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Support the Flora of the Southeastern US

2024 has been a banner year for making the best flora we can imagine. We've created:
With financial support from people like you, we are aiming even higher in 2025. Together we can accomplish all this: Vote on our 2025 priorities
  • Add Global Conservation Ranks (GRanks) vote
  • Professional graphic keys (polyclaves) to individual families/genera vote
  • 2 new FloraQuest apps: Florida & Mid-South vote
  • Image overlays highlighting diagnostic characters with arrows vote
  • iNaturalist integration in FloraQuest vote
Write-in vote: vote
We've set a goal of recruiting 200 ongoing supporters to donate $15 or more each month in 2025. Please help us reach this goal and make next year's flora even better:
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Click the number at the start of a key lead to highlight both that lead and its corresponding lead. Click again to show only the two highlighted leads. Click a third time to return to the full key with the selected leads still highlighted.

Key to Heliotropium

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1 Plant a shrub or woody vine (liana); fruits drupes, white to yellowish green, initially fleshy; [section Tournefortia].
  2 Shrub, densely branched, the stems with living leaves densely clustered near the stem tips, with dead leaves clothing the stem below; leaves linear-spatulate, 4-8 cm long, 0.5-1.0 cm wide, sessile, crowded on the twigs, densely silky tomentose, silvery-gray
  2 Shrub, scrambling shrub, or liana, sparingly branched, leaves widely spaced; leaves ovate, 5-20 cm long, 3-9 cm wide, not crowded, nearly glabrous to scabrous and soft-pubescent, green.
    3 Leaves nearly glabrous; [rare exotic]
    3 Leaves scabrous-hirsute above, densely soft-pubescent below; [rare native]
1 Plant an herb; fruits of 2 2-seeded mericarps.
      4 Leaves glabrous, succulent, 4-7 (-10) mm wide, the lateral veins not obvious; [of saline coastal situations, sometimes inland west of the Mississippi River in LA, AR, OK, and TX]; [section Platygyne]
      4 Leaves pubescent, not succulent, 4-60 (-100) mm wide, the midvein and lateral veins obvious, rugose-impressed; [of a variety of mostly inland situations].
        5 Leaves sessile to subsessile, 0.4-2 cm wide, strongly undulate-margined; corolla purplish with a yellow eye; [section Heliotrophytum]
        5 Leaves with petioles 0.5-8 cm long, 1-6 (-10 cm wide, either undulate-margined or not; corolla white, blue or violet.
          6 Petioles 2-8 cm long, winged; leaves 2-6 (-10) cm wide, the margins often undulate; corolla blue or violet (rarely white); [section Tiaridium]
          6 Petioles 0.5-1.5 cm long, not winged; leaves 1-3.5 (-5) cm wide, the margins plane; corolla white.
             7 Leaf blades 2-10 (-12) cm long, 2-4× as long as wide, acute to acuminate; corolla 2-3 mm long, bearded in the throat; [section Schobera]
             7 Leaf blades 1.5-4 cm long, 1.5-2.5× as long as wide, obtuse to broadly acute; corolla 4-5 mm long, glabrous in the throat; [section Heliotropium]