Citronella mucronata
Credits
Article from Bean's Trees and Shrubs Hardy in the British Isles
Recommended citation
'Citronella mucronata' from the website Trees and Shrubs Online (treesandshrubsonline.
Synonyms
- Villaresia mucronata Ruiz & Pav.
Other taxa in genus
Editorial Note
The text below combines and adapts the entries for this species in Bean (1981) and Clarke (1988), who treated it under the names Villaresia mucronata and Citronella mucronata respectively.
Citrus chilensis Molina (1782) was mistakenly treated as a synonym by Miers (1862). Miers’ synonymy was noted as questionable by Bean, Clarke (1988) enlarging on the point without rejecting the name, even though Howard (1940) had demonstrated convincingly that Molina was describing a quite different plant (with different fruits, yellow wood, and spiny stems). Some authorities (e.g. POWO 23/6/2025) continue to cite in synonymy Molina’s name and subsequent names based on it – Villaresia chilensis (Molina) Stuntz and Citronella chilensis (Molina) R.A.Howard ex Muñoz.
The accepted name is based on Villaresia mucronata Ruiz & Pav. (1802), though Ruiz and Pavon had earlier applied the name Villaresia to a plant apparently belonging to the Celastraceae (the type – or types – were lost at an early date, perhaps shipwrecked (Howard 1940)). Regarding Villaresia as therefore unavailable in Icacinaceae, Don published the new genus Citronella (1832) to accommodate this species.
An evergreen tree up to 60 ft high; young shoots downy, ribbed. Leaves alternate, of hard leathery texture like those of a holly, ovate or oblong, pointed, 11⁄2 to 31⁄2 in. long, 3⁄4 to 2 in. wide, entire on the flowering shoots of adult trees, spiny, much larger, and more rounded at the base on young ones, glabrous and dark glossy green; stalk 1⁄8 to 1⁄4 in. long, downy. Flowers fragrant, 3⁄8 in. wide, yellowish white and densely crowded in a cluster of panicles, each 1 to 2 in. long and produced in the terminal leaf-axils and at the end of the shoot in June. The individual flower, which has its various parts in fives, is almost stalkless, but the main and secondary flower-stalks are clothed with brown down. Fruit an egg-shaped drupe 2⁄3 in. long, containing one fleshy seed surrounded by a hard shell. Bot. Mag., t. 8376.
A native of central Chile, rare in the wild. It was introduced by the Hon. W. Fox-Strangways about 1840 to the garden at Abbotsbury in Dorset, where a tree of this species planted around 1840 was about 60 ft high in 1911 [it no longer existed by 1988]. The only other sizeable example in the open air grows in the National Botanic Garden at Glasnevin, Eire. It measured 25 × 2 ft in 1974. This tree, even when some seventy years old, still bore the spiny foliage characteristic of young trees and suckers, and this is true of the present tree in the garden, which measures 26 × 1 ft 8 in. at 21⁄2 ft. It has been propagated, and plants distributed to a number of collections. The example in the National Botanic Garden, Glasnevin, Eire, measureD 23 × 41⁄4 ft in 1980.
The explanation for the synonym C. chilensis is that in 1782 Molina gave a short description of a Chilean plant which he named Citrus chilensis. If this was in fact the present species, as some botanists believe, the epithet chilensis would be the correct one to use.