Malpighia coccigera L.

• Title

  Malpighia coccigera L.

• Authors

  Nathaniel Lord Britton, Frances W. Horne

• Scientific Name

  Malpighia coccigera L.

• Description

  Flora Borinqueña Malpighia coccigera Azota caballo West Indian Holly Family Malpighiaceae Malpighia Family Malpighia coccigera Linnaeus, Species Plantarum 426. 1753. Beautiful with its small, shining, spiny-toothed leaves, and small, but often numerous white flowers, therefore often grown in gardens for ornament and interest, this low shrub inhabits thickets and woodlands, at lower and middle elevations in the wet and moist parts of Porto Rico. It is distributed in Hispaniola and Cuba, and in the Lesser Antilles from Martinique to St. Vincent. Malpighia is a Linnaean genus dedicated to Marcello Malpighi, an Italian botanist, who lived from 1628 to 1693; it includes 30 or more species of tropical American shrubs and small trees. Their opposite leaves bear stinging hairs on the underside in many of the species. Their white, pink, or red flowers are axillary, clustered, or sometimes solitary; there are 5 sepals, accompanied by several glands; the 5 petals are wavy-margined, or fringed; the filaments of the 10 stamens are united to the middle, or below; the ovary is 3-lobed, and the 3 styles are topped by small stigmas. The fruits are mostly small, depressed-globose, fleshy stone-fruits. Malpighia coccigera (berry-bearing, from the berry-like fruits), may form a shrub about a meter high, but is usually much lower, and sometimes nearly prostrate. Its short-stalked, shining leaves, from 0.5 to 3.7 centimeters long are various in form, from ovate to nearly orbicular, or obovate, prominently wavy-toothed, with bristle-tipped teeth, or rarely untoothed, strongly veined; the flowers are few together, in short-stalked clusters, or solitary; the oblong or ovate-oblong sepals are about 3 millimeters long, the pink, or nearly white petals about 9 millimeters long, or shorter. The nearly globular, scarlet fruit is about 10 millimeters in diameter. There are 4 other species of Malpighia in the Porto Rico Flora.