ADDITIONAL NOTES ON THE GENUS VITEX. XV Harold N. Moldenke VITEX DONIANA Sweet Additional bibliography: Mold., Phytologia 44: 386, 389, & 416^17. 1979. Recent collectors describe this species as a tree, 3 to over 25 m. tall, often single-stemmed, or a middle-sized or very large shrub, often solitary; trunk 30 — 100 cm. in diameter at breast height; wood soft, light; sap colorless; bark rough; branchlets glabrous; leaves "5-lobed" [ i.e. , composed of 5 leaflets], very dark-green above, grayish beneath, glabrous; inflorescence "cov-ered with rusty-brown hairs"; flowers in dense axillary cymes, hairy, "on long pedicels [ i.e. , peduncles] in leaf-axils"; fruit "the size of a cherry", green with lighter patches or white spots when immature, blackish-purple when ripe, edible. The chromosome number is reported by the Hanguenots (1962) as 2n = 32. Gossweil-er calls the plant a "wet hydrophyte". The corollas are said to have been "white" by Den Outer (19720, "yellowish or white with blue-purple corolla-lobes" by Hutchinson & Dalziel (1936) , and "petals dirty-white inside with a blue lip" by Williams (1949) . It is said to have been "blue to mauve" on Reckmans 1409 and "white, upper petal purple" on Richards 25816. Siwunmi (1973) describes the pollen as follows: "Pollen grains isopolar, radially symmetrical; 3-colpate; lobate-oblate spher-oidal (P 25.7 :t, E 25. Ot 1.2 fjn) . Sexine subtectate, I>rPC: 343. Colpi ca. 17. 6± 1.4f»m long, width ca. l.Ui 0.1f;m. Apocolpium diameter 8. 0± 0.1pm. Exine 2.0 fjm thick (thinner at the colpi). Sexine reticulate, reticulation finer at apocolpia than at meso-colpia. Muri 0.4± O.lunh v;ide, distinctly simplibaculate. Lu-mina 0.7^ 0.1pm wide. Tectal part of muri 0.6;^ 0.1pm, baculate zone 0.5a:0.1pra, foot layer 0.9ir 0.1pm thick", based on Jos 1965. Recent collectors have encountered l^. doniana in dry gulches, on wooded savannas and secondary savannas in mesophyll forests, at the edges of sandy bushland, on river banks and lake shores, in the riverine forest belt, in gallery forests and light forests on heavy loam, on shrubby savannas, in hard stony soil in open park-lands, and in gullies in Brachystegia woodlands, at 700 — 1900 m. altitude, flowering in January and February and from April to No-vember, fruiting from January to April and in August. Greenway (1973) describes it as dominant in mixed but mainly compound-leaved Brachystegia microphylla wood on hillsides. Kershaw (1967) says that in Nigeria, according to Keay (1948), this species grows in open woodlands with Lophira alata, Terminalia glaucescens , Daniella oliveri, Hymenocardia acida, Detarium senegalense, and Afzelia africana as the characteristic species of trees. He also 474
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