Cestrum laurifolium L'Her.

• Title

  Cestrum laurifolium L'Her.

• Authors

  Nathaniel Lord Britton, Frances W. Horne

• Scientific Name

  Cestrum laurifolium L'Hér.

• Description

  Flora Borinqueña Cestrum laurifolium Galan del monte Laurel-leaved Cestrum Family Solanaceae Potato Family Cestrum laurifolium L'Héritier, Stirpes Novae aet minus Cognitae 4:69.1788 Readily known from shining, thick leaves, yellowish flowers, and purple-black berries, this is a common shrub in moist or wet parts of Porto Rico and Vieques Island, reaching from sea-level to middle altitudes, and grows nearly throughout the West Indies, except Jamaica and the Bahamas, various in form and size of leaves and of flowers. The French botanist, L'Héritier, who first described and illustrated it in his monumental folio volumes, knew it from a cultivated plant in a French garden, and from incomplete accounts by previous authors. Cestrum (Greek, a hammer, referring to the shape of the filaments in the flowers of some species) is a Linnaean genus of about 150 species of tropical American shrubs and trees; in the Porto Rico flora 5 are represented, of which 2 are illustrated in this work. Cestrum nocturnum called Dama de noche and Lady-of-the-night, commonly grown in gardens, with slender, yellowish flowers opening in the evening, is the typical species; it is occasionally seen escaped from cultivation. They have alternate, untoothed leaves, and mostly yellow or white, clustered flowers. The calyx is 5-toothed, or 5-lobed; the corolla is salverform, or funnel-form, with a slender tube and 5, rarely 4, spreading lobes; the 5 stamens are borne on the corolla-tube, the slender filaments with a tooth-like appendage in some species, whence the generic name; the ovary is 2-celled, containing few ovules, the style very slender, the stigma dilated, sometimes 2-lobed. The fruits are small berries, the oblong seeds smooth. Cestrum laurifolium (laurel-leaved) is an evergreen, smooth, shrub from 1 to 4 meters high. The leaves are oblong-elliptic, or sometimes widest above the middle, pointed or blunt, from 5 to 17 centimeters long, lustrous above, their slender stalks from 4 to 15 millimeters long. The flowers are few together in small, axillary clusters much shorter than the leaves; the calyx is about 2 millimeters long, narrowly bell-shaped at first, but broadening in fruit, its teeth short, fringed with minute hairs; the yellow, or greenish-yellow corolla is from 10 to 17 millimeters long, its blunt lobes about one-fourth as long as the tube; the filaments bear a tooth-like appendage. The ellipsoid, or nearly globular berries are from 7 to 10 millimeters long. Our illustration was first published in Addisonia, plate 501, September, 1930.