Krameria ixine L.

• Title

  Krameria ixine L.

• Authors

  Nathaniel Lord Britton, Frances W. Horne

• Scientific Name

  Krameria ixine L.

• Description

  Flora Borinqueña Krameria Ixina Ixina Rhatany root Family Krameriaceae Krameria Family Krameria Ixina Linnaeus, Species Plantarum, edition 2,177.1762. The family Krameriaceae is one of the few which consists of but one genus only. It has no living close relations, and must be of very ancient origin. Affinity with some plants of the Senna Family has been suggested. Krameria was dedicated by Loefling to the Austrian botanist J.G.E. Kramer, and accepted by Linnaeus in 1762, founded upon the species here illustrated, which was first known to botanists from Venezuela. There are about 25 species, shrubs and perennial herbs, all natives of tropical and warm-temperate America, most numerous in Mexico, several in the southern United States and in Brazil, one in the Andes of South America. They have alternate, simple, or in a Mexican species, 3-foliolate leaves, without teeth, and rather large, very irregular flowers, borne solitary in the leaf-axils, or in clusters at the ends of branches. The calyx is composed of 4 or 5 unequal sepals; there are 5 petals, the 3 upper ones long-clawed, separate, or partly united, the 2 others much smaller, broad, sessile, without claws; the 4 (rarely 3) stamens are separate, or borne on the united claws of the upper petals, their anthers 2-celled, discharging the pollen through a pore; the pistil has a 1-celled ovary containing 2 ovules, and a cylindric style. The globose fruit is spiny, 1-seeded, and falls away without opening. Krameria Ixina (perhaps an aboriginal name) is a shrub, about a meter high or lower, irregularly branched, with slender, stiff, softly white-velvety branches. Its narrow leaves are short-stalked, velvety, from 1 to 2.5 centimeters long, spinulose-tipped; the flower-stalks are short, mostly not longer than the upper, small leaves, with which they are borne; the 4 broad sepals are silky-hairy, long-pointed, about 6 millimeters long; the upper petals are united at the base, about 4 millimeters long, their claws narrow, the limbs broad and pointed; the lower petals are about 3 millimeters broad, above the middle. The body of the fruit is hairy, 5 or 6 millimeters in diameter, its slender spines 4-6 millimeters long, retrorsely barbed above. In Porto Rico this shrub is restricted in distribution to the dry, southwestern districts, in thickets and on hillsides near the coast, and grows also on Mona Island; elsewhere in the West Indies it occurs in Santo Domingo, Haiti, St. Thomas, St. Eustatius, Antigua and Grenada; in South America it grows in northern Venezuela and Colombia, and on the Dutch Islands Bonaire and Curaçao. Its dried roots, and those of two South American species, furnish the officinal drug, extract of Krameria, a tonic and astringent medicine.