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Snot Berry
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Snot Berry
P Native Photo: S. Kasim
Common name: Snot Berry, Sandpaper saucer-berry • Malayalam: Virimaram, Mookattakkai, Mookalapazham, Pasakaimaram
Botanical name: Cordia monoica    Family: Boraginaceae (Forget-me-not family)
Synonyms: Cordia dioica, Cordia rubra, Cordia diversa, Cordia bakeri

Snot Berry is a shrub or a small, multi-stemmed tree. Leaves are alternately arranged, broadly obovate-oblong to almost circular, very rough on the upper surface, covered in soft rusty hairs below; margin entire or slightly toothed. Flowers are white, cream or pale yellow in dense at branch-ends heads; petals distinctly curved back; sepals and stalks covered in yellowish hairs. Sepal tube is 8 mm, obconic, densely woolly outside, hairless inside, unevenly 3-4 lobed, sepals 5 mm, triangular. Flowers are funnel shaped, with 4-5 petals, longer than the tube, oblong, stamens 4-5; filaments attached to the mouth of flower tube, 3 mm, hairless; anthers 1.5 mm; ovary superior, 4-celled, hairy, ovule one in each cell; stigma club-shaped. Fruit is a drupe, 2.5 x 1.5 cm, yellow, ovoid with a mucronate tip, fulvous-velvet-hairy; stone 4-celled; seed one. Snot Berry is found in Peninsular India, Sri Lanka and Africa.

Identification credit: S. Kasim Photographed in Thiruvalam, Vellore Distt, Tamil Nadu.

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