A new species of Syzygium (Myrtaceae) from the South Western Ghats of Tamil Nadu, India

Abstract

Syzygium bharathii, a new species from Megamalai Wildlife Sanctuary, Tamil Nadu, India is described. This species is closely allied to Syzygium benthamianum and Syzygium agastyamalayanum but differs from both by having a cylindrical stem with red young shootlets, glabrous leaves with wavy margin, quadrangular peduncle, large sized flower, inwardly curved filaments, narrow pyriform hypanthium, obovate, subglobose, ellipsoid fruits and ovate-obovate seeds. This combination of characters makes determining the relationships of S.bharathii difficult.

Syzygium syzygioides (Myrtaceae), a new distributional record for Peninsular India

“…Syzygium Gaertn., the largest genus in Myrtaceae, comprises about 1200 species distributed from Africa eastwards to the Hawaiian Islands, India and southern China southwards to Australia and New Zealand (Parnell et al, 2007;Govaerts et al, 2020). Seventy two species are so far reported from India, which include eight recently described species from the Western Ghats, two from Andaman Nicobar Islands and one from Northeast India (Viswanathan & Manikantan, 2008;Shareef et al, 2012Shareef et al, , 2014Sujanapal et al, 2013Sujanapal et al, , 2014Nayar et al, 2014;Ramana et al, 2014;Narayanan et al, 2014;Murugan & Arumugam, 2017;Ramasubbu et al, 2018;Sarma et al, 2019). The Western Ghats of Peninsular India shows the highest diversity of the genus in India with 47 species, 20 of which are endemic (Nayar et al, 2014;Govaerts et al, 2020).…”