2024 Author: Gavin MacAdam | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:38
The flora of the tropics is rich. Favorable living conditions attract to these lands not only powerful palms, exotic fruit trees, but also many different herbaceous plants and lianas. One of the herbaceous tropical lianas is Clitoria trifoliate, which I met on the Thai island of Phangan. Fans of the picturesque plant grow Clitoria trifoliate in areas with cold winters, giving it a place in greenhouses, indoors, or using liana as an annual plant
Species Latin epithet of the plant
Thin shoots of a herbaceous evergreen liana quickly increase their length, rushing closer to the sun. They cling to the turned up support, rising to a height of three and a half meters. If the gardener wishes to turn the vine into a shrub, the shoots are shortened. Some kind of evergreen shrub and met on my way to the beach, drawing my attention to themselves with relatively large bright blue flowers with intricately twisted petals. Having run through the Internet, I determined that this tropical plant is called "Clitoria trifoliate". In Latin, which is the official language of botany science, the name of the picturesque plant is “Clitoria ternatea”.
If you look closely at the plant's specific epithet - "ternatea", then its some similarity with the Latin word "terni", meaning "for three", gave an incorrect translation of the epithet into Russian. Botanists assigned this epithet to one of the seventy species of plants of the genus Klitoria not at all because of the "triad" parts of the plant, but because of the name of the island on which they first met such a plant. It was one of the islands of the Maluku archipelago called Ternate. The fame of the island in the 16th century was brought by the spice "cloves", for the production of which the island was one of the world's main producers.
Clitoria trifoliate - the healer of the soil
It turned out that this plant is attractive not only for its appearance, but is also actively used by humans. Being a representative of plants of the legume family, Clitoria trifoliate is able to fix atmospheric nitrogen, increasing the nutritional quality of the soil. It is a pity that the climate of Kuzbass does not allow the use of the trifoliate Clitoria, which can quickly heal the "wounds" of the earth, for land reclamation at the site of worked-out coal mines, as is done in warm Australia.
The use of the Clitoria trifoliate for cooking and household purposes
In Thailand and other Southeast Asian countries, the vivid blue of herbaceous liana flowers is used in the production of food colors. A friend of mine once brought blue rice, advertising it as a healthy food product. I was surprised at blue rice, considering that this is how it grows in nature. But it turned out that this is the usual white rice, colored with the blue flowers of Clitoria trifoliate. Out of the habit of washing the cereals before cooking, I tried to "wash the dust" off the blue rice. The water turned blue, and after the second portion of water the rice noticeably lost its blue. Not only rice is dyed, but also jelly, toilet soap, and fabrics. Dried flower petals are used as tea leaves.
Clitoria trifoliate - the healer of the human body
In the twenty-first century, full of everyday anxieties and stresses, the roots of Clitoria trifoli are used by traditional healers as an antidepressant; getting rid of chronic fatigue; insomnia medications. Traditional healers use the plant to improve blood circulation in the brain, which in turn strengthens human memory. The extract from the roots of the tropical beauty helps fight the Borde-Zhangu bacteria, which cause the disease called whooping cough.
Decorativeness of the Clitoria trifoliate
The demand for Clitoria triple by landscape designers and ordinary lovers of plant beauty is the merit of spectacular blue flowers. As for the leaves of the plant, they are rather simple feathery green leaves, consisting of whole elliptical leaves. The number of leaves on one leaf varies from three to seven, but most often leaves with five oval evergreen leaves are found, as in the following photo:
At the end of the article, another not very clear photo, the flower in which has a slightly different appearance than in the previous photos:
Recommended:
Hibiscus Trifoliate
Hibiscus trifoliate is one of the plants of the family called mallow, in Latin the name of this plant will sound as follows: Hibiscus trionum L. (H. ternatus Cav.). As for the very name of the trifoliate hibiscus family, in Latin it will be like this:
