Nepenthes Edwardsiana - Botanical History

Botanical History

The type specimen of N. edwardsiana was collected on Mount Kinabalu in 1858 by a climbing team consisting of Hugh Low, Frederick William Burbidge, and Spenser St. John. Designated as Low s.n., the specimen is deposited at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

Nepenthes edwardsiana was formally described in 1859 by Joseph Dalton Hooker. Hooker named the species after George Edwards, Governor of the Crown Colony of Labuan, at the request of his friend Hugh Low. Hooker's original description and illustration were reproduced in Spenser St. John's Life in the Forests of the Far East, published in 1862. St. John wrote the following account of N. edwardsiana on Mount Kinabalu:

As we ascended, we left the brushwood and entered a tangled jungle, in which few of the trees were large. The spur of the mountain became very narrow, sometimes not much wider than the path, and was greatly encumbered at one part by the twining stems of the Nepenthes Edwardsiana. This handsome plant was not, however, much diffused along the spur, but confined to a space about a quarter of a mile in length, and climbed upon the trees around, with its fine pitchers hanging from all the lower boughs. We measured one plant and it was twenty feet in length, quite smooth, and the leaves of a very acute shape at both ends. It is a long, cylindrical, finely-frilled pitcher, growing on every leaf; one we picked measured twenty-one inches and a half long, by two and a half in breadth. They swell out a little towards the base, which is bright pea green, the rest of the cylinder being of a brilliant brick-red colour. Its mouth is nearly circular, the border surrounding it being finely formed of thin plates about a sixth of an inch apart, and about the same in height, and both of a flesh colour; the handsome lid is of a circular shape. The dried specimen forwarded to Dr. Hooker only measured eighteen inches. The plant is epiphytal, growing on casuarinas (species nova). The pitchers of the young creepers precisely resemble those of the older ones, except in size.

Alfred Russel Wallace made brief mention of N. edwardsiana in his famous work The Malay Archipelago, first published in 1869: "Another, Nepenthes Edwardsiania, has a narrow pitcher twenty inches long; while the plant itself grows to a length of twenty feet".

In subsequent years, N. edwardsiana was featured in a number of publications by eminent botanists such as Friedrich Anton Wilhelm Miquel (1870), Joseph Dalton Hooker (1873), Frederick William Burbidge (1882, 1897), Odoardo Beccari (1886), William E. Dixon (1888), Ernst Wunschmann (1891), Otto Stapf (1894), Harry James Veitch (1897), Jacob Gijsbert Boerlage (1900), William Botting Hemsley (1905), and Elmer Drew Merrill (1921).

However, most of these publications made only passing mention of N. edwardsiana. The first work to include significant taxonomic revisions was that of Günther Beck von Mannagetta und Lerchenau in 1895, "Die Gattung Nepenthes". Beck was the first to unite N. edwardsiana and N. villosa, considering the former a variety or form of the latter. He also published the name Nepenthes edgeworthii based on a specimen collected in Borneo by Heinrich Gustav Reichenbach. The specimen, Herb.Reichenbach s.n., is deposited at the University of Vienna herbarium (WU). Beck, like all subsequent authors, considered N. edgeworthii to be conspecific with N. edwardsiana.

Nepenthes edwardsiana was formally reinstated as a valid species in John Muirhead Macfarlane's 1908 monograph, which included a revised description and illustration of the species. Macfarlane also wrote about N. edwardsiana in the Journal of the Linnean Society in 1914 and The Standard Cyclopedia of Horticulture in 1919.

B. H. Danser treated N. edwardsiana in synonymy with N. villosa in his seminal monograph, "The Nepenthaceae of the Netherlands Indies", published in 1928. The work included a revised Latin diagnosis and botanical description of N. villosa. Eight years later, Hermann Harms once again elevated N. edwardsiana to species status. This treatment was supported by Shigeo Kurata in 1976 and has not been challenged since.

A similar taxon from Mount Trus Madi was long considered to be N. edwardsiana. It was described in 1987 as N. edwardsiana subsp. macrophylla by Johannes Marabini. A decade later, Matthew Jebb and Martin Cheek recognised it as a separate species (N. macrophylla) in their monograph on the genus. This interpretation has been followed by subsequent authors.