Guettarda scabra (L.) Lam.

• Title

  Guettarda scabra (L.) Lam.

• Authors

  Nathaniel Lord Britton, Frances W. Horne

• Scientific Name

  Guettarda scabra (L.) Vent.

• Description

  Flora Borinqueña Guettarda scabra Palo de cucubano Velvet-berry Family Rubiaceae Madder Family Matthiola scabra Linnaeus, Species Plantarum 1192. 1753. Guettarda scabra Lamarck, Tableaux Encyclopédie et Méthodique 2:218.1810 The upper side of the broad, thick leaves of this shrub or small tree are characteristically rough, and almost always distinguish it from related plants of its family in the West Indies; this feature is not absolutely constant, however, for plants bearing nearly smooth leaves have rarely been observed. In Porto Rico it grows at lower and middle elevations in moist or wet districts, ascending to at least 400 meters on the mainland, and on Vieques; it is distributed nearly throughout the West Indies, north to southern Florida, and is recorded as found in Central America. The Linnaean genus Guettarda, commemorating Jean Etienne Guettard, a French botanist, who lived from 1715 to 1786, includes 60 or more species of trees and shrubs, mostly natives of tropical America, one in Polynesia and the East Indies. They have opposite leaves, and clustered, rarely solitary flowers borne in the leaf-axils. The short tube of the calyx is attached to the ovary, its limb without teeth, or irregularly toothed; the corolla is salverform, with a long tube and from 4 to 9, blunt lobes; the very short stamens are borne on the tube of the corolla, and as many as its lobes; the ovary is from 4-celled to 9-celled, with a solitary ovule in each cell; the style is very slender, the stigma rounded or 2-lobed. The somewhat fleshy fruits are few-seeded, and fall away without opening. Guettarda scabra (rough) may form a tree about 10 meters high, usually lower, commonly shrubby, its twigs velvety-hairy. The leaves are elliptic, ovate, or broadest above the middle, leathery in texture, blunt or short-tipped, from 3 to 15 centimeters long, usually very rough on the upper side, hairy and densely netted-veined beneath, their hairy stalks from 5 to 20 millimeters long. The fragrant, white flowers are few together, the clusters on a stalk from 2 to 10 centimeters long; the calyx is about 3 millimeters long, the appressed-hairy corolla from 1.5 to 2 centimeters long, with oblong lobes much shorter than the tube. The nearly globular fruit is velvety-hairy, from 4 to 6 millimeters in diameter. Six other species of the genus inhabit Porto Rico.