Umdhlebi

Umdhlebi or umdhlebe is an unverified plant species purported to originate in Zululand, South Africa. Henry Callaway's The Religious System of the Amazulu, published in 1870, records several stories of the tree; an additional report appeared in a letter to the journal Nature on 2 November 1882 by Reverend G. W. Parker, a missionary in Madagascar who said the plant was poisonous.

To date, no specimen of the umdhlebe has ever been recovered, and other than 19th-century anecdotal evidence, no further verification is known to exist.

Characteristics

Though providing little in the way of physical description—focusing instead on the extreme toxicity of the plant and its purported capacity for movement—the accounts collected by Callaway nonetheless mention several varieties of umdhlebe. Parker describes two of these in greater detail: a small, shrub-like form, and a larger tree with two layers of bark—a dead outer layer, and a new living layer that grows beneath it; both are described as having red and black fruit and brittle, glossy, lanceolate leaves.