Remembering K.S. Manilal and the rediscovery of a rare orchid

Renowned botanist K.S. Manilal's legacy includes rediscovering the rare Ipsea malabarica orchid in Silent Valley.

Mention K.S. Manilal, the renowned botanist who passed away on Wednesday, and the first thing that springs to mind is the Hortus Malabaricus, Hendrik van Rheede’s monumental 17th-century treatise, which he translated and interpreted.

But among other things botanical, Manilal’s name is associated with the rediscovery of a rare orchid after more than 130 years from the Silent Valley; the Ipsea malabarica, perhaps better known as the ‘Malabar Daffodil Orchid.’

Its rediscovery in the early 1980s is credited to him and Sathish Kumar C., an orchid specialist who later became the Principal Scientist at the Jawaharlal Nehru Tropical Botanic Garden and Research Institute (JNTBGRI) at Palode, Thiruvananthapuram.

Manilal was heading the Department of Botany at the University of Calicut at the time. Manilal had a Department of Science and Technology (DST) project on the flora of Silent Valley. Sathish Kumar joined it as a junior research fellow in 1981. “As a student, I was already mad about orchids. In Silent Valley, wherever I looked I saw orchids!” Dr. Sathish Kumar recalls.

Now retired, Dr. Sathish Kumar remembers how difficult it was then to identify the orchid in question collected from Silent Valley. Later confirmed as endemic to the southern arm of the Western Ghats, it had attractive bright yellow flowers.

“Putting a name to it was difficult with the literature available then,” he says. A perusal of more books led to a suspicion that it could be the long-lost Ipsea malabarica. “I urged him to write to the Natural History Museum, Vienna, where a herbarium specimen from the original discovery was preserved,” he says. Manilal wrote to Vienna and a photocopy of the specimen arrived some weeks later. “It was a ditto match,” Dr. Sathish Kumar says.

The paper, Manilal K.S.; C.S. Kumar: Rediscovery of Ipsea malabarica Hook.f. - an endemic orchid species from Silent Valley, Kerala, was published in 1983.