Rhexia cubensis Griseb.

• Title

  Rhexia cubensis Griseb.

• Authors

  Nathaniel Lord Britton, Frances W. Horne

• Scientific Name

  Rhexia cubensis Griseb.

• Description

  Flora Borinqueña Rhexia cubensis West Indian Meadow Beauty Family Melastomaceae Meadow-beauty Family Rhexia cubensis Grisebaeh, Catalogue Plantarum Cubensium 104. 1866. This delicate, low, herbaceous plant is rare in Porto Rico, restricted to wet, sandy places of the northern coastal plain, beautiful when in flower, prized by nature-lovers, very different from any of the other plants of its family in the West Indian Flora, most of these being shrubs or trees. We have had the pleasure of observing and studying it at Laguna Rica in 1924. The plant grows also in Santo Domingo, Cuba and southern Florida. No Spanish name for it is recorded. Rhexia (Greek, breaking, originally applied to a different plant) is a Linnaean genus of 13 known species of perennial herbs, natives of eastern North America and the West Indies. The nearly or quite stalkless, opposite leaves are 1-nerved, 3-nerved, or 5-nerved, narrow in some species, broad in others. The large, regular flowers are solitary, or few in clusters, at the ends of the stem and branches; the calyx has an urn-shaped, or bell-shaped tube, constricted at the neck, with 4, short lobes; there are 4, broad, thin petals, which usually fall away soon after expanding; there are 8, separate stamens, all alike, the narrow anthers incurved, or inverted in the flower-bud; the 4-celled ovary contains many ovules, the style is slender, the stigma flat-topped. The fruit is a round, short, necked capsule, which splits into 4 valves, releasing the numerous curved, or coiled, small, rough seeds. Rhexia cubensis (Cuban), the only species found in Porto Rico, is a slender, branched, loosely glandular-hairy herb, about 0.5 meter high, or lower, the narrow, 1-nerved leaves from 1 to 2.5 centimeters long, and from 1 to 3 millimeters wide, with slightly, distantly toothed margins. The calyx is from 6 to 8 millimeters long, with narrow, pointed lobes about 2 millimeters long; the pink or purple petals are from 12 to 16 millimeters long. The capsule is about 7 millimeters long, with a neck about the same length.