Bramia monnieri (L.) Pennell

• Title

  Bramia monnieri (L.) Pennell

• Author(s)

  Nathaniel Lord Britton, Frances W. Horne

• Scientific Name

  Bramia monnieri (L.) Pennell

• Description

  Flora Borinqueña Bramia Monnieri Yerba de culebra Water Hyssop Family Scrophulariaceae Figwort Family Lysimachia Monnieri Linnaeus, Centuria Plantarum 2: 9. 1756. Gratiola Monnieri Linnaeus, Systema Naturae, edition 10, 851. 1759. Herpestis Monniera Humboldt, Bonpland and Kunth, Nova Genera et Species Plantarum 2: 366. 1818. Bramia Monnieri Drake, Flore de la Polynésia Française 142. 1892. Forming a dense, and often extensive, low green ground-cover on moist or wet soil, this small, smooth, creeping, fleshy herb, with pretty, bluish flowers, is distributed nearly all over tropical and subtropical America, ranging north to Bermuda, and Maryland, inhabiting also tropical parts of the Old World. In Porto Rico it is plentiful at low elevations, especially in subsaline soil, but extending up some of the rivers, and we observed it once along a limestone spring near Ciales; it grows also on the small islands Mona and Cayo Icacos. Bramia (from Brami, a Malabar name) is a genus established by the eminent French botanist Lamarck, in 1785; There are only a few species, natives of warm and tropical regions, only the one here illustrated inhabiting Porto Rico. They are low, perennial herbs, with blunt, opposite, small, punctate, palmately-veined leaves, and small stalked flowers, mostly solitary in the leaf-axils. The 2-bracted calyx is 5-parted, the upper segment the broadest; the nearly regular corolla has a short, cylindric tube and a nearly equally 5-lobed limb; there are 4, short stamens in 2 pairs; the 2-celled ovary contains many ovules, the style is slender, the stigma 2-lobed. The fruit is a small, many-seeded capsule, the seeds smooth. Bramia Monnieri (in honor of Louis Guillaume Le Monnier, 1717-1799, Professor in Paris), is perennial, with a creeping stem from 10 to 50 centimeters long, which strikes roots at the nodes. The spatulate or obovate, stalkless leaves, from 6 to 20 millimeters long, are toothless, or minutely toothed. The flowers, mostly solitary in alternate axils, have stalks which become longer than the leaves, in fruit; the upper is 8 to 10 millimeters broad; the stamens are nearly equal. The ovoid, pointed capsule is shorter than the calyx.