\nSoft-wooded, short-lived shrubs up to ca. 1 m tall, straggly with age, all parts densely pubescent with erect, simple or glandular hairs up to 1 mm long. Leaves simple, alternate, usually geminate, 1 larger than the other, ovate-acuminate, often 6 cm long, 4 cm wide, margins entire or rarely with a few blunt lobes, apex acuminate, base cordate, petioles 2 to 3 cm long. Flowers perfect, actinomorphic, solitary in the leaf axils, pedicellate; calyx connate in lower, 5-lobed, veins often prominent, the lobes acumunate-triangular, ca. 1 cm long, distinct at apex; corolla yellow with well-defined purplish brown spots at base, 15 to 20 mm in diameter, the limb rotate or shallowly 10-lobed, the tube swollen into shallow nectary pouches between the filaments, densely pubescent with pale yellowish dendritic hairs below the spots and around the nectaries; style 5 to 7 mm long. Berries pale yellow, drying pale brown, aromatic, succulent, globose, 1.5 to 2 cm in diameter, enclosed in the inflated calyx 3 to 3.5 cm long. Seeds numerous, pale brown, discoid, 1.75 to 2 mm long, minutely shallowly reticulate, embryo curved, endosperm present (Wagner et al. 1999, in PIER 2002).\n
Seeds creamy white to yellowish and very small (less than 2 mm in diameter); ovoid, compressed; testa slightly pitted (PIER Undated). \n
Principal source:
Compiler: IUCN SSC Invasive Species Specialist Group (ISSG) with support from the EU-funded South Atlantic Invasive Species project, coordinated by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB)
Review:
Publication date: 2010-08-16
Recommended citation: Global Invasive Species Database (2024) Species profile: Physalis peruviana. Downloaded from http://iucngisd.org/gisd/species.php?sc=1461 on 21-11-2024.