tabernæ

Plural of taberna. Tabernæmontana (tā-bėr"nē-mon-tāʼnä), n. [NL., named after Jacobus The odor us Taber næmontan us, a German physician and botanist (died 1590).] A genus of gamopetalous plants, of the order Apocynaceæ and tribe Plumericæ, type of the subtribe Tabernæmontaneæ. It is characterized by cymose flowers, a calyx furnished at the base of its five lobes with a continuous or interrupted ring of glands, and a fruit of two many-seeded berries or fleshy follicles which are large and globose or smaller and oblique or recurved. There are about 150 species, widely scattered through tropical regions. They are trees or shrubs, commonly smooth, bearing opposite thin or coriaceous feather-veined leaves. The small cymes of white or yellowish salver-shaped flowers are terminal or variously placed, but not truly axillary. The smooth or three ribbed pulpy fruit contains several or many ovoid or oblong seeds with fleshy albumen: in several species it is ornamental - in T. macrocarpa and others of the section Rejoua, mainly of the Malay archipelago, resembling a reddish orange in appearance. Instead of the acrid, drastic, and poisonous milky juice of most related genera, many species of Tabernæmontana secrete a bland and wholesome fluid, sometimes useful as a nourishing drink, as in T. utilis, the cow-tree or hya-hya of British Guiana, which yields a thick, sweet, white liquid, made somewhat sticky by the presence of caoutchouc. This species also yields a soft white wood and a medicinal bark. T. orien talis, the Queensland cow-tree, and T. coronaria, known as Adam's apple or East Indian rose- bay, are sometimes cultivated, forming small evergreen trees, the latter under gla and also naturalized in tropical Asia from the Cape of Good Hope. Several other species are cultivated under gla for their large fragrant flowers and ornamental deep green leathery leaves. T. cra a, the kpokpoka-tree of Sierra Leone, produces a fiber there made into a cloth known as dodo - cloth. A species in Ceylon, known as divi ladner, probably T. dichotoma, has been called forbidden fruit, from its beautiful but poisonous fruit bearing marks fancied to be the prints of the teeth of Eve.