Aegiphila martinicensis Jacq.

• Title

  Aegiphila martinicensis Jacq.

• Authors

  Nathaniel Lord Britton, Frances W. Horne

• Scientific Name

  Aegiphila martinicensis Jacq.

• Description

  Flora Borinqueña Aegiphila martinicensis Capaillo Family Verbenaceae Vervain Family Aegiphila martinicensis Jacquin, Observationum Botanicarium 2:3.1767. A shrub, or small tree, growing in woodlands and thickets, with broad leaves, and inconspicuous, white, or pale yellow, clustered flowers followed by attractive, small, round, orange fruits. It has wide distribution through the West Indies and tropical continental America. In Porto Rico it inhabits moist and wet parts of the eastern and northern districts, mostly at lower elevations, but locally ascending to about 400 meters. We have found no English name in use in Porto Rico. Aegiphila (Goat's friend, the foliage recorded as a favorite food of goats) a genus established by the Austrian botanist Jacquin in 1767, includes about 120 species of tropical American trees and shrubs, the one here illustrated typical, and the only one in Porto Rico. Their leaves are opposite and untoothed, their small, regular flowers in terminal and axillary clusters. The usually bell-shaped calyx enlarges and persists under the fruit; the corolla has a short or slender tube, and 4 or 5 equal lobes; there are 4, rarely 5, stamens borne on the corolla, and alternate with its lobes; the incompletely 4-celled ovary has 1 ovule in each cell and the style is 2-lobed. The small stone-fruits contain from 1 to 4 nutlets. Aegiphila martinicensis (first known botanically from Martinique) is usually a shrub from 1 to 3 meters high, sometimes a small tree, up to about 5 meters, its young twigs and the flower-clusters finely-hairy. The thin, pointed, oblong, elliptic, or broadly lance-shaped leaves are from 4 to 20 centimeters long, smooth, with stalks about 15 millimeters long, or shorter. The flowers are many, in terminal, or also axillary clusters; the narrowly bell-shaped calyx is at first about 2 millimeters long, with very short teeth, but enlarges to several times that size in ripening; the corolla has a tube 4 or 5 millimeters long, and a bluntly lobed limb about 3 millimeters broad. The orange, nearly globular, smooth fruits are from 8 to 10 millimeters in diameter.