Corchorus hirsutus L.

• Title

  Corchorus hirsutus L.

• Authors

  Nathaniel Lord Britton, Frances W. Horne

• Scientific Name

  Corchorus hirsutus L.

• Description

  Flora Borinqueña Corchorus hirsutus Malvavisco peludo Jack-switch Family Tiliaceae Linden Family Corchorus hirsutus Linnaeus, Species Plantarum 530. 1755. This is a characteristic, scurfy-velvety shrub, upright, or when growing on rocks, sometimes nearly prostrate, with small, toothed leaves, and small, yellow, or pink flowers in clusters opposite the leaves. It is distributed nearly throughout tropical America, ranging north into Mexico; in Porto Rico it inhabits sandy and rocky soil at lower elevations along and near the coasts, most abundant in the dry, southern districts, locally extending inland, and grows also on the small islands Desecheo, Mona, Cayo Muertos, Cayo Icacos and Vieques. Corchorus (a Greek name for some bitter plant) a genus accepted by Linnaeus from the writings of his eminent French predecessor, Pitton de Tournefort, consists of some 40 species of herbs and shrubs, tropical and subtropical in distribution. Their leaves are alternate, and toothed, their yellow flowers axillary, or opposite the leaves, clustered, or solitary. There are 5, rarely 4, sepals and petals; the stamens are twice as many as the petals, or more numerous, with very slender filaments; the ovary has from 2 to 5 cells, the ovules numerous; the styles are united, the stigma expanded and wavy-margined. The fruit is a many-seeded capsule. Corchorus hirsutus (hirsute, but the name is not definitive) may become about 2 meters high, but is usually lower, and is pale scurfy-velvety nearly all over, its short-stalked, ovate to lance-shaped, mostly blunt leaves are from 2 to 6 centimeters long, and bluntly toothed. The flowers are few together, in short-stalked clusters, the sepals 5 or 6 millimeters long, the obovate, yellow or pink petals about as long. The oblong, densely woolly, 4-celled, capsules, about 6 millimeters thick, are borne on curved stalks of about their length. Four other species of Corchorus inhabit Porto Rico.