Boucerosia frerei, née Frerea indica

[One Windowsill]

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It seems I have not posted anything for about four and a half years. I did not have much that counts as a succulent. I lost my most interesting plants in a cold winter when the landlord didn't want to spend much on heating.

I got a few nice plants from a supplier in Hungary, along with a small infestation of spider mite. Luckily I noticed the damage when they arrived and got a load of Phytoseiulus predators. They seem fine now. The first flower opened a month after they arrived. They have a faint smell of death if you get close to them.

Those are three different flowers in the pictures. Each flower is unique, each having five distinct yellow letter/glyph patterns that seem randomly determined. I hope that I will have a complete Frerea font, eventually. The flowers are about 2.5cm (1 inch) diameter.

I didn't want to derail a previous topic, but DavidW said this in March:

Decades ago our British Cactus Society had a millionaire President called Maurice Mason, who in addition to cacti and orchids had a large greenhouse full of species Begonias,...
...
He did propagate some plants described in the past he re-collected into cultivation, including the unusual leafy Stapeliad, Frerea indica which he had collected in the wild and introduced to UK succulent collections when he was President.

I am writing an article for my blog about Frerea and the various collections that have been made. I am pretty sure that Maurice Mason did not collect the cuttings from the wild, though he was the first to have the plant in Europe. The cuttings were photographed* on the 24th of May 1958. They were in full leaf and growth. The monsoon in Maharashtra does not start until June. Wild plants would have been leafless, gnarly and silvered. Those cuttings had to come from cultivated plants.

Gordon Rowley was frustratingly ambiguous in his article. He wrote: "...introduced from India by Mr. Mason for the first time".

I can find descriptions of Mason's travels before 1957 but can't find a mention of his travels in 1958 and nothing about an Indian adventure. Mason (and his wife) had collected from the wild on challenging treks in many hot countries around the world. He also had a web of connections with botanic gardens and other plant collectors who would send him interesting plants. He was famous for once having ordered three of everything from Hilliers nursery.

The most likely source would have been Hermenegild Santapau, a Jesuit botanist who taught at St Xavier's College in Bombay. He had been growing the plant since 1950, when he had published a short note about it.†

Mason contributed living plants of Frerea indica to Kew Gardens in 1959.

Ulrich Meve and Sigrid Liede decided that Frerea is one of the genus Boucerosia in 2002. They had revived Boucerosia from 1834, though it had been a section of Caralluma for a long time. As Boucerosia indica was already taken they had to use Boucerosia frerei. Rowley had renamed the plant to Caralluma frerei in 1958, so that was the second choice for specific name. Other authorities disagree on both of those placements. I will just be calling it Slutty Monkey.



* Rowley, GD "Whitsun Safari" The National Cactus and Succulent Journal (1958) 13(3): 47-52 https://www.jstor.org/stable/42788356 Free registration to view on JSTOR.

† Santapau, H "New Record for Frerea indica Dalz. in Bombay Province." The Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society (1950) 49(2): 801-2 https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/ite ... 1/mode/1up

[DaveW]

Other Succulents are not my subject being a Cactophile. I only know what I was told at the time. Our Nottingham Branch, BCSS visited his place a couple of times when he was BCSS President. (Fincham Hall, Kings Lyn, if my aged memory serves me correct?) He certainly seemed to have introduced it into British cultivation at the time, whether he collected it in the wild himself or acquired it on his trips.

See:-

https://norfolktalesmyths.com/2020/06/0 ... ice-mason/

You may find more information for your blog here:-

https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/search/a ... cfa27aa374

https://forum.bcss.org.uk/viewtopic.php?t=164669

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frerea

[One Windowsill]

Mason definitely introduced it, though whether he collected it from the college in Bombay where it was being grown or by amateur or professional courier is the question. The evidence suggests he did not collect it from the wild.

Unfortunately, I will not be able to get to York to read his archived letters. Thanks, I had not seen that archive information. It does start 14 years after the introduction of Frerea. I had seen the other links you provided. Talbot Manor, Fincham was the address.