Fallopia aubertii (L.Henry) Holub

This species, which is closely allied to F. baldschuanica, was described by Louis Henry in 1907 from a plant growing in the garden of the Paris Museum. This had been raised from seeds received from the French missionary Aubert in the spring of 1899, collected by him in the neighbourhood of Tatsien-lu (Kangting) in W. Szechwan, China. The species also occurs in Kansu and Shensi. The main botanical distinction would appear to be that in F. aubertii the inflorescence-axes are papillose, and that the panicles are narrow, erect and spike-like, borne laterally along leafy stems, while in F. baldschuanica the inflorescence-axes are glabrous or almost so, and the inflorescences are crowded towards the ends of the shoots, so forming broad, compound panicles. The flowers in F. aubertii are rather smaller than in the Russian species, but there is no reliable difference in their colour. In his original description Henry gave as a further difference that the young growths of F. aubertii are tinged with red. He judged it to be inferior to F. baldschuanica in its flowers, but the better of the two as a foliage plant, because of its luxuriant leafage.It has been stated that many plants grown as F. baldschuanica are really F. aubertii, and that the latter is the commoner in cultivation. If so, a likely explanation is to be found in the fact that the plants raised from the seeds collected by Aubert were distributed without name. It was seven years before Henry published the name F. aubertii, and in the meantime plants may have been identified in other gardens as F. baldschuanica and further distributed under that name. But the cultivated and naturalised material in the Kew Herbarium does not altogether bear out the statement that F. aubertii is the commoner species. Some specimens have the inflorescence-axes glabrous as in F. baldscbuanica; others have them more or less papillose – sometimes only slightly so – and presumably represent F. aubertii, though the type of inflorescence more often favours F. baldschuanica. F. aubertii grows as vigorously as the Russian species, and can be put to the same uses.