Brachystelma tumakurense

Did you know that Brachystelma tumakurense is a new plant, slender stemmed with a vivid display of colours in their flowers, discovered in 2017 by a group of Agricultural scientists in Devarayanadurga in Karnataka's Tumakuru district, and hence the suffix "tumakurense"?

Brachystelma tumakurense, a new species, is a tuber derivative which belongs to the Apocynaceae family (a family of flowering plants) with the pollens similar to orchids, which was found in

flowering while bearing leaves. It was discovered for the first time in 2017 in Devarayanadurga (a temple town and hill station) near Namda Chilume (700 m elevation), in Karnataka's Tumakuru district , and it has been rightly named after the district from where its type material was collected by agricultural scientists as ‘B. tumakurense’. The scientists who disocvered and anlysed this rare sample of plant were Gundappa B.V. from the Wildlife Aware Nature Club, Tumakuru; Sringeswara A.N. and Vishwanath belonged to the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS), GKVK Campus – Bengaluru, and P. Venu from the Environment Protection Training and Research Institute – Hyderabad. These scientists published their Technical paper on the new plant in the ‘RHEEDEA Journal of the Indian Association for Angiosperm Taxonomy’ and noted that the plant belongs to Brachystelma R.Br, the second largest genus in the tribe Ceropegieae with over 116 species distributed in the old world tropics ( Africa /South Asia). 

The new plant spieces, a lesser known plant with pollen similar to orchids, are stated to be mainly distributed in Peninsular India in dry hill ranges; seven species are reported from Karnataka. All of the species exhibit erect stems and are non climbing in nature. The flowers of this plant exhibit a brilliant display of colours, particuarly in their corolla and coronal structures. The scientists reporting this new spieces said that the plants (16 to 18 individuals in one population) were distinctly visible in the grasses as the grasses had not attained their usual height owing to low rainfall (which caused grasses surrounding the plant to grow shorter than usual), in 2017. The scientists reporting their find also stated: "We found the plant in 2017 and studied it and found that it is not similar to any known plant. It is a tuber from which a plant comes out around May-end. After one or two and a half months, by August-end, it dries up, but the tuber remains for a year. The tubers may be eaten by animals and men, as it has an edible property.”

B. tumakurense is defined as a perennial tuberous herb which rises to a height of 1 m. Its tuber is oblong or fusiform, and 7 cm long. Stem is erect but weakly bent. The stem is normally un-branched, but rare branches are seen from nodes below browsed ends, terete, faintly furrowed and ridged, glabrous/minutely puberulous.

- Narasipur Char