Rubber vine

Description

Cryptostegia grandiflora, commonly known as rubber vine, is a woody-perennial vine that is native to south-west Madagascar. It is also a significant weed in northern Australia, sometimes regarded as the worst weed in all of Australia. It has also been introduced to most other tropical and subtropical regions by man, because of its attractive flowers and the fact that its latex contains commercial quality rubber (hence the name). It is now naturalised in the Caribbean, East Africa, Mauritius, India, Southeast Asia, Indonesia, Latin America, the southern United States, Fiji and New Caledonia. It is very similar to the purple rubber vine (C. madagascariensis), which is also native to Madagascar. A rubber vine can grow up to 2 metres (6 ft 7 in) tall as a shrub, but when it is supported on other vegetation as a vine, it can reach up to 30 metres or 100 feet in length. Rubber vine prefers areas where annual rainfall is between 400 and 1,400 millimetres (16 and 55 in), and is well adapted to a monsoonal climate. It can grow maximally on an annual rainfall of 1,700 millimetres or 67 inches, but seeds best with an annual rainfall of 400 millimetres (16 in) or less. For this reason, rubber vine thrives on (and requires) the extreme variability of rainfall and streamflow characteristic of central Queensland. The extreme variability (four times that of other countries to which it has been introduced) is almost certainly why rubber vine has become a major weed in Australia and not any other country in which it has been introduced.