin, Hawksworth and Marhold2006] Art. 58.1, cf. Ex. 1). Fortunately there do not seem to be any synonyms that were published before 1912, so the name is not threatened but the author citation changes from that generally used in Indian floras to Desmos viridiflorus Saff.