Lycium pallidum

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Lycium pallidum
Lycium pallidum 4.jpg
Status TNC G5.svg
Secure  (NatureServe)
Scientific classification OOjs UI icon edit-ltr.svg
Kingdom: Plantae
Clade: Tracheophytes
Clade: Angiosperms
Clade: Eudicots
Clade: Asterids
Order: Solanales
Family: Solanaceae
Genus: Lycium
Species:
L. pallidum
Binomial name
Lycium pallidum

Lycium pallidum is a species of flowering plant in the nightshade family known by the common names pale wolfberry and pale desert-thorn. It is native to northern Mexico and the southwestern United States. In Mexico it can be found in Sonora, Chihuahua, Zacatecas, and San Luis Potosi. In the United States it occurs from California to Texas and as far north as Utah and Colorado. [1]

Contents

Description

This shrub grows 1–3 metres (3 ft 3 in – 9 ft 10 in) tall. It is a dense tangle of spiny spreading or erect branches. It can form bushy thickets. [1] The leaves are pale, giving the plant its name. [2] The flowers are solitary or borne in pairs. They are funnel-shaped and "creamy-yellow to yellowish-green" or "greenish cream, sometimes tinged with purple". [2] They are fragrant and pollinated by insects. [2] The fruit is a juicy, oval-shaped, shiny red berry containing up to 50 seeds. The plant reproduces by seed and it can also spread via cuttings, and by suckering and layering. [1]

Ecology and habitat

This plant grows in many types of desert habitat. It occurs in pinyon-juniper woodland, sagebrush, shrubsteppe, savanna, and other ecosystems. It can grow in high-salinity soils. It is characteristic of the flora of the Mojave Desert, and it also occurs in the Sonoran and Chihuahuan Deserts. In the Mojave Desert it grows alongside plants such as winterfat (Krascheninnikovia lanata), Pima rhatany (Krameria erecta), spiny hopsage (Grayia spinosa), Shockley goldenhead (Acamptopappus shockleyi), Frémont's dalea (Psorothamnus fremontii), spiny menodora (Menodora spinescens), and species of ephedra, prickly pear, and yucca. In Arizona it grows in riparian habitat with sycamore (Platanus wrightii), willows (Salix spp.), Arizona walnut (Juglans major), Fremont cottonwood (Populus fremontii), alligator juniper (Juniperus deppeana), Arizona white oak (Quercus arizonica), and velvet ash (Fraxinus velutina). [1] This plant is common around Anasazi ruins; they may have simply collected it and dropped the seeds, but it is possible they cultivated it. [2]

Many types of animals consume the fruits. Phainopepla especially favor it. Woodrats like the foliage. [1]

Uses

Native Americans utilized the plant for a number of medicinal and other purposes. [3] The Navajo used it for toothache. They considered it a sacred plant and sacrificed it to the gods. Several groups used the fruit for food by eating it fresh, cooked, or dried, eating it mixed with clay, boiling it into a syrup, and making it into beverages. [3] Among the Zuni people, the berries are eaten raw when perfectly ripe or boiled and sometimes sweetened. [4] The ground leaves, twigs, and flowers were given to warriors for protection during war. [5]

Related Research Articles

<i>Lycium</i> Genus of flowering plants

Lycium is a genus of flowering plants in the nightshade family, Solanaceae. The genus has a disjunct distribution around the globe, with species occurring on most continents in temperate and subtropical regions. South America has the most species, followed by North America and southern Africa. There are several scattered across Europe and Asia, and one is native to Australia. Common English names for plants of this genus include box-thorn, wolfberry, and desert-thorn. There are about 70 to 80 species.

<i>Eriogonum fasciculatum</i> Species of flowering shrub

Eriogonum fasciculatum is a species of wild buckwheat known by the common names California buckwheat and flat-topped buckwheat. Characterized by small, white and pink flower clusters that give off a cottony effect, this species grows variably from a patchy mat to a wide shrub, with the flowers turning a rusty color after blooming. This plant is of great benefit across its various habitats, providing an important food resource for a diversity of insect and mammal species. It also provides numerous ecosystem services for humans, including erosion control, post-fire mitigation, increases in crop yields when planted in hedgerows, and high habitat restoration value.

<i>Rhus trilobata</i> Species of shrub

Rhus trilobata is a shrub in the sumac genus (Rhus) with the common names skunkbush sumac, sourberry, skunkbush, and three-leaf sumac. It is native to the western half of Canada and the Western United States, from the Great Plains to California and south through Arizona extending into northern Mexico. It can be found from deserts to mountain peaks up to about 7,000 feet (2,100 m) in elevation.

<i>Juniperus monosperma</i> Species of conifer

Juniperus monosperma is a species of juniper native to western North America, in the United States in Arizona, New Mexico, southern Colorado, western Oklahoma (Panhandle), and western Texas, and in Mexico in the extreme north of Chihuahua. It grows at 970–2300 m altitude.

<i>Lycium andersonii</i> Species of flowering plant

Lycium andersonii is a species of flowering plant in the nightshade family, Solanaceae. Its common names include water-jacket, redberry desert-thorn, Anderson thornbush, Anderson's desert thorn, Anderson boxthorn, Anderson lycium, Anderson wolfberry, and squawberry.

<i>Berberis fremontii</i> Berry and plant

Berberis fremontii is a species of barberry known by the common name Frémont's mahonia.

<i>Dimorphocarpa wislizeni</i> Species of flowering plant

Dimorphocarpa wislizeni, commonly known as spectacle pod, Wislizeni's spectaclepod, and touristplant, is a flowering plant in the mustard family native to western North America, where it occurs in the southwestern United States as far east as Oklahoma and Texas, and Baja California, Sonora, Chihuahua, and Coahuila in Mexico.

<i>Lupinus flavoculatus</i> Species of legume

Lupinus flavoculatus is a species of lupine known by the common name yelloweyes, or yellow-eyed lupine.

<i>Lycium fremontii</i> Species of flowering plant

Lycium fremontii is a species of flowering plant in the nightshade family, Solanaceae, that is native to northwestern Mexico and the southernmost mountains and deserts of California and Arizona in the United States. It often grows in areas with alkaline soils, such as alkali flats.

<i>Menodora spinescens</i> Species of flowering plant

Menodora spinescens is a species of flowering plant in the olive family known by the common name spiny menodora. It is native to the southwestern United States, where it grows in varied mountain, canyon, and desert habitat in California, Nevada, Utah and Arizona.

<i>Celtis reticulata</i> Species of tree

Celtis reticulata, with common names including netleaf hackberry, western hackberry, Douglas hackberry, netleaf sugar hackberry, palo blanco, and acibuche, is a small- to medium-sized deciduous tree native to western North America.

<i>Phoradendron juniperinum</i> Species of flowering plant

Phoradendron juniperinum is a species of flowering plant in the sandalwood family known by the common name juniper mistletoe. It is native to the southwestern United States and northern Mexico, where it grows in various types of woodland habitat. It has been reported from California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Texas, Chihuahua and Sonora.

<i>Physalis hederifolia</i> Species of fruit and plant

Physalis hederifolia is a species of flowering plant in the nightshade family known by the common name ivyleaf groundcherry. It is native to the southwestern United States and northern Mexico, where it can be found in rocky, dry desert and mountain habitat. This is a rhizomatous perennial herb producing a hairy, branching stem 10 to 80 centimeters long. The gray-green oval leaves are 2 to 4 centimeters long and have smooth or bluntly toothed edges. The flowers growing from the leaf axils are bell-shaped and just over a centimeter long. They are yellow with five brown smudges in the throats. The five-lobed calyx of sepals at the base of the flower enlarges as the fruit develops, becoming an inflated, veined nearly spherical structure 2 or 3 centimeters long which contains the berry.

<i>Populus fremontii</i> Species of tree

Populus fremontii, commonly known as Frémont's cottonwood, is a cottonwood native to riparian zones of the Southwestern United States and northern through central Mexico. It is one of three species in Populus sect. Aigeiros. The tree was named after 19th-century American explorer and pathfinder John C. Frémont.

<i>Lycium berlandieri</i> Species of flowering plant

Lycium berlandieri is a species of flowering plant in the nightshade family known by the common name Berlandier's wolfberry. It is native to Mexico and the south-western United States from Arizona to Texas.

See also Zuni ethnobotany, and Native American ethnobotany.

This is a list of plants and how they are used in Zuni culture.

<i>Berberis haematocarpa</i> Species of shrub

Berberis haematocarpa, Woot. with the common names red barberry, red Mexican barbery, Colorado barberry and Mexican barberry, is a species in the Barberry family in southwestern North America. It is also sometimes called algerita, but that name is more often applied to its relative, Mahonia trifoliolata.

<i>Syntrichopappus fremontii</i>

Syntrichopappus fremontii, is a small annual plant in the family(Asteraceae. It has yellow flower heads and grows in the Mojave Desert, to Utah and northwestern Arizona.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 Matthews, Robin F. 1994. Lycium pallidum. In: Fire Effects Information System, [Online]. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station, Fire Sciences Laboratory.
  2. 1 2 3 4 Lycium pallidum. International Institute of Tropical Forestry.
  3. 1 2 Lycium pallidum. University of Michigan Ethnobotany.
  4. Stevenson, Matilda Coxe 1915 Ethnobotany of the Zuni Indians. SI-BAE Annual Report #30 (p.68)
  5. Stevenson, p.94