''Lobelia anceps'', commonly known as angled lobelia, is a small herbaceous plant in the family ''

Campanulaceae The family Campanulaceae (also bellflower family), of the order Asterales, contains nearly 2400 species in 84 genera of herbaceous plants, shrubs, and rarely small trees, often with milky sap. Among them are several familiar garden plants belon ...

'' it grows in several states of Australia, New Zealand, South America and South Africa. It is a small, perennial herb with blue to purple flowers.

Description

''Lobelia anceps'' is a prostrate to ascending, glabrous, perennial herb typically growing to a height of , occasionally branches rooting at nodes. The leaves are variable, angled or more or less winged, linear-elliptic, oblong to oval spoon-shaped, long, wide, toothed or smooth, and often red to purplish at the base and the petiole long. The blue, purple or occasionally white flowers are borne singly in leaf axils on a

pedicel Pedicle or pedicel may refer to: Human anatomy *Pedicle of vertebral arch, the segment between the transverse process and the vertebral body, and is often used as a radiographic marker and entry point in vertebroplasty and kyphoplasty procedures ...

long. The corolla usually long, the two upper petals narrower than the three lower petals. Flowering occurs mostly in summer and autumn and the fruit is a conical shaped capsule covered in soft, upright hairs or smooth, long and in diameter.

Taxonomy and naming

''Lobelia anceps'' was first formally described in 1782 by

Carl Linnaeus Carl Linnaeus (; 23 May 1707 – 10 January 1778), also known after his ennoblement in 1761 as Carl von Linné Blunt (2004), p. 171. (), was a Swedish botanist, zoologist, taxonomist, and physician who formalised binomial nomenclature, the ...

and the description was published in ''

Supplementum Plantarum ', commonly abbreviated to ' or just ', and further abbreviated by botanists to ''Suppl. Pl.'', is a 1782 book by Carolus Linnaeus the Younger. Written entirely in Latin, it was intended as a supplement to the 1737 ' and the 1753 ', both written b ...

''. The

specific epithet In taxonomy, binomial nomenclature ("two-term naming system"), also called nomenclature ("two-name naming system") or binary nomenclature, is a formal system of naming species of living things by giving each a name composed of two parts, bot ...

(''anceps'') means "two-sided, double, flattened", referring to the leaves.

Distribution and habitat

Angled lobelia is found along the banks of pools, creeks and rivers along coastal areas in New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland and South Australia. In Western Australia it grows between the

Mid West The Midwestern United States, also referred to as the Midwest or the American Midwest, is one of four Census Bureau Region, census regions of the United States Census Bureau (also known as "Region 2"). It occupies the northern central part of ...

and Goldfields-Esperance regions of Western Australia in sandy-peat-clay soils over

granite Granite () is a coarse-grained (phaneritic) intrusive igneous rock composed mostly of quartz, alkali feldspar, and plagioclase. It forms from magma with a high content of silica and alkali metal oxides that slowly cools and solidifies undergro ...

or limestone.

References

{{Taxonbar, from=Q15601396

anceps In languages with quantitative poetic metres, such as Ancient Greek, Latin, Arabic, Sanskrit, and classical Persian, an anceps (plural ''ancipitia'' or ''(syllabae) ancipites'') is a position in a metrical pattern which can be filled by either a lo ...

Flora of Western Australia Plants described in 1782 Flora of Queensland Flora of Tasmania Flora of Victoria (state) Flora of New South Wales