Strychnos spinosa

Plant Characteristics

Habit		tree
Height:	⇕	20 ft"ft" can not be assigned to a declared number type with value 20.
Width:	⇔	12 ft"ft" can not be assigned to a declared number type with value 12.
Lifespan:	⌛	perennial
Bloom:	❀	early spring, mid spring, late spring

Cultivation

Exposure:	☼	sun
Features:	✓	flowers, edible, fruit
USDA Zones:		10 to 12
Flower features:	❀	white

Scientific Names

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Strychnos spinosa is a tree indigenous to tropical and subtropical Africa. It produces juicy, sweet-sour, yellow fruits, containing numerous hard brown seeds. Greenish-white flowers grow in dense heads at the ends of branches (Sep-Feb/Spring - summer). The fruit tend to appear only after good rains. The smooth, hard fruit are large and green, ripen to yellow color. Inside the fruit are tightly packed seeds surrounded by a fleshy, edible covering.

Common names : Spiny Monkey-orange/Green Monkey Orange (English) Doringklapper (Afrikaans) Morapa (NS) umKwakwa (Swaziland) Nsala (Tswana) Mutamba (Shona) Maboque (Angola)

This tree can be found growing singly in well-drained soils. It is capable of growing on semi-arid and arid lands.

Read about Strychnos spinosa in the Standard Cyclopedia of Horticulture

Strychnos spinosa, Lam. Low tree: branchlets slender, armed with pungent spines from the nodes: lvs. obovate or suborbicular, 5-nerved from near the base, glabrous, subcoriaceous: cymes short, dense, terminal, very compound: fls. greenish; calyx-tube very short, segms. linear; corolla-tube short, campanulate, the lobes usually 5, ovate: fr. the size and color of an orange, the shell leathery, the pulp abundant and edible; seeds large. Trop. and S. Afr., Madagascar, and Seychelles. — A promising fr. intro. into the S. U.S. CH The above text is from the Standard Cyclopedia of Horticulture. It may be out of date, but still contains valuable and interesting information which can be incorporated into the remainder of the article. Click on "Collapse" in the header to hide this text.

Cultivation

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External links

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