Tamonea macrophylla (D. Don) Krasser

• Title

  Tamonea macrophylla (D. Don) Krasser

• Authors

  Nathaniel Lord Britton, Frances W. Horne

• Scientific Name

  Tamonea macrophylla (D.Don) Krasser

• Description

  Flora Borinqueña Tamonea macrophylla Large-leaved Tamonea Family Melastomaceae Meadow-beauty Family Chitonia macrophylla D. Don, Memoirs of the Wernerian Society 4: 319. 1823. Diplochita serrulata De Candolle, Prodromus 3: 177. 1828. Miconia macrophylla Triana, Transactions of the Linnaean Society of London 28: 103. 1871. Tamonea macrophylla Krasser, in Engler and Prantl, Natuerlichen Pflanzenfamilien 37: 188. 1893. No popular names for this large-leaved, forest tree, with large clusters of white or pink flowers, have been recorded. The Spanish name Camasey, used for other trees and shrubs of its family, may, perhaps, have sometimes been associated with this one. It may attain a height of about 12 meters, but is usually smaller, and grows in mountain forests, or in hillside thickets, in wet or moist parts of Porto Rico, at middle and higher elevations. We have not observed it at any place lower than about 300 meters. The tree inhabits the Greater Antilles, also St. Croix, and Trinidad, and has a wide range in tropical continental America. Tamonea (a French Guiana name), a genus established by the French botanist Aublet, in 1775, in his pioneer work on the plants of French Guiana, consists of about 40 species of tropical American trees and shrubs, with opposite leaves, and large clusters of regular flowers borne at the ends of branches. The flowers have an oblong, scarcely toothed calyx, and 5 or 6, obovate petals; there are twice as many stamens as petals, their narrow, long anthers mostly curved; the ovary contains many ovules and the style is unbranched. The fruit is a many-seeded berry. Tamonea macrophylla (large-leaved) has stout, somewhat flattened, velvety twigs. The ovate, or elliptic, pointed, finely and closely toothed leaves are from 10 to 30 centimeters long, short-stalked, rather thin, the upper surface dark green, smooth, or nearly so, the underside whitish, and densely stellate-hairy. The velvety flower-clusters are as long as the leaves, or shorter, the individual flowers nearly, or quite stalkless; the calyx is about 7 millimeters long; the 6 petals, white, or pink, are from 6 to 8 millimeters long; the stamens have hairy filaments and long, violet anthers. The berries are nearly globular, about 6 millimeters in diameter. Another species, Tamonea guianensis, also inhabits Porto Rico woodlands and forests, and has a wide range in tropical America.