Angelonia salicariifolia Benth.

• Title

  Angelonia salicariifolia Benth.

• Authors

  Nathaniel Lord Britton, Frances W. Horne

• Scientific Name

  Angelonia salicariifolia Benth.

• Description

  Flora Borinqueña Angelonia salicariaefolia Angelon Family Scrophulariaceae Figwort Family Angelonia salicariaefolia Humboldt, Plantae Aequinoctiales 2: 92. 1809. Among the native, wild, herbaceous plants of Porto Rico, Angelon is one of the most conspicuous and attractive by its large, blue flowers, borne in long clusters, inhabiting banks, in moist places, and sometimes seen on roadsides, and often grown in flower-gardens. In the West Indies it grows also in Santo Domingo and Trinidad; on the South American continent in Venezuela and Colombia, first found by Humboldt at Caracas. Angelonia (from Angelon, the Venezuelan name) was established as a genus, with the species here illustrated typical, by Humboldt, in the elegant folio volumes describing and illustrating plants of equatorial America, published in 1809. There are about 25 species now known, all natives of tropical America, all herbs with opposite leaves, or the upper leaves alternate. The blue or violet flowers are showy, borne in long clusters at the ends of the stem and branches, or, in some species, solitary in the leaf -axils ; the calyx is 5-cleft, or 5-parted; the widely spreading corolla is irregularly 5-lobed, the 2 posterior lobes external in the bud, the anterior lobes with a horn-like appendage at the base; the short tube of the corolla is saccate anteriorly; there are 4, short stamens in 2 pairs; the 2-celled ovary contains many ovules, the style is short, the stigma nearly round. The fruit is a 2-valved capsule, containing small, pitted seeds. Angelonia salicariaefolia (leaves resembling those of Salicaria) is upright, often branched, glandular-hairy and viscid, about 0.6 meter high, or lower. Its leaves are lance-shaped, or oblong, nearly stalkless, pointed, toothed, from 3 to 7 centimeters long, or the upper ones much shorter. She flowers form long, terminal clusters, intermixed with small leaves (bracts); their stalks are about as long- as the bracts, or longer, and recurve as the fruit ripens; the oblique calyx is 3 or 4 millimeters long; the corolla is from 1.5 to 2 centimeters broad, its oblong lobes rounded. The capsular fruit is about 6 millimeters in diameter. Our illustration was first published in Addisonia, plate 396, June, 1927. Angelonia angustifolia, with narrower, scarcely toothed leaves, is also grown in flower gardens, not known to be wild in Porto Rico, but widely distributed in other West Indian islands, and in tropical continental America.