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36. Stonesia G. Taylor

Stonesia G. Taylor, Bull. Brit. Mus (Nat. Hist.) Bot. 1(3): 59 (1953); Cusset, Adansonia II, 13: 307--312 (1973), rev.

Roots crustose; stems simple or branched, short or elongate and then 10--40 cm long. Leaves repeatedly forked into linear segments or scale-like, when scale-like then often lobed, with 1 or 2 of the lobes prolonged into thread-like appendages. Spathellas subsessile, ± 2 mm long subtended by 2--6, usually lobed, scale-like leaves. Flowers inverted in unruptured spathella, either sessile on upper surface of creeping root, or along elongate stems, solitary or in clusters; pedicel 0.4--1 cm long in fruit; tepals 3, one each side of  andropodium base, the third between the two filaments; stamens 2, borne on an andropodium; pollen in dyads; ovaries 2-locular. Capsules broadly ellipsoidal; valves equal and persistent, each with 5 or 7 ribs, the ribs nearest the sutures shorter than others and not reaching ends of valves; stigmas linear. Four spp., W tropical Africa, confined to a small region in Guinea & Sierra Leone.

 

 

 

Subfam. Podostemoideae

Stonesia gracilis. A Crustose root bearing flowers and two elongate shoots bearing flowers (1 cm). B Flower (1 mm). C Capsule.

Cook & Rutishauser 2007

 
       
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