Addisonia 25 



(Plate 133) 



HELIOTROPIUM POLYPHYLLUM 

 White Heliotrope 



Native oj southern Florida and tropical America 



Family HeliotropiacEae; Heliotrope Family 



Heliotropium polyphyllum Lehm. Neue Schr. Nat. Ges. Halle 3:9. 1817. 

 Schleidenia polyphylla Fresen. in Mart. Fl. Bras. 8^- 36. 1857. 



Plants a yard tall or less, usually erect, the stem simple below 

 the inflorescence or branched at the base and throughout, with the 

 branches ascending or partly decumbent, strigose, leafy, with 

 ultimately brown or reddish thin bark exfoliating in age. The 

 leaves are alternate, spreading or ascending, rather close together, 

 sometimes approximate, mostly one half to one inch long. The 

 blades are linear to narrowly elliptic, or sometimes slightly broad- 

 ened upward, short-petioled, acute or short-acuminate, finely 

 strigose, often more copiously so than the stem and branches, 

 entire, commonly slightly revolute. The flowers, borne in scorpioid 

 elongating racemes which terminate the stem and the branches, 

 are crowded near the tip of the rachis. The bracts subtending the 

 flowers are ovate, oval, or elliptic, less than half an inch long. 

 The flower-stalks are short and stout. The calyx is pubescent like 

 the leaves, with a turbinate to broadly campanulate tube and five 

 lobes. The lobes are longer than the tube and various in size 

 and shape; the two outer are ovate or ovate-lanceolate, acute, the 

 three inner rather shorter than the outer, lanceolate, acute or short- 

 acuminate. The corolla is mainly white, finely pubescent without; 

 the tube is shorter than the calyx, more or less swollen at the 

 middle; the limb is five-lobed and pentagonal in outline, usually 

 three eighths of an inch wide, greenish at the center where the 

 throat is partly closed by retrorse appendages with deltoid lobes, 

 these apparently ovate by the inrolling of the margins, about as 

 long as the body of the limb. The five stamens are included in the 

 corolla-tube, with the filaments adnate to the corolla-tube for the 

 greater part of their length, the free portion short but slender. 

 The anthers are conic-lanceolate, about an eighteenth of an inch 

 long. The gynoecium is included in the corolla-tube. The ovary is 

 seated in a short disk and surmounted by a cylindric style. The 

 stigma is annular and surmounted by a conic, somewhat two-lobed 

 appendage. The fruit is a depressed globose-ovoid obscurely 

 four-sided nut, minutely pubescent, with a cavity at the apex where 

 the style was attached. 



There are three conspicuous heliotropes in southern Florida, two 

 of them with yellow flowers and one with white. One of the yellow- 



