Clerodendrum infortunatum
Clerodendrum infortunatum, known as bhat or hill glory bower, is a perennial shrub belonging to the family Lamiaceae, also sometimes classified under Verbenaceae. It is the type species among ~150 species of Clerodendrum. It is one of the most well-known natural health remedies in traditional practices and siddha medicine.
The species is native to tropical regions of Asia including Bangladesh, India, Myanmar, Pakistan, Thailand, Malaysia, the Andaman Islands, and Sri Lanka.
Description
Clerodendrum infortunatum is a flowering shrub or small tree, and is so named because of its rather ugly leaf. The stem is erect, high, with no branches, and produces circular leaves with diameter. Leaves are simple, opposite; both surfaces sparsely villous-pubescent, elliptic, broadly elliptic, ovate or elongate ovate, wide, long, dentate, inflorescence in the terminal, peduncled, few-flowered cyme; flowers white with purplish pink or dull-purple throat, pubescent. Fruit berry, globose, turned bluish-black or black when ripe, enclosed in the red accrescent fruiting-calyx. The stem is hollow, and the leaves are long and borne in whorls of four on very short petioles. The inflorescence is huge, consisting of many tubular snow white flowers in a terminal cluster up to long. The tubes of the flowers are about long and droop downward, and the expanded corollas are about across.The fruits are attractive dark metallic blue drupes, about in diameter. The fruit usually has four dry nutlets, and the seeds may have or may not have endosperm. It flowers from April to August.