A new species of Chlorophytum (Asparagaceae) from southern Western Ghats of India

The genus Chlorophytum Ker Gawler (1808: 1071) is one of the major genera of family Asparagaceae (APG 2009) with about 212 taxa (Kativu &a Nordal 1993, Govaerts et al. 2012). It is distributed in the Old World tropics especially in Africa and India (Mabberley 2005). It is represented by 17 species in India of which 15 occur in the Western Ghats (Malpure & Yadav 2009). Characters like anther filament ratio, anther filaments, number of tepal nerves, pedicel articulation and somatic chromosome number are taxonomically important (Adsul et al. 2014). The Western Ghats lies in the western part of peninsular India in a series of hills stretching over a distance of 1,600 km from north to south and covering an area of about 160,000 km(2). Within this area, the Palakkad district of Kerala is very rich in endemics and endangered species (Sasidharan 2004, 2013). While working on the floristic diversity of high mountains in Dhoni and Muthikulam forests (Palakkad District), the authors collected an interesting specimen of Chlorophytum from the grasslands of Palamalai hills and later from Elival hills of Muthikulam. The study of relevant literature (Dalzell 1850, Baker 1875, 1894, Hepper 1968, Ansari et al. 1970, Meerts et al. 2012, Nordal & Poulsen 1998, Poulsen & Nordal 1999, 2005, Sasidharan 2004, 2013, Sardesai et al. 2006, Malpure & Yadav 2009, Bjora et al. 2012, Chandore et al. 2012) revealed that these plants show affinities with C. sharmae Adsul et al. (2014: 9503) but show many morphological differences. These plants are described here as a new species, C. palghatense sp. nov.