Entry for JUSSIAEA suffruticosa L. [family ONAGRACEAE]
Entry From
Flora of Tropical East Africa, page 1, (1953) Author: J. P. M. BRENAN
Notes
Micheli, sur les Onagrariées du Brésil (Arch. Sci. Bibl. Universelle) (1874), argued that J. octonervia Lam. should be a distinct species, a view followed more recently by Jonker (Fl. Suriname) and Cheesman (Fl. Trinidad and Tobago). I was tempted to accept it too, especially as var. sessiliflora is so abundantly distinct from the other African variants of J. suffruticosa. The specific characters assigned to J. octonervia by recent authors are inconstant, however, and both in America and Asia there are numerous very perplexing intermediates between subsp. suffruticosa and subsp. octonervia. The var. sessiliflora is the plant described as J. suffruticosa L. by Perrier de la Bâthie in Humbert, Not. Syst. 13: 147 (1947).J. suffruticosa in fact seems to be a species evolutionarily in full cry, so to speak, and would surely be an almost ideal subject for cytogenetical work in the tropics.In interpreting J. suffruticosa, I follow the reasonable view of Fawcett and Munz. Linnaeus conception of this was clearly a muddle, and there is no specimen in his herbarium. It is thus reasonable to typify J. suffruticosa by Linnaeus descriptive phrase, evidently derived from a plant he had seen, and by the habitat, India. These can hardly refer to any other plant but the present, though there is nothing actually to exclude J. peruviana L., which is unlikely to have been in India so early.
