CALLIANDRA,
THE BEAUTIFUL-STAMEN BUSH
 Maybe
the most eye-catching plant flowering along the road to town right now is the shrub shown
at the right.
Averaging ten to fifteen feet tall, that's the genus CALLIANDRA, probably the species
HOUSTONIANA. One local name for it is Barba de Chiva, which mean's Goat's Beard,
but lots of plants go by that name. Those red, slender bristles poking nearly three inches
from the brown, leathery calyxes and corollas are the stamens' filaments. You can see that
each filament is tipped with a tiny, yellow, pollen-producing anther. This is one flower
depending on its stamens' red filaments to draw the attention of pollinators, not colorful
corollas the way it is in most flowers.
North Americans might say that both the twice-compound, ferny leaves and the red,
powder-puff-like flowers look a lot like the pretty backyard tree up there often called
Mimosa or Silk-tree, Albizia julibrissin, which is native from Iran to Japan.
It's true that the two species are closely related, both belonging to the same subfamily
of the huge and important Bean Family. However, botanists assign them to different genera
largely on the basis that Calliandra's fruits split open when they're mature --
they're "dehiscent" -- while Albizia fruits don't.
The genus name Calliandra is a good one, based on the Greek root calli
for beautiful, and andro for male, pertaining to the beautiful male stamens. We
also find the root calli in "calligraphy" (beautiful graphics), and andro
in "androgynous."
This is a common roadside weed throughout most of humid Mexico. My Las Plantas
Medicinales de Mexico reports that people in Sinaloa chew the shrub's bark to toughen
their gums. I'd be careful using the plant for that purpose, however, since the root bark
contains an alkaloid said to paralyze the heart so that it's unable to contract -- hinders
its systolic action. |