Pictetia aculeata (Vahl) Urb.
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Authority
Britton, Nathaniel L. Flora Borinqueña.
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Family
Fabaceae
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Scientific Name
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Description
Species Description - This small tree, or shrub, locally abundant on hillsides and in thickets in the dry southern and eastern parts of Porto Rico, is a conspicuous element of the native vegetation when in bloom, in the spring, being then covered with clusters of bright-yellow flowers. It commonly grows with two or several trunks from the same mass of roots, and is sometimes gregarious, forming dense colonies, or thickets, as observed by us in the vicinity of Boqueron, and west of Coamo Springs, and reaches a maximum height of about 10 meters, the slender trunks seldom more than 20 centimeters in diameter; its pale yellow wood is durable and much heavier than water. The tree is wild also in Santo Domingo, and extends eastward from Porto Rico, through Vieques and Culebra, throughout the Virgin Islands to Anegada; it is known as Karrebesu in the Virgin Islands, and also erroneously, as Fustic. The genus Pictetia was established by De Candolle in 1824, named in honor of Marc Auguste Pictet, who lived from 1752 to 1825; it has four known species, all of them West Indian; the one here illustrated the only one living in Porto Rico, was first regarded by Danish botanists studying plants of the Virgin Islands as of the same genus as the North American Locust-trees (Robinia), but that classification was soon abandoned; in 1797 the Austrian botanist Jacquin included it in the genus Aeschynomene, to which it is more nearly related, and of which we have three herbaceous kinds in Porto Rico, known as Yerba rosario and Yerba de cienega. The specific name aculeata (prickly) refers to the bristle-tipped leaflets. The thin, ash-colored bark of Tachuelo separates from the trunks in large, thin flakes, and its branches are characteristically slender, and not densely leafy, the young twigs finely hairy. Its compound leaves, from 6 to 12 centimeters long, are subtended by a pair of spinescent stipules 6 to 12 millimeters long; they have from 9 to 25 orbicular leaflets which are from 1 to 2 centimeters long and wide, rather thin, few-veined, and bristle-tipped. The clusters of bright yellow flowers are about as long as the leaves, or shorter, the few or several flowers in each cluster borne on very slender stalks from 1 to 2.5 centimeters long; the bell-shaped, many-veined, toothed calyx is about 6 millimeters long; the corolla is composed of a round recurved standard about 2 centimeters long with smaller wing-petals and a blunt keel; nine of the ten stamens are united; the slender style is incurved. The pods are narrow, flat, from 2 to 6 jointed, from 2 to 5 centimeters long, about 6 millimeters wide, the joints falling apart when ripe.
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Discussion
Tachuelo Karrebesu Pea Family Robinia aculeata Vahl; West, Bidrag St. Croix 300, 1793. Pictetia aculeate Symbolae Antillanae 2: 294. 1900.