Gingersrus Database Taxon ID 7586Costus comosusOLD NAME: Costus comosus - cultivated NEW NAME: Costus comosus NAME CHANGE NOTES: cultivated plant often incorrectly called Costus barbatus FULL SCIENTIFIC NAME: STATUS : distinct form CONTINENT: Neotropical FIELD OBSERVATIONS:(If field observations are available, you can click on the link to open in a new window.) PHOTOS:(If photos are available, you can click on the link to open in a new window.) SYNONYMS: BOTANICAL NOTES: The plant that is commonly sold in US horticulture as Costus barbatus, is generally recognized to be a form of Costus comosus var. bakeri, but its origin in the wild is not known. There are several early accessions in botanical gardens that indicate it was grown from seeds collected in Costa Rica, but this form is not found in that country growing in the wild - quite possibly it was collected from a plant in cultivation there. In Australia it has been usually named as C. comosus var. bakeri. The variety is distinguished from var. comosus by having the upper side of the leaves glabrous and the bracts scabrid to the touch. The type species is from Guatemala which is the center of distribution for this variety, but the plants found in that region do not at all look like the cultivated Costus barbatus. The variety bakeri will be united with the variety comosus in the upcoming revision to new world Costaceae, so in any event this popular cultivated plant will become simply Costus comosus. The common name often given this form is "red tower ginger". In March 2017 I visited the Villa Tunari area of Dept. Cochabamba in southern Bolivia. In that area I found a plant growing in a wild area, that is very close in form, nearly identical to the cultivated form of Costus comosus that is often incorrectly tagged as Costus barbatus. There are several early records in that region for C. comosus var. bakeri, and it was also early on known to be in the Santa Cruz Botanical Garden. Since the plant is so widely cultivated, I had to consider the possibility that the plants I saw had escaped from cultivation, but at least at one site, it was far away from populated areas. In October 2017 I visited with Paul and Hiltje Maas in Holland. Dr. Maas told me that the C. comosus in that region is natural there - not escaped from cultivation. Dr. Maas has had this form cultivated in Holland at Utrecht since 1993. There is a collection record (Cardenas 7368) for this variety in adjacent Cochabamba Dept, Province Carroasco, at Puerto Polonia, RÃo Coni, 14 km E of San Antonio, that is dated in October of 1942, well before this species would likely have been in cultivation. In December 2017 I found another plant in this form in Peru in a rather remote locality in Dept. JunÃn, along the road to the reserve at Pampa Hermosa. DNA was sampled from my R3031 accession from cultivation and the whole genome was sequenced.
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