Picrasma
Sponsor
Kindly sponsored by
Peter Hoffmann
Credits
Owen Johnson (2024)
Recommended citation
Johnson, O. (2024), 'Picrasma' from the website Trees and Shrubs Online (treesandshrubsonline.
Family
- Simaroubaceae
Common Names
- Bitterwoods
A genus of about 12 species of tree, evergreen or deciduous. Bark bitter; twigs with a central pith. Leaves alternate, pinnate, with more or less opposite leaflets plus one terminal leaflet. Flowers small, in axillary cymose panicles. Plants usually dioecious; sepals, petals and stamens 4 or 5. Fruit a berry-like druparium, with a dry flesh. (Peng & Wayt Thomas 2008).
Like the closely related Ailanthus – which differs in its flowerheads which can tip the branches, and its seeds which are ‘keys’, with a dry wing – Picrasma is a largely tropical genus whose distribution extends from southern Brazil to Mexico, and from New Guinea to India. Again like Ailanthus, just one fully hardy species extends northwards across China; this tree, P. quassioides (D. Don) Benn., in fact enjoys one of the broadest natural ranges of any east Asian plant, from Kashmir and Sri Lanka to Korea and Japan. Carl Ludwig Blume’s name for the genus, which he published in 1825 for the tropical tree P. javanica, derives from the Greek picrasmos (‘bitterness’) and describes the characteristic bitter taste of the quassinoids which imbue these trees (Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew 2024; Peng & Wayt Thomas 2008).
One other Picrasma species, P. chinensis P.Y. Chen, was described in 1983 from mountain forests in the far south of China, to an altitude of 1400 m (Peng & Wayt Thomas 2008); it consequently might prove hardy in mildest parts of our area, but does not yet seem to have been introduced.
