The type locality of Aloe cameronii Hemsley

Theo Campbell-Barker

Illustrations by the author

When I first arrived in central Africa I was spellbound by the beauty of a particular aloe that I was told had been first discovered in Nyasaland (now Malawi) by a man named Kenneth I. Cameron.  The flowers were bright scarlet and the leaves of the shrubby laxly rosulate plants were a stunning glossy bronze-red during the dry season.  Having asked a number of the expatriate botanical pundits about the site of the original discovery, I found that no one was at all sure.  Even the national herbarium was unable to tell me, even though they had a record of Cameron's consignment of the plant to Kew in 1894.  It arrived at Kew in 1895, and was planted and nurtured there.  It finally flowered in one of the hothouses in February 1903, when Hemsley was able to fully describe it.  On checking further through the records at Kew on one of my leaves to the UK I was surprised to find that no clear record of the actual type locality had been recorded by Hemsley either, presumably because Cameron's notes accompanying the plant went missing or were never sent in the first place.

In Dr. Gilbert Reynolds' book "The Aloes of Nyasaland", he states with some uncertainty, on page 36, that ... 'The type locality of A. cameronii therefore appears to be Blantyre.'  The Aloes of Nyasaland was published in 1954, and in his later (1966) definitive tome "The Aloes of Tropical Africa and Madagascar" he writes with the same degree of uncertainty, on page 352, that ... 'Hence, Blantyre might be the type locality. But it is possible that the type could have come from hills between Blantyre and Zomba, perhaps from Namasi Estate, near Zomba.'  This spelling of 'Namasi' was confusing as the same Estate is mentioned earlier in the same paragraph as 'Namadzi.'

Having no knowledge of Reynolds' 1966 opus with this clue in it at the time, I set about trying to ascertain the whereabouts of any naturally occurring specimens of A. cameronii in the Blantyre area.  I started my search at the offices of Mandala, a company that had originally been The African Lakes Corporation, for whom Kenneth Cameron had worked.  Someone there told me that Cameron may have found the plants growing in a rocky ravine nearby, as the Mandala offices occupied the same site as the original Corporation buildings.  There was no sign of any aloes in the ravine or any other kind of succulent plant and knowing the kind of places where xerophytic or succulent vegetation normally occurs, I was totally sceptical of the spot being a likely locality for Cameron's discovery.  The old photos they possessed of the site with the earliest buildings on it showed no aloes in the ravine either, even when I scrutinised the photos carefully with a powerful hand-lens.  My search eventually extended out beyond the city boundaries.  There was Aloe mawii growing along the top ridge of Ndirande Mountain, with a number of the rare A. buchananii scattered on the plateau below the ridge in the grasses between the Brachystegia and Ficus trees.  On the precipitous Ntawira side of the mountain there were a few A. christianii at the lowest levels, and on Nyambadwe Hill there were also a number of A. christianii.  No aloes grew on the heavily forested Soche Mountain, and no aloes grew on Michiru and the other mountains behind it either, although there were quite a large number of robust A. christianii in the bush around the base.  Further south and towards Mwanza Aloe swynnertonii was much in evidence in grassland and scrub with A. cryptopoda in the hills and gorges around Mpatamanga, although these areas were getting far from the Blantyre environs.  Of course it was possible that all of the naturally occurring A. cameronii could have been removed and transplanted into expatriate gardens, but having searched the most remote places as well as the accessible ones over a long period, I became certain that the species could not have been found by Cameron in the Blantyre area.

I then searched all the hills between Blantyre and Zomba but only came up with A. chabaudii, A. christianii and, set far back from the Blantyre/Zomba road, on Chiradzulu Mountain, Aloe mawii.  Many large specimens of this aloe were actually growing in the crowns and on the branches of trees along the wooded summit ridge on this mountain - something I had never seen before.  Noticing that the powerful prevailing wind was coming from the west I decided to climb down the western cliffs to investigate.  Sure enough there was a large colony of A. mawii halfway down, so clearly the strong wind sometimes blows the dry slightly winged seeds far up to the summit where some of them settle and root actually up in the trees.  I never found any of the aloes on the eastern side of the mountain.

Some time after this I was shown a volume of Dr. Reynolds' work "The Aloes of Tropical Africa and Madagascar" by my friend David Slater at his house on Sanjika Hill, and happened upon the reference to 'Namadzi' or 'Namasi' as a possible site for the original find.  I then returned to the Mandala headquarters to ask if Kenneth Cameron had ever spent time at any place of that name, and they found that he had been stationed at Namadzi near Zomba as a planter to tend experimental crops.  This was very encouraging news, so I drove northwards towards Zomba and turned off the road that led to the Cotton Research Station on the Namadzi Estate where Cameron had worked.  And there, on my right, was a granite whaleback covered in flowering A. cameronii in the middle of a field - a field that I had passed at a distance on many occasions in my search.  Perhaps someone should collect and press a flowering specimen for Kew from the place to finally put the matter to rest.

I chose to paint the plant at the stage depicted because it is never figured in books like this, but is always shown flowering, when it looks considerably different.  In order to show the small suckering rosette at the base of the stem I removed several persistent dead leaves.  There are a few tiny elliptical spots near the stem on the lower surface of some of the upper (younger) leaves, and also a number on the lower surfaces of the leaves of the sucker, but it was not possible to record these on the painting because of the angle.  One oddity about the leaves on all the plants on the rock was that the one, two or even three tiny teeth on the apex of each leaf were consistently growing on the right-hand side as you faced each terminal spine.  This was the case for my several visits over some years, but may not be the case today.  Characteristically all the leaves have an 'entire' (toothless) area leading up to the apex apart from these tiny ones, and even these are absent on some leaves.  I chose this plant for the painting as others were shrubbier and so too complex to clearly show the form well.  At the height of the dry season, in keeping with many other aloe species, the leaves of A. cameronii tend to incurve rather than recurve as it is seen here just at the end of the rains.  The depicted plant was returned to the rock when finished with, but I did remove the small rosette from the base of the stem, and still have it in the UK.