Ceropegias of India

The genus Ceropegia L. includes more than 200 species distributed in the Old World ranging from South East Asia, India, Madagascar, Tropical Arabia, Canary Islands, Africa except the Mediter- ranean region, New Guinea and Northern Australia (Surveswaran et al. 2009; Chandore et al. 2010). Ansari (1984) revised the genus for India and reported 44 species. Karthikeyan et al. (2009) reported about 56 species, two subspecies and three varieties for India. Now there are 64 taxa (58 species, two subspecies and four varieties) of Ceropegia in India, including the recently described C. bhatii S. R. Yadav & Shendage (2010) from Karnataka, C. man- narana P. Umam. & P. Daniel from the gulf of Mannar, Tamil Nadu (Daniel & Umamaheswari 2001) and C. attenuata Hook. var. mookambikae Diwakar & R. Kr. Singh (2011) from Mookambika Wildlife Sanc- tuary, Udupi district of Karnataka. About 34 species and one variety of Ceropegia are endemic to Western Ghats (Diwakar & Singh 2011) which is the centre for diversity of the genus in India (Yadav 1996; Malpure et al. 2006). An interesting new species of Ceropegia belonging to series Attenuatae Huber col- lected from Vengurla, Sindhudurg district of Maha- rashtra, in Aug. 2011, is described and illustrated below. Presently, series Attenuatae is represented by 10 species and one variety in India.