In a paper in Bradleya, Leonard Newton says:
"Sansevieria bagamoyensis was described(Brown, 1915) from a herbarium specimen in Paris that had been collected in Tanzania by the French missionary Charles Sacleux (1856–1943).
Whilst resident in Zanzibar in the late 19th century, Sacleux sent a number of living Sansevieria specimens and herbarium specimens to Paris,
where Professor Max Cornu was building up a living collection in the botanical garden attached to the National Museum of Natural History. The
collection locality of this specimen (Sacleux 672), collected in 1889, was given as “Near Bagamoyo”.
In the time of Sacleux, Bagamoyo was an important port for travellers from Zanzibar, and many early journeys of exploration into the interior of
East Africa started from there. Consequently it was already a sizeable town, and so “near Bagamoyo” can probably be interpreted as “within
a few kilometres of Bagamoyo”.
The name Sansevieria arborescens was published in a less formal paper (Gérôme & Labroy, 1903), based on a living plant from Sacleux, with
no citation of a herbarium specimen and no statement of the type locality. A description, compiled from data scattered in the protologue, is: Shrubby;
stem rigid, erect to 1 m, leafy throughout; leaves 5-ranked, sheathing, spreading horizontally, 15 cm long, c. 3 cm wide, c. 6 mm thick, apices pungent (Newton, 2009).
The inflorescence was not described in the protologue, but plants matchingthe description have flowered in cultivation (Newton, 2009). They produced an inflorescence to 50
cm long, with up to 15 spreading branches, the lower ones reaching 8 cm long.
Jankalski (2006) decided that S. bagamoyensis is a superfluous renaming of S. arborescens, apparently on the assumption that Sacleux would
have sent both living and preserved material of each species to Paris. As Sacleux 672 is the only Sacleux specimen of a caulescent species in Paris
herbarium, Jankalski concluded that it must represent the living S. arborescens in the garden.
In 2004, one of my postgraduate students went to north-eastern Tanzania for some field work, and I asked her to look for sansevierias near Bagamoyo.
She brought back some plants collected at two localities near Bagamoyo. The small shoots that were collected for me looked rather like
S. arborescens (Newton, 2005), but longer leaves were produced as the same plants grew taller. In my garden most of the prominently
caulescent plants have taken a long time to flower, perhaps because of the higher altitude (1,512 m) compared with the natural habitat close
to the coast. After having been planted in my garden in 2004, the plants from Bagamoyo have yet to flower. In December 2011 I visited Bagamoyo
myself, during a field trip with Bob Webb and Toni Yocum. One of my student’s localities was visited, plus a new locality found during the journey.
The plants were not in flower, but many dried inflorescences were found, giving useful information.
The observations presented above suggest that S. bagamoyensis and S. arborescens are two distinct species, with significant differences between them.
Their ranges of leaf length
do not overlap, as would be implied by the protologue of S. bagamoyensis. After recognition that the upper two leaves on the type specimen are immature,
it is necessary to amend the description of S. bagamoyensis slightly to correct the statement of mature leaf length. This should now read as
follows: Leaves 34–40 cm long, 1.6–2.5 cm wide.
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