The tiny flowers are green.
And
the small fruit.
And an
larger one.
This
small one has more true leaves than normal.
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A member of the Hyacinthaceae family, first described by William Henry Harvey in 1867. Found in southern
and eastern Africa, where
it grows in peat, and stands a lots of water and sun. The onion-like
caudex can be op to 25 cm in diameter (could take 70 years), and the
branches reaches for op to 5 meters, but will die back when dried out.
It gets small greenish flowers, but can also be reproduced by
dividing the bulbs.
Highly poison, from root to top!
Different from B. gariepensis
by the curling main stem, green flowers and the capsule being valves
acuminate.
The true leaves that emerge from the bulb are small, very short lived,
but they are replaced by the scrambling or twining, branched green
flowering stems which reach up to four m long which are scattered with starry,
green flowers.
Bowiea is named after the British plant collector James Bowie
(1789-1869).
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Bowiea volubilis
"kilimandscharica".
Gottfried Wilhelm
Johannes Mildbraed reconiced B. kilimandscharica in 1934 ,
originating from Tanganyika, but although the fruits are
longer, it is since been considered a variation of B.
volubilis.
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