Justicia periplocifolia Jacq.

• Title

  Justicia periplocifolia Jacq.

• Authors

  Nathaniel Lord Britton, Frances W. Horne

• Scientific Name

  Justicia periplocifolia Jacq.

• Description

  Flora Borinqueña Justicia periplocifolia Various-leaved Justicia Family Acanthaceae Acanthus Family Justicia periplocifolia Jacquin, Collecteana 5: supplement 5. 1796. Justicia vulgaris Bertero: Schultes. Mantissa 1: 135. 1822. Adhatoda reflexiflora [Rees], in De Candolle, Prodromus 11: 398. 1847. A shrub, with rather large, purple flowers, occasional in thickets, woodlands, and on hillsides at lower and middle elevations in Porto Rico, ascending to about 300 meters, remarkable for difference in the shape of its leaves, varying, on the same or different plants, from narrow, to quite broad. The widest-leaved plants grow in moist or wet districts, the narowest mostly where the rainfall is low. It grows also on the small islands Mona, Vieques and Culebra, ranges eastward through the Virgin Islands to St. Martin, westward into Santo Domingo and Haiti, and occurs also in Mexico and Venezuela. No popular names are recorded. An account of the genus Justicia may be found with our description of Justicia sessilis. Justicia periplocifolia (name from the resemblence of some of its leaf-forms to those of Periploca, of the Milkweed Family) is a shrub about 1.5 meters high, or lower, usually branched, smooth, or minutely hairy. Its thin, long-pointed leaves vary from very narrowly lance-shaped to ovate, from 5 to 12 centimeters long, and from 0.5 to 4 centimeters wide, with stalks about 1.5 centimeters long, or shorter. The flowers form terminal clusters, or are, sometimes, solitary in the axils; the narrowly lance-shaped, finely hairy calyx-segments are from 7 to 10 millimeters long, with a tube somewhat longer than the 2-lipped limb. The flattened, densely and finely hairy, tipped capsule is about 10 millimeters long.