Streptocarpus wendlandii is a monocarpic unifoliate species with a large dark green leaf (450 x 350 mm) with a deep beetroot red underside and a distinctive leaf stalk. This leaf stalk allows the plant to carry its leaves off the ground, probably to protect them against rot during very wet seasons, but this makes the species suitable for a planting of a number of plants in one large pot, so that it almost looks like it possesses a leaf rosette. It produces many flowers at the same time, the corollas (35 -50 mm) are tube shaped, medium violet with two deeper blotches in the throat with white lines.
Streptocarpus wendlandii only occurs in the small Ngoye Forest (9600 acres) inland of Mtunzini on the KwaZulu Natal Province north coast, South Africa, where it grows on earth banks and is occasionally epiphytic. Already grown in 1890 in Europe and Kew, the plant was illustrated in Curtis’s Botanical Magazine with pointed corolla lobes and upper corolla lobes coloured deeper than the lower ones, neither which is incorrect.
