Borrichia arborescens (L.) DC.

• Title

  Borrichia arborescens (L.) DC.

• Authors

  Nathaniel Lord Britton, Frances W. Horne

• Scientific Name

  Borrichia arborescens (L.) DC.

• Description

  Flora Borinqueña Borrichia arborescens Clavelon de playa Sea Ox-eye Family Carduaceae Thistle Family Buphthalmum arborescens Linnaeus, Systema, edition 10. 1227. 1759. Borrichia arborescens De Candolle, Prodromus 5: 489. 1836. The Sea Ox-eye is a widely distributed, coastal shrub of tropical America, growing nearly throughout the West Indies and extending north to Florida and to Bermuda. It is frequent on rocky coasts of Porto Rico, and is the only species of its genus occuring here, and also inhabits the islands Mona, Vieques and Culebra. It forms colonies, or occurs as isolated bushes, or intermixed with other maritime plants. Borrichia is a tropical American genus of about 5 known species of halophytic shrubs. They have opposite, fleshy leaves, and rather large heads of both central, tubular, and marginal, radiate flowers. The genus was founded by the French botanist Adanson in 1763. The involucre of the flower-head is hemispheric, its bracts overlapping in 2 or 3 series, the inner ones leathery in texture; the receptacle (organ on which the individual flowers are borne) is convex, chaffy, the stiff chaff more or less enveloping the central (discoid) flowers; the ray-flowers are yellow, flat and elongated; the disk-flowers are small, tubular and 5-toothed, their anthers dark in color; both disk and ray-flowers produce fruit (achenes), those of the former 4-sided, of the latter 3-sided, and both are capped by a minute, scaly toothed crown. The generic name commemorates Olaf Borrick, a Danish Botanist. Borrichia arborescens is a branched shrub about 1.3 meters high, or lower, its stems and leaves either finely white-hairy or green and smooth. Its leaves are thick, narrow, mostly broader above the middle than below it, about 6 centimeters long or shorter, and from 6 to 15 millimeters wide, and they are without teeth, without stalks, and very obscurely veined. The flower-heads are stalked, usually solitary at the ends of the twigs, but occasionally there are 2 together; the involucre is from 1 to 1.5 centimeters high, its bracts either blunt or pointed; the ray flowers are from 6 to 9 millimeters long, the slender disk-flowers about 6 mm. long, the nearly black achenes about 4 mm. long.