Plants→Aloes→Massawa Aloe (Aloe eumassawana)

Small to medium clumping aloe from the coast of Eritrea and Djibouti. Offsets to form large groups. Inflorescence has 1-2 branches and orange-red flowers. Leaves are often spotted, especially when young. This plant shares some history with Aloe massawana, and is often misidentified as such.

Aloe massawana was originally described by Reynolds in 1959 based on plants found in Tanzania, including plants found on old Arab graves near Dar es Salaam. He named it for the port city Massawa in Eritrea, where he thought these plants originated. Nearly 40 years later this description was found by Carter et al. to encompass two separate groups, one from Tanzania and another from Eritrea, with distinct features, especially on the inflorescences. The new species eumassawana was described at that time to refer to the northern group, and massawana (despite its name) now refers only to the southern group.

https://www.researchgate.net/p...

Aloe eumassawana is distinct from massawana in a few ways, but still frequently confused with it. A. eumassawana tends to clump much more, and the inflorescences on eumassawana have fewer branches (1-2 instead of 2-7). One key distinguishing feature is that A. eumassawana has fine hairs on the racemes, while massawana does not. They are also different in other ways: Aloe eumassawana racemes are more laxly flowered; its flowers are orange-red instead of dusty pink; its flowers are shorter; its leaves are wider.

There apparently are 2 different types of eumassawana, which can be distinguished based on how they reproduce. There are Eritrean plants which appear to reproduce only by offsets, but there is also a population in Djibouti which fruits and sets viable seed. The spread of the infertile plants reflects their shared history with humans, including cultivation presumably for medicinal use.

https://www.researchgate.net/p...

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