Flora of North America species comparison

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Cissus trifoliata

hierba del buey, ivy treebine, marine vine or ivy, sorrell vine, sorrelvine
Habit Lianas, stout, scrambling or sprawling over low vegetation or small trees.
Branches

usually glabrous;

branchlets succulent when young, becoming woody, sometimes rooting at nodes; growing tips usually glabrous;

tendrils unbranched.
Leaves

usually 3-foliolate, sometimes simple;

petiole usually shorter than blade;

blade succulent, broadly ovate to ovate-reniform, 2–8 × 2–7 cm, if simple usually 3-lobed, rarely unlobed, margins coarsely and irregularly toothed, surfaces glabrous;

leaflets (compound leaves) ovate to oblong.
Flowers

greenish, greenish yellow, whitish, or purplish.
Berries

black to blue-black, 6–12 mm diam.

Cissus trifoliata
Phenology Flowering late Apr–Jun; fruiting Aug–Sep.
Habitat Rocky wooded hillsides, stream banks, prairie ravines, glades, bluffs, chaparral, coastal hammocks and dunes, maritime woodlands, shell mounds in salt marshes, roadsides, waste places.
Elevation 0–2000 m. (0–6600 ft.)
Distribution
from FNA
AL; AR; AZ; FL; GA; KS; LA; MO; MS; NM; OK; TX; Mexico; Central America; West Indies; n South America
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[BONAP county map]
Discussion

Many previous authors treated Cissus incisa and C. trifoliata as distinct species, but the characters used to separate them (size of leaflets, branching patterns of cymes, and berry shape) appear to intergrade abundantly, particularly in Florida, where their geographical ranges overlap. It appears that much of the basis for separating these two species is geographical distribution and habitat, with C. trifoliata being chiefly coastal and tropical and C. incisa being chiefly subtropical and temperate continental. Some authors (for example, R. P. Wunderlin 1982; R. K. Godfrey 1988; J. A. Lombardi 2000) therefore have treated C. incisa as a synonym of C. trifoliata, a conclusion that is followed here.

(Discussion copyrighted by Flora of North America; reprinted with permission.)
Source FNA vol. 12, p. 21.
Parent taxa Vitaceae > Cissus
Sibling taxa
C. verticillata
Synonyms Sicyos trifoliatus, C. incisa
Name authority (Linnaeus) Linnaeus: Syst. Nat. ed. 10, 2: 897. (1759) — (as trifoliat)
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Unless otherwise noted, all data comes from the online version of the Flora of North America, who have made most of their content available via a Creative Commons license (CC BY 4.0).



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