Flora of North America species comparison

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Erythrina herbacea

eastern coral or Cherokee bean, eastern coralbean, red cardinal
Habit Herbs or shrubs, 1–2.5(–5) m; main branches erect or sprawling, new shoots erect or arching, glabrous or minutely puberulent and glabrescent.
Leaflets

thin-herbaceous, blades ovate-acuminate to hastate-ovate, subtrilobed, terminal blade (2–)3–8(–13) × 2–11 cm, base truncate to broadly cuneate.
Inflorescences

of herbaceous forms appearing before or with leafy stems, flowers and leaves usually on separate stems, 20–60(–75)-flowered.
Flowers

calyx tube short-cylindric to obconic, 5–8 mm, apex truncate and unlobed;

corolla banner elliptic-oblong, 3–5 cm, folded and pseudotubular, wings and keel short, slightly protruding from calyx.
Legumes

6–15(–21) cm.
Seeds

(1–)3–6, red to orange-red or orange.

Erythrina herbacea
Phenology Flowering Apr–Jun.
Habitat Thickets, turkey oak wood­lands, longleaf pine savannas, scrub live oak, post oak-hickory-pine, mixed oak-pine, mixed hardwoods, pine-sweetgum-palmetto woodlands, coastal dunes, hammocks, sandy or sandy clay soils.
Elevation 0–100 m. (0–300 ft.)
Distribution
from FNA
AL; AR; FL; GA; LA; MS; NC; OK; SC; TX; Mexico (Tamaulipas)
[WildflowerSearch map]
[BONAP county map]
Discussion

Over most of the range of Erythrina herbacea, the plants are herbaceous perennials with flowers and leaves on separate stems (flowers borne on leafless stems) arising separately from the underground root. In many counties of Florida, as well as Gulf states from Georgia to Texas, flowers and leaves are often borne on the same stem; the flowers usually in a dense to loose raceme and usually distal to the leaves, sometimes axillary. Some of these plants are herbaceous. In southernmost Florida, the stems are usually distinctly woody and perennial with deciduous leaves. J. K. Small (1933) distinguished E. arborea on this basis, noting also that the banner was slightly shorter in E. arborea (35–40 versus 45–50 mm in E. herbacea); these forms are conspecific.

A single white-petaled plant in a population of red-petaled ones from Pinellas County, Florida, has been described (Erythrina herbacea forma albiflora Moffler & Crewz).

Plants of Mexico previously treated as the strictly Mexican Erythrina herbacea subsp. nigrorosea Krukoff & Barneby have been treated as E. nigrorosea (Krukoff & Barneby) G. L. Nesom (G. L. Nesom 2016). They differ from E. herbacea in their pink corollas and black calyces and consistently shrubby habit; E. nigrorosea may be more closely related to the Mexican-Central American E. goldmanii Standley and E. standleyana Krukoff. Erythrina herbacea and E. nigrorosea are sympatric in southern Tamaulipas, Mexico.

(Discussion copyrighted by Flora of North America; reprinted with permission.)
Source FNA vol. 11.
Parent taxa Fabaceae > subfam. Faboideae > Erythrina
Sibling taxa
E. flabelliformis
Synonyms E. arborea, E. herbacea var. arborea
Name authority Linnaeus: Sp. Pl. 2: 706. (1753)
Web links 
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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