Romulea hirta Schltr.

Manning, John C. & Goldblatt, Peter, 2001, the Arabian Peninsula and Socotra including new species, biological notes, and a new infrageneric classification, Adansonia (3) 23 (1), pp. 59-108 : 100-101

62. Romulea hirta Schltr.

Bot. Jahrb. Syst. 27: 91 (1900); M . P . de Vos , J . S . African Bot., Suppl. 9: 269 (1972); Fl. S . Africa 7(2), fasc. 2: 49 (1983). — Type: Schlechter 8766, South Africa, Western Cape, Koudeberg, Wuppertal (holo-, B; iso-, BM, K!, P!, S, Z) .

Plants 5-30 cm high, stem subterranean; corm rounded at base with curved acuminate teeth. Leaves 3-6, basal, suberect or curved, 4-winged, H-shaped in section with two broad lateral grooves, the wings sometimes ciliate or crisped, 2-5 mm wide; outer bracts with narrow usually brown-speckled membranous margins, inner bracts with brownish membranous margins. Flowers pale yellow, sometimes with obscure chestnut blotches at the edge of the cup, unscented, tepals elliptic, 12-25 mm long; filaments 5-6 mm long, anthers 3-5 mm long. Fruiting peduncles recurved or suberect. Flowering: July-Sep.

Romulea hirta extends from the Bokkeveld

Mts. and western Karoo of Northern Cape Province, South Africa, to Wuppertal in the northern Cedarberg of Western Cape Province. Although the species is mostly found in damp sand and light clay, often along streams, populations from the western karoo occur on stony doleritic clay. Romulea hirta appears to comprise two series of populations. The typical form comprises plants with fairly slender leaves which flower in August and September and produce suberect fruiting peduncles. Plants flowering in July on the dolerite flats at Calvinia are much smaller, have short leaves with the marginal wings lightly crisped, and the fruiting peduncles are distinctly curved. There are, however, intermediate populations, for example, in the Nieuwoudtville Wildflower Reserve, that seem to link these plants to the typical slender form and we prefer not to recognize the variant populations as taxonomically distinct.

Highly distinctive in its leaf morphology, Romulea hirta is one of two species in the genus in which the leaf margins are broadly winged and the leaf is thus H-shaped in cross section. It and R. tetragona , which has a remarkably similar leaf, were treated as immediately related by DE VOS (1969), who placed them together in subsection Hirtae . The two differ markedly, however, in corm and bracts. Romulea hirta has rounded corms and narrow membranous margins to the bracts while R. tetragona has ridged corms and wide membranous margins to the bracts. These differences seem to us more significant than the leaf similarity and we place them in separate subgenera.

— Ser. ATRANDRAE