Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Shrubs up to 2 m tall, armed with strong, straight or slightly recurved, flattened prickles up to 12 mm long, base up to 6 mm wide, ferruginous on younger shoots.

Stems: Stems strongly winged from the decurrent bases of the leaves, wings leafy, 2–15 mm wide.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Alternate. Blades ovate juvenile leaves up to 30 cm long and 28 cm wide, later leaves ovate in outline, ca. 15 cm long and 10 cm wide, lobes 2–4 cm long, sinuses rounded. Apex acute. Base truncate to subcordate, oblique and continued down the petiole as a leafy wing. Surfaces densely pubescent with stellate hairs on stems and upper and lower surfaces along veins, with lower surfaces paler than upper surface. Margins with 2–4 triangular lobes sinuses cut 1/5 to mid–vein. Petioles 2–8 cm long. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in unarmed, racemose cymes up to 10 cm long, extra-axillary, peduncle to first flower 1.5–2.5 cm long. Flowers bisexual (perfect), actinomorphic; pedicels ca. 1 cm long. Calyx tube 2–3 mm long, the lobes ovate–lanceolate, 7–10 mm long. Corolla stellate, deeply divided, the lobes lanceolate, 10–15 mm long, 5–8 mm wide, densely pubescent externally. Stamens equal, inserted near base of corolla tube; filaments 1–3 mm long; anthers lanceolate, 5–7 mm long, opening by apical pores. Ovary superior, globose, densely pubescent; style 1, erect, 9–11 mm long, exceeding anthers, pubescent in lower part; stigma terminal.

Fruit: Berries yellowish; globose; 1.2–2 cm in diameter; persistently pubescent; pedicels 1–2 cm long; calyx not much enlarged; reflexed. Seeds numerous; brown; compressed; sub–reniform; ca. 1.4 mm long; foveolate.

Ploidy: 2n = 24

Habitat: Guava-infested cattle pastures.

Elevation Range: ca. 230 m.