Ipomoea crassipes
Hook.
Leafy-flowered ipomoea
(c) Richard Gill, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC), uploaded by Richard Gill
(c) Richard Gill, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC)
What to Eat
Edible parts: Root, Tuber
The root tuber is eaten raw.
Where to Find It
It is a subtropical plant. It grows in grassland. It grows between 120-1,400 m above sea level.
Africa, Angola, Botswana, Central Africa, East Africa, Eswatini, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, South Africa, Southern Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe,
How to Identify
A herb. It has tubers. It puts up annual stems. These can be erect or trailing. The leaves vary but are usual oval or sword shaped. They are 2-8 cm long by 1-3 cm wide. They are hairy and are often purple around the edge. The leaf stalk is 1 cm long. The flowers occur singly. They are funnel shaped and mauve. They have leaf like bracts around them. The fruit is a capsule that splits open. It is 1 cm across.
Names & Synonyms
Vimbukhalo
References (6)
- Fox, F. W. & Young, M. E. N., 1982, Food from the Veld. Delta Books. p 162
- Guillarmod, J., 1966, 1971,
- Peters, C. R., O'Brien, E. M., and Drummond, R.B., 1992, Edible Wild plants of Sub-saharan Africa. Kew. p 94
- Ruiters-Welcome, A. K., 2019, Food plants of southern Africa. Ph.D. thesis. Univ. of Johannesburg p 46
- van Wyk, Ba., 2000, A Photographic Guide to Wild Flowers of South Africa. Struik Nature. p 81
- Welcome, A. K. & Van Wyk, B.-E., 2019, An inventory and analysis of the food plants of southern Africa. South African Journal of Botany 122 (2019) 136–179
