Sapota achras Mill.

• Title

  Sapota achras Mill.

• Authors

  Nathaniel Lord Britton, Frances W. Horne

• Scientific Name

  Sapota achras Mill.

• Description

  Flora Borinqueña Sapota Achras Nispero Sapodilla Family Sapotaceae Sapodilla Family Sapota Achras Miller, Gardeners Dictionary, edition 8, no. 1. 1768. This valuable tree, with milky sap, bearing important edible fruit, and producing hard and durable, light red wood, used for furniture and in cabinet work, and often planted for shade, is frequent on hillsides and in woodlands in Porto Rico, mostly at lower elevations. Whether it is indigenous here, or long ago introduced, we are unable to determine, but we regard it as native in the lack of information to the contrary. The tree is distributed nearly all over the West Indies and continental tropical America. Mesple and Naseberry are other popular names. The fruit varies considerably in size and in flavor. The genus Sapota (aboriginal West Indian name) taken up by Miller in 1768, from the writings of his predecessor Plumier, is monotypic, the species here illustrated being the only one known. Sapota Achras (the Greek name of a wild pear tree) may, under favorable conditions reach a height of about 20 meters, with a trunk nearly a meter in diameter, the bark dark brown, the twigs rather stout. The alternate, untoothed, slender-stalked, rather thick leaves, mostly clustered near the ends of the twigs, are nearly smooth, oblong to elliptic, blunt, from 5 to 12 centimeters long. The flowers are borne axillary among the leaves, on brownish-hairy stalks about as long as the leaf-stalks, or shorter. The usually 6 sepals, in 2 series, are from 8 to 10 millimeters long; the nearly urn-shaped, white, usually 6-lobed corolla is scarcely longer than the hairy sepals; the stamens, as many as the corolla-lobes, alternate with longer staminodes; the ovary is 10-celled, or 12-celled, with 1 ovule in each cell, the style is slender, the stigma small. The fruit is a large, brown, rough-skinned berry, globose, or ovoid, from 3 to 8 centimeters in diameter, its sweet, brownish flesh milky; the usually several, black, shining seeds are flattened, about 2 centimeters long, with a white scar on the inner edge.