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.
|
|
