Psychotria poeppigiana: Hot Lips of the Coffee Family

Note: This plant was identified faster than I would have believed possible by Nuytsia (blog, Flickr photos), based on his examination of the images I posted at Flickr. Thanks, Nuytsia!

I found this plant growing in the understory of a planted pine forest. I don’t know whether it strictly fits in the “neotropical savanna” category, but I found it so curious that I wanted to identify it. The red parts reminded me of the wax lips we used to be able to buy as children.

Recently, a visiting botanist reminded me of the value of learning plant families well. If you can get at the family, then you have a much better chance of learning the genus and species. This is a viewpoint I learned in my very first botany book, Botany in a Day, by Thomas Elpel, but I had drifted away from that approach, mostly because I was finding a habitat-organized book quite useful. If it didn’t serve me, though, I was basically stumbling around with each new plant, trying to find pictures in books or images on the web to steer me in the right direction.

So, this time, I’m taking the family point of view to work through the features of this plant. Psychotria poeppigiana, commonly known as “Hot Lips,” is a member of Rubiaceae, the coffee family.

Before I start on the plant, I always like to look at the name. Rubia, the root of the family name, comes from the Latin “ruber,” referring to the red dye that comes from the root of plants in the genus Rubia. After I’ve spent a little time with the Family, I’ll look at the genus and species names.

The Rubiaceae (13,000 species) are the fourth largest family of flowering plants after the Asteraceae (Aster Family – 21,000 species), Orchidaceae (Orchid Family-17,500 species) and Fabaceae (Bean and Pea Family – 16,500 species). The 13,000 or so Rubiaceae species are grouped into about 650 genera.

The features that nearly all 13,000 Rubiceae species have in common are these: opposite leaves with no teeth or lobes on the edges and…here it becomes really botanical and I’ll break this down…interpetiolar stipules. (A Field Guide to the Families and Genera of Woody Plants of Northwest South America, by Alwyn H. Gentry)

First, here are the opposite leaves with entire margins (no teeth or lobes on the edges):

Second – the stipules. These are small appendages or outgrowths found near the base of the leaf stalk, or petiole. Stipules may be between the petiole bases (interpetiolar) or between the petiole and the stem (intrapetiolar). Make sense? Not all plants have stipules, but the ones found in Rubiaceae are found between the petiole bases, which, remember, are on opposite sides of the stem.

Since this is such an important characteristic of the family, I went back to the plant to shoot a picture of the stipules.

Another feature of Rubiceae is that the flowers are radially symmetrical, as in a daisy or in a starfish. In animals, we’re used to bilateral symmetry – the left side is a mirror image of the right side. But in some animals such as jellyfish and starfish we see radial symmetry, in which pie-shaped wedges are like each other. In plants, we see radial symmetry more often than we see bilateral symmetry. A tulip is an example of radial symmetry. A pea flower is an example of bilateral symmetry.

In this plant, the flowers are so small and numerous that I could not document their symmetry. Remembering that the coffee plant is a Rubiceae, I went here for an illustration of the flowers. They’re small and a little hard to see, but they have 5 petals, an odd number, which itself shows the flowers could not be bilaterally symmetrical.

Once we’ve shown the plant is a member of Rubiceae, we need to figure out what makes it a Psychotria.

 

First, about the name, Psychotria. According to Dave’s Botanary, it means “Life, referring to medicinal qualities of some species.” Perhaps the best known species of Psychotria used for medicinal purposes is Psychotria ipecacuanha, which has been used to treat amoebic dysentery. Psychotria poeppigiana itself has been said to have medicinal properties in Belize and in the Guianas.

Regarding the species name, poeppigiana, Dave’s Botany did not have an entry, but it did suggest one for “poeppigii,” which is named for Eduard Friedrich Poeppig, 19th century German explorer and botanist. Knowing the meaning of Psychotria will probably help me remember it, but since I had never heard of Poeppig and the references to him in a google search are scanty, I can imagine that I’ll have a harder time remembering that name. I may just think of it as Poppy Guiana. Having no idea of the proper pronunciation lets me call it what I want!

Now about the plant itself. A useful introduction to the Rubiceae is from the National Botanic Garden of Belgium. Here’s where I learned that the flowers in one particular group of Rubiceae are protected by a set of bracts, an involucre. “The involucre is coloured a brilliant red and helps the plant to attract pollinators. In fruit stage, the red involucre contrasts strongly with the blue berries, attracting dispersers.” So those Hot Lips are an involucre, eh, bracts that attract pollinators and later, dispersers. I’m sure there’s a comment to be made here, but I won’t.

A New South Wales site has a key to the Rubiceae family, which allows one to get down to the genus level. From that key, I picked the characteristics of Psychotria that are useful to me in the field:

1. Woody plant, usually more than 1 m high

2. Flowers terminal or terminal and axillary in upper leaf axils, usually united into terminal inflorescences; ovules attached at base of ovary

No mention in this key of those conspicuous bracts, nor even of the other feature that struck me when first looking closely at the plant – the “hairy” nature of every visible part of the plant – stems, leaves, bracts. I guess plants with hairs occur in too many families to be an identifying characteristic.

So, without the hot lips bloom, all I’d be able to say about this plant is that it is a member of the Rubiceae family. I’m learning to be happy going that far, though. Knowing that the plant is in the coffee family offers a good deal of satisfaction. Discovering that the gardenia, the ixora, and the medicinal plant noni (the last is new to me since coming to Panama) all are members of this family pleases me no end. Just today I was in a plant nursery in San Pablo and saw rows of young ixora plants. I ran over and looked:

opposite leaves with no teeth or lobes (check!)

interpetiolar stipules (check!)

For a while, I’m sure, I’ll be running over to plants with those two characteristics in mind and asking the plant, “Are you related to Hot Lips of the Coffee Family?”