Blighia

Plant Characteristics

Habit		tree
Height:	⇕	10 m"m" can not be assigned to a declared number type with value 10. to 20 m"m" can not be assigned to a declared number type with value 20.
Poisonous:	☠	apart from aril, the fruit is poisonous

Cultivation

Features:	✓	evergreen

Scientific Names

Sapindaceae >

Blighia >

K.D.Koenig >

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Blighia is a genus of four species of flowering plants in the soapberry family, Sapindaceae, native to tropical Africa from Guinea east to Kenya. The fruit is partly edible, with the Ackee (B. sapida) being grown commercially for fruit production. The genus is named for Captain William Bligh (formerly of the HMS Bounty), who brought samples back to England.

The species are evergreen trees growing to 10–20 m tall, with pinnate leaves. The flowers are produced in small panicles. The fruit is an oval capsule 4–8 cm long containing three seeds, each surrounded by an edible fleshy yellow aril, and a thick, leathery orange or red skin; the fruit apart from the aril is very poisonous.

Read about Blighia in the Standard Cyclopedia of Horticulture

Blighia (W. Bligh, British mariner, who wrote on a journey in the South Seas, 1792). Sapindaceae. Trees and shrubs with pinnately compound Lvs. and axillary, racemose fls.; differs from Cupania in having a deeply cut calyx (rather than separate sepals) with the parts only slightly imbricate, and also in the fr.—One species in Guinea, now naturalized in the W. Indies, and yielding the akee, a 3-parted fr. with edible red aril that is much improved by cooking. The fls. are so fragrant as to deserve distilling. The tree reaches a height of 30 ft., and is cult. in Jamaica to an altitude of only 3,000 ft., but can endure slight frost. It is also cult, in S. Fla. 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 It may be out of date, but still contains valuable and interesting information which can be incorporated into the remainder of the article.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.

Species

Selected species

• Blighia sapida - Ackee
• Blighia unijugata
• Blighia welwitschii

Gallery

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References

• Standard Cyclopedia of Horticulture, by L. H. Bailey, MacMillan Co., 1963

External links

• w:Blighia. Some of the material on this page may be from Wikipedia, under the Creative Commons license.
• Blighia QR Code (Size 50, 100, 200, 500)