Nepenthes Burbidgeae - Botanical History

Botanical History

Nepenthes burbidgeae was discovered on Mount Kinabalu in 1858 by Hugh Low and Spenser St. John. St. John wrote the following account of finding the species near the Marai Parai plateau:

Crossing the Hobang, a steep climb led us to the western spur, along which our path lay; here, at about 4000 ft, Mr. Low found a beautiful white and spotted pitcher-plant which he considered the prettiest of the twenty-two species of Nepenthes with which he was then acquainted; the pitchers are white and covered in a most beautiful manner with spots of an irregular form, of a rosy pink colour.

Frederick William Burbidge was one of the first to collect the plant in 1878, although he did not succeed in introducing it into cultivation. The type specimen of N. burbidgeae, Burbidge s.n., was collected on the Marai Parai plateau of Mount Kinabalu and is deposited at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. A duplicate specimen is held at the New York Botanical Garden.

Nepenthes burbidgeae appeared as an unnamed species in Burbidge's 1880 book The Gardens of the Sun. Joseph Dalton Hooker named N. burbidgeae after Burbidge's wife, though the name only appeared in an unpublished manuscript. The specific epithet is attributed to Burbidge as he used it in a letter to The Gardeners' Chronicle in 1882. It reads:

Nepenthes Burbidgeae, Hook. f. MSS., is a lovely thing, as yet unintroduced : pitchers pure white, semi-translucent like egg-shell, porcelain-white, with crimson or blood-tinted blotches. Lid blotched and dotted with crimson-purple. It is a very distinct plant, with triangular stems, 50 feet long, and the margins of the leaves decurrent.

In 1894, Otto Stapf identified specimens belonging to N. burbidgeae as N. phyllamphora, a taxon that is now considered synonymous with N. mirabilis.

In two articles authored by Burbidge in 1894 and 1896, the name of this species was written as N. burbidgei. This name is considered a sphalma typographicum (misprint) of N. burbidgeae, although it appeared in a number of other works by authors such as Odoardo Beccari (1886), John Muirhead Macfarlane (1908), and Elmer Drew Merrill (1921). Herbarium material also bears this spelling of the name.

Seventy years after its discovery, N. burbidgeae remained a poorly known species. This is reflected in the writing of B. H. Danser in his seminal 1928 monograph, "The Nepenthaceae of the Netherlands Indies", where he suggests a close relative in N. pilosa:

This species has only been found twice on Mt. Kinabalu and is very insufficiently known. I have not ventured to unite it with any other. N. pilosa, though doubtless the most nearly related species, is certainly different.

In 1981, Australian botanist Allen Lowrie reported that the fluid in unopened pitchers of N. burbidgeae is effective in stopping external bleeding. Lowrie cited two examples of researchers in the field successfully using this fluid on cuts and wounds.