Again and again, new plant species, hitherto unknown to science, are discovered. Last year, for example, these were the giant water lily Victoria boliviana in northern Bolivia, the Garrarnawun bush tomato Solanum scalarium in the Australian outback, the orchid Gastrochilus pankajkumarii in the highlands of Vietnam and the two bottle trees Uvariopsis dicaprio in Cameroon and Disepalum rawagambut on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. Not surprisingly, all of these new additions were found in tropical climes and far from human civilization. In the tropics, the plant diversity is much higher – there are 13,634 known plant species in New Guinea, only 4105 in Germany – and where there are few people, there is not only untouched nature left, there were also not so many botanists there and looked.

Ulf von Rauchhaupt

Editor in the "Science" section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.

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This makes it all the more surprising that Kenji Suetsugu, professor of botany at Kobe University, together with colleagues in the still young year 2023, is already scientifically describing the second flowering plant – and that both species do not grow in a remote tropical region, but in cold-temperate, highly industrialized, densely populated and correspondingly concreted Japan.

Only two weeks ago, Suetsugu and his colleagues published the discovery of a fairy lantern of the species Thismia kobensis in the journal Phytotaxa. Strictly speaking, it was not a new discovery: The species from the order of the yam had already been seen in 1992 in the urban area of Kobe, but in 1999 the site was built over, and since then the species was considered extinct. More than 100 years ago, this had already happened to her relative Thismia americana in Chicago. But in 2021, the botanists from Kobe came across about twenty specimens of T. kobensis about thirty kilometers away in a tree plantation near the town of Sanda.

Thus, the species could finally be described exactly. This had previously only been done on the basis of an incomplete museum copy. At the time, this had suggested a relationship with a Thismia species occurring in Australia and New Zealand. Most of the other eighty or so representatives of these strange plants, which do not carry out photosynthesis but feed on symbiotic fungi, grow in the tropics. But now it turns out that the Japanese fairy lantern is much more closely related to the American one, whose ancestors probably came from East Asia via the Bering Strait to North America.

On Friday, Kenji Suetsugu and his team published a description of a new plant species, this time in the Journal of Plant Research. Suetsugu had already noticed about ten years ago that of the specimens of the orchid species Spiranthes australis, which is widespread in Japan, some from the genus of twistworms, which also occurs here, bloom a good month before the others and they also lack the hairs on the stems. Only molecular biological methods have now confirmed the assumption that it is a separate rotarywort species reproductively isolated from S. australis, which the researchers named Spiranthes hachijoensis, after the island of Hachijo-jima, located 300 kilometers south of Tokyo. There she had first noticed Suetsugu. But now that we know what to look for, the scientifically new orchid can be found everywhere in Japan, but also elsewhere such as Laos or Taiwan – and not only in the wild, but also in city parks, private gardens and even on balconies.