吉贝属 ji bei shu

Chorisia Kunth; Eriodendron Candolle.

Trees, deciduous; trunk swollen and/or buttressed, trunk and branches usually spiny. Petiole long; leaf blade palmately compound; leaflets 3-5(-9), shortly petiolulate, both surfaces glabrous, abaxially gray-white, base attenuate, margin serrate or entire. Flowers blooming before or simultaneously with leaf flush, solitary or 2-15-fascicled, pendulous, axillary or subterminal, actinomorphic, rarely zygomorphic. Calyx campanulate, truncate or irregularly 3-5(-12)-lobed, thickly fleshy, persistent. Petals 5, pink or yellow-white, connate at base and coherent to staminal tube, falling with stamens and style. Stamens (3-)5-15; filament tube short, sometimes thickened or with sterile appendages, free parts of filament long to absent, each bearing 2(or 3) straight to strongly twisted thecae. Ovary syncarpous, 5-locular; ovules many per cell; style filiform; stigma capitate to lobulate. Capsule oblong or nearly obovate, pendulous, woody or leathery, loculicidally dehiscent into 5(or 6) valves, inner walls densely woolly. Seeds many, enclosed in wool.

Seventeen species: W Africa (one species) and tropical America (16 species); one species (introduced) in China.

Lower Taxon

• Ceiba pentandra (Linnaeus) Gaertner