Please try our next iteration of the Michigan Flora Online here. Beginning on February 1, 2023, michiganflora.net will point to this new site.

The new site offers several benefits over the existing website, including real coordinate mapping, giving a clearer view of the density of documentation as well as more precision about plant distributions and their link to landforms. We will also have the ability to update species pages more regularly, both in terms of new collections and as more existing Michigan specimens are georeferenced. In addition, we have a better photo display, and offer indented keys.

The true garden four-o’clock, Mirabilis jalapa L., native to Latin America, rarely escapes from cultivation and apparently has not done so in Michigan. It has a perianth at least 2 cm long and 1-flowered, cup-shaped, herbaceous involucres that do not change in fruit. In our species, the perianth is less than 1.2 cm long and the cup-shaped involucres enlarge, broaden, and become papery as the fruit matures. Occasionally young plants will have only axillary involucres, on slender peduncles, giving them quite a different aspect from larger plants with a ± dense terminal cymose inflorescence.

1. Leaf blades linear, less than 5 mm wide; middle and lower internodes (if not all) glabrous.

M. linearis

1. Leaf blades broader, lance-ovate to deltoid; middle and lower internodes glabrous or pubescent.

2. Middle and lower internodes pubescent, at least in strips; peduncles and involucres with some glandular hairs; blades of principal leaves lance-ovate to lance-oblong, nearly or quite sessile.

M. albida

2. Middle and lower internodes glabrous or nearly so; peduncles and involucres glabrate to pubescent with non-glandular hairs; blades of principal leaves broadly ovate to deltoid, on distinct petioles ± 1 cm or more long.

M. nyctaginea