Nepenthes Sumatrana - Discovery and Taxonomy

Discovery and Taxonomy

Nepenthes sumatrana was first collected by Johannes Elias Teijsmann in February 1856, near the port town of Sibolga. Teijsmann wrote the following account of his discovery:

Among the plants collected to-day and the day before yesterday, there were 4 species of Nepenthes (katoepat baroek, tjalong baroek, or taau-taau), growing here on the very coast between the scrub in a thin layer of humus, under which pure sea sand, or against steep rocks and the coast, when there was only some earth or moss for the germination. Some species are very common and luxuriant here and abound in flowers and fruits. The plants are all transported to Buitenzorg in living state, but from the seeds only those of one species I have succeeded in bringing to germinate, this growing very slowly but being very interesting, as the young plants, only few lines large, already bear minute pitchers.

The plant material was initially described as a variety of N. boschiana by Friedrich Miquel in 1858, and in 1886 Odoardo Beccari considered it a variety of N. maxima. Both of these species are now known to be absent from Sumatra. Günther Beck von Mannagetta und Lerchenau, in his 1895 work "Die Gattung Nepenthes", was the first to publish N. sumatrana under its present binomial combination, although he introduced it under the entry for N. maxima with the words "Hierzu gehört als Varietät: N. sumatrana" (this includes a variety: N. sumatrana).

In his monograph of 1908, "Nepenthaceae", John Muirhead Macfarlane placed N. sumatrana in synonymy with N. treubiana, a species native to New Guinea. B. H. Danser supported this interpretation in his seminal monograph, "The Nepenthaceae of the Netherlands Indies", published in 1928.

In 1986, N. sumatrana was again recognised as a distinct species by Rusjdi Tamin and Mitsuru Hotta, who noted significant differences between it and N. treubiana. Matthew Jebb also treated N. sumatrana separately in his 1991 monograph, "An account of Nepenthes in New Guinea", as did Joachim Nerz and Andreas Wistuba in 1994, when they described the closely related N. longifolia. Nepenthes sumatrana was formally restored in Matthew Jebb and Martin Cheek's 1997 revision, "A skeletal revision of Nepenthes (Nepenthaceae)", although the authors sunk N. longifolia in synonymy with N. sumatrana. This latter decision was reversed by Charles Clarke in his 2001 work, Nepenthes of Sumatra and Peninsular Malaysia.

Despite the numerous taxonomic revisions, it appears that none of these authors (with the exception of Clarke) saw living plants of N. sumatrana. The first person to knowingly observe N. sumatrana in the wild since Teijsmann's original collection is thought to have been Ch'ien Lee, in 1998.