Trees of Tropical Asia Lamiales small.pdf - XTBG-Botany

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Spathodea Spethodea
Spathodea capanulata, the African tulip tree, cultivated widely, here in the Philippines; note the laminar glands at the leafle base,
characteristic of the family.
ASTERIDS (LAMIIDS): LAMIALES
Cyrtandra
GESNERIACEAE
NAME: From the genus Gesneria, a genus of tropical
herbs, the name of which commemorates Swiss naturalist
Conrad Gessner, d. 1565, author of Historiae Animalium.
They are most commonly known in English as the
African Violet family.
OVERVIEW: The gesneriads are a large family of herbs
and lianas with about 150 genera and 3200 species. They
share with other Lamiales opposite sometimes toothed
leaves and an asymmetric lipped flower. They differ in
an inflorescence of paired flowers .The ovary varies from
superior to half-inferior to inferior while the fruit is either
a dry dehiscent capsule or a fleshy berry, typically
with a great many seeds. The traditional distinction with
Scrophulariaceae is a unilocular ovary with parietal placentation
rather than a bilocular ovary and axile placentation.
CYRTANDRA. [Greek, in reference to the curved
stamens.] Maybe 500 or more species, with centers of
species richness from Borneo north and eastward to Hawaii
including secondarily woody species. About 16 or so
on Kinabalu, maybe five of which could be called small
trees, reaching two m or so in height and two cm DBH;
Malaya claims about 13 species, maybe three as shrubs,
MERRILL loc. cit. (as updated by Leonardo Co) enumerates
over 100 species for the Philippines, of which
maybe 10 to 15 species reach 1-3 cm DBH. Most of the
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Cyrtandra. The characteristic features of the genus are illustrated
here by the Philippine endemic, C. oblongata, from the forest
plot in Palanan, Isabela, Philippines. The stem barely reaches 2
cm DBH, the paired leaves are clustered at the top of the single
main axis; the flowers are large and paired from the leaf axil.
(Photographs © Leonardo L. Co.)
shrubs are of the schopfbaum habit - a single upright stem
with a dense rosette of opposite leaves, often collecting
leaf litter in the small canopy.