Brazilian shade-loving groundcover for id please

I'll add, regarding the red underside of the leaves, a quote from http://aobpla.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2015/04/28/aobpla.plv042.full.pdf:

That talks about reddening of the lower leaf surfaces in a different plant, but could possibly apply here. It mentions that some leaves on the same plant could have the red colouring while others do not, so the colouring is not a fixed characteristic of the leaves of the species.

 

Apart from all the differences pointed out already there is also the different venation and arrangement of the flowers that don’t resemble the botanical drawing of Mikania hemisphaerica I believe Flora SBS has made a mistake, the more because they give the link to the drawing of Mikania hemiphaerica on the Flora do brasil, I do believe the botanical drawing, it was instant recognition..

 

I am doubting now again, maybe I should just keep it with Mikania species..

May I give a link to the other forum, where JRsbugs (Janet Rowley) has been doing research on the same plant for me. Please scroll all the way to the end of my thread over there:
Plant ID forum: Brazilian vine-like rainforest plant (National Gardening Association)

 

Ah, nice to have more links with some photos. Janet Super Sleuth, on the National Gardening Association forum, had a link to Mikania guaco, which is a name that I read somewhere is also used for M. hemisphaerica. I liked seeing this photo, which shows some purple colouring on the leaf underside, seeming to me to support the idea that that is not a fixed characteristic but variable according to the amount of light the leaves have received.
Florula Digital - Páginas de Especies de Plantas

 

On this page, there is photo just past halfway down, just called Guaco, paired with another photo that looks nothing like it (!), but the second photo in that section looks very similar to yours. The thing is, for this item, there is no botanical name given, just some common names.
Guaco, Planta, Xarope, Brasil, Usos, Origem Guaco. The image itself is at http://www.portalsaofrancisco.com.br/alfa/guaco/imagens/gguaco-53.jpg
It ends with source credit: Fonte: www.cantoverde.org

 

Yes, I came upon the same photo in my searches Wendy, but the photo is of very poor quality, no details visible and like you say it doesn't give the species name.
I find it so weird that while there are piles of photos of Mikania sps on the web, there is none that truly resembles mine, the plant really calls your attention when you meet it, at least for someone interested in plants..strange also that the ones i met are supposedly all juveniles!
I found a herbarium specimen of Mikania hemisphaerica on Global Plants, but I am not allowed to enlarge, only access for researches or people affiliated with universities.. but the condition of the specimen looks poor anyway..
Type? of Mikania hemisphaerica Sch.Bip. ex Baker [family ASTERACEAE] on JSTOR

 

Well, there is a description, in Portuguese though most of it is in Latin, of Mikania hemisphaerica, along with a key to the ones that would occur in that area, here on JSTOR:
A família Asteraceae em um fragmento florestal, Viçosa, Minas Gerais, Brasil
Silvana da Costa Ferreira, Rita Maria de Carvalho-Okano and Jimi Naoki Nakajima
Rodriguésia
Vol. 60, No. 4 (2009), pp. 903-942 (Mikania on page 929)
Stable URL: A família Asteraceae em um fragmento florestal, Viçosa, Minas Gerais, Brasil on JSTOR
There was a link somewhere on the right side of the page that said, Free: read online. You sign up and get to have three books on your shelf. I think I signed up many years ago, guessed my ID and was in.
I think my path there was:
1. Click the link you gave below, Type? of Mikania hemisphaerica Sch.Bip. ex Baker [family ASTERACEAE] on JSTOR
2. Click the link to the document I named at the start of this post, listed under related materials on the right side of the page
That brings up an abstract, and on the right was the option to read online by logging in or signing up for the free account.
You can click Thumbnails to go right to page 929; maybe start at the top for the first description of Mikania in the key.
After all that, I think you can get the article here:
MINAS GERAIS, BRASIL, both viewed online and downloaded as a pdf.

Anyway, no drawing for this species.
On page 909 though, there's a leaf drawing for Austrocritonia velutina that looks sort-of like your other leaf posting. Good luck getting information on that.

 

Thank you very much, I have signed up with JStor, but access to the text was much easier through your last link. In the text it says that Mikania hemiphaerica blooms in June, so probably the reason why I didn't find it in bloom, when I travel it is in the winter months (summer for Brazil).
But none of the Mikania descriptions talk about white venation while it is so prominent in my plant...
I wonder if the Botanical garden in Rio would have a botanist specialized in Asteraceae..

 

I'm not adding anything, just check up on this from time to time, thought of it again when I saw on facebook an Asteraceae with similar leaf design but opposite coloration. I'm just adding here a link to the other forum where bonitin posted this, which mentions two suggested Asteraceae names. Plant ID forum: Brazilian vine-like rainforest plant - Garden.org.
The thread there ended around the time it ended here. I'm still expecting to come across it some day.

 

Hi, wcutler, nice to hear this plant is still under your attention! :)

I joined a Brazilian plant identification group on Facebook a couple of years ago and had given up my search after the plant was identified as being Mikania hemisphaerica by a Brazilian botanist.
You inspired me to tell about my experiment I did with this plant on my thread on that forum.
Myriam Vandenberghe

Somehow the link will not appear?

 

Yes, that's the link to your Facebook discussion. Links all get converted to text display words now, if there are ones coded on the page.

I'm so glad I made my comment - how interesting to see your two new plants. How old will you have to be to see their adult forms! :)

I wonder if the expert in Mikania mentioned in the FB postings is the same person whom Alex Popovkin asked, so it's still only one person's identification.

 

Yes, it is amazing how this plant seem to be such a slow grower Wendy, only making one offset per year!
While previous years I met this plant once in a while, last year I didn't see any at all, apart from the one I had planted. I also revisited a place where once there where several in two separate spots along a trail. They had disappeared and nowhere around I found a grown Mikania vine, strange..
And like you say it is the identification of only one person, so I am still not totally convinced..lol.

If I get the chance to return to Brazil, I'll sure revisit my plant again and keep you updated. :)

 

Just found out that the photos of Mikania hemisphaerica on the Flora SBS, that caused my confusion, have been taken down, so they probably were wrong..

 

Is that this one? You have to click the species from that page. I didn't really think the drawing that you and others thought was so different was all that different. When you read descriptions that give several options for the shape at the base and other characteristics, there might need to be room for some variations. We just don't know how much.

Do you think those immature plants "grew up" and don't have their baby leaves any more, and you missed noticing the same plants now because you don't recognize them? Hedera doesn't work that way, has both mature and immature leaves at the same time, but maybe these don't do that? Ha, can you imagine if someone were to offer these as a houseplant, based on those nice leaves, and then they turn out to be something entirely different a year later?

 

No Wendy, I meant the site 'Flora SBS' that had photos of the plant that now have been taken down: Pesquisar resultados - FloraSBS
not the 'Flora do Brasil' with the botanical drawing of the plant that I agree is a match.

I don't know how the 'immature' (?) plants disappeared but they were growing along a trail in the forest close by the river, a monsoon can cause serious havoc among the vegetation like I have witnessed a couple of times..

I am thinking now that what I have seen were not immature plants but adults, remember the botanical drawing had flowers, but they seem to bloom in June, a time I cannot be in Brazil.

 

OK, thanks for giving that one again. In the link you pasted, you're missing the "a" at the end of Mikania. Did you do the search that way, or was that just in the pasting that it went missing? I can fix that if you want (or I think you can).

It gives me a chance to demonstrate the variability I was talking about. For Mikania campanulata on that site, the google translation of Portuguese says

Climbing vines, cylindrical branches, sometimes purple, glabrous with little hair. Opposite leaves, when young mostly purple on the abaxial face, laciniate stipules, sometimes diminutive, triangular-deltoids to semi-toasted, 4-10 × 2-6 cm, whole margin to paucidenteada, sometimes ciliada, base cuneada to chordate, apex acuminate, glabrous or hairy, sometimes with glandular trichomes, scattered on the abaxial face, trinérveas. ​

So sometimes cordate leaf base and sometimes cuneate shaped leaf base (that difference in leaf bases led you to say early on that the surrounding plants were something different), sometimes hairy sometimes not, sometimes purple sometimes not, sometimes slightly dentate margin and sometimes not. I'm assuming the same variability would apply to M. hemisphaerica.

It's nice that you're able to get there as often as you are - too bad about missing flowering season, but it doesn't matter if those plants disappear, at least in any form in which you can notice them. Maybe the people who gave you the common names know of some other places where they've seen them.

 

You're right I see now I had missed the 'a' in the word Mikania!

Oh yes, for sure, the Mikania genus is renown for being vastly variable. Not sure though if that is also the case for Mikania hemisphaerica..you see, where the plants had disappeared, I looked carefully, there were not any vines/creepers that could have been from the Mikania genus. There was also a colony of Hippeastrum striatum that also had vanished, and these are evergreen species..
I found a pdf from the scientist who did the id. : Caetano Troncoso Oliveira, he is specialized in Mikania..

I wish it was true that I would be able to go as often to Brazil as I wish, lol! It depends on factors like having the necessary funds and finding an affordable stay for my limited budget..:)
Myriam

 

Thanks. I have fixed the link to FloraSBS.
Interesting to find the first part of Oliveira's document. I was taken aback thinking I was going to have to read 200 pages, but then I was disappointed when I found they weren't there! I think I do remember running across a separate document about the new discovery, then deciding that it wasn't your plant anyway.

 

@bonitin, did you see this photo on flickr? Species not identified. It's not an exact match, but close enough that it suggests that Mikania could be reasonable. That is if you accept all the variability from the descriptions, including the leaf bases.
Mikania
And the green leaves in the middle of the second photo in posting #14 look a lot like this photo ID'd only as Mikania sp.:
Asteraceae - Mikania sp
He has a couple of other similar photos in that album.

 

Yes, Wendy the photo of your first link does has a resemblance to my plant, but an important difference is that the venation is really different. (The green-leafed Mikania sp. on the second link does look like the ones on post #14.. and both look like juvenile plants..)

 

I suppose that does override the similarity of the design at the other end of the leaves.

 

@bonitin, I asked a flickr user (Mauricio Mercadante) whom I have recently started to follow. I forget how I came across his photos, but he is in Brazil, not even in the same area, but I wrote to him anyway. He was kind enough to reply:

Hi Wendy I presented the problem in a group of professional Brazilian botanists. The subject had already been discussed in the group before. The group came to the conclusion that it is indeed Mikania hemisphaerica. The discussion in Portuguese can be seen at www.facebook.com/groups/171157419593991/permalink/1022813347761
​

You will need to join the facebook group for the link to take you to the discussion. It looks to me like all the people involved are unrelated to any of people mentioned in any of the postings here. The person who was ultimately asked for the ID seems to be a specialist in Mikania: Caetano Troncoso Oliveira | Escavador.

 

Thanks Wendy for your efforts, Caetano Troncoso Oliveira was the same botanist who had identified my plant on my facebook thread, I gave the link in my #35 post.
Myriam Vandenberghe
I had read the threads you mentioned on DetWeb.

 

Oh, sorry, I thought it was all new people, was so excited.

 

Never mind Wendy! :)
Yes, those facebook groups are very interesting and great for expanding my knowledge of the Atlantic Forest!