Quamoclit quamoclit (L.) Britton

• Title

  Quamoclit quamoclit (L.) Britton

• Authors

  Nathaniel Lord Britton, Frances W. Horne

• Scientific Name

  Quamoclit quamoclit (L.) Britton

• Description

  Flora Borinqueña Quamoclit Quamoclit Cambustera Cypress-vine Family Convolvulaceae Morning-glory Family Ipomoea Quamoclit Linnaeus. Species Plantarum 159. 1753. Quamoclit vulgaris Choisy, in De Candolle, Prodromus 9: 336. 1845. Quamoclit Quamoclit Britton, in Britton and Brown, Illustrated Flora 3: 22. 1898. Commonly grown as a garden plant, conspicuous and attractive by showy, scarlet, or rarely white flowers, and delicately finely divided leaves, and freely spontaneous from seed, this slender, annual vine is occasionally seen on banks, in thickets, and in waste or cultivated grounds in Porto Rico. It is widely distributed, mostly through cultivation, nearly throughout tropical and temperate America, and also in the Old World; its original home is not certainly determined, but recorded by Linnaeus from India. The English names Indian Pink and Indian Creeper, and Sweet William of the Barbados, are also used for it. Quamoclit (Greek name for a dwarf kidney bean, application obscure), a genus taken up by the German botanist Moench in 1794, from the writings of pre-Linnaean students, consists of about 10 species inhabiting warm and tropical regions, annual, twining vines with stalked, alternate leaves, and stalked, axillary flowers, borne solitary, or few in a cluster. The calyx is composed of 5, equal, thin, sepals; the tube of the salver-form corolla is longer than the spreading limb; the 5 stamens, and the compound style project beyond the corolla-tube; the 4-celled or 2-celled ovary contains 4 ovules. The capsular fruit is usually 4-celled and 4-seeded. Quamoclit Quamoclit is a smooth vine, from 3 to 6 meters long. The leaves, varying from 5 to 10 centimeters long, rarely longer, are pinnately parted into many segments less than 2 millimeters wide. The flowers are usually several together, sometimes solitary, on a long stalk, the stalks of the individual ones thickening in fruit, from 1 to 4 centimeters long; the blunt, usually minutely tipped sepals are from 4 to 6 millimeters long; the corolla is 3 or 4 centimeters long, its tube somewhat enlarged above, the nearly flat limb with 5, ovate lobes. The ovoid capsule, about 10 millimeters long, splits into 4 valves. The white-flowered race was observed on a roadside bank near Barceloneta. Another species, Quamoclit coccinea, is also illustrated in this work.