Botanical atlas

Henriques' Rubber Vine

Clitandra henriquesiana

Clitandra henriquesiana belongs to a group of rainforest lianas once prized not for the kitchen or the medicine chest, but for the milky latex running beneath their bark. During the wild rubber boom of the late 1800s and early 1900s, vines in this genus were tapped across the forests of equatorial Africa, their latex coagulated into the raw rubber that fed a rapidly industrializing world. The species carries the name of Julio Henriques, the Portuguese botanist whose work helped catalog the flora of Angola, and it remains far better known to herbarium records than to any kitchen or apothecary shelf. Unlike many entries in this atlas, it has no well-documented history of traditional food or medicinal use, and none is invented here.

Safety.

Not a food or medicinal plant; it produces a milky latex that irritates skin and eyes and should never be ingested, and related Apocynaceae species contain toxic, heart-affecting compounds.