''Zanthoxylum undulatifolium'' (from Latin ''undulati'', meaning wavy and ''folium'', meaning leaf. Chinese: 浪葉花椒, meaning "wavy-leaved prickly ash") is a woody plant from the Rutaceae family. It is native to western Hubei, eastern Sichuan,

Taibai Mountain Mount Taibai () is a mountain located on the border between Mei, Taibai and Zhouzhi counties in the south west of Shaanxi Province, China. The mount's highest point, Baxian Tower (), rises to a height of and is the tallest in the Qinling Range, ...

in southern Shaanxi to the Three Gorges of the Yangtze River in

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...

Description

Small arbor, about 3 meters high. New branches and leaf shafts have sporadic short thorns or no thorns, and brown rust-colored

puberulent Trichomes (); ) are fine outgrowths or appendages on plants, algae, lichens, and certain protists. They are of diverse structure and function. Examples are hairs, glandular hairs, scales, and papillae. A covering of any kind of hair on a plant ...

hairs. The leaves have 3-5 leaflets; which are ovate or ovate- lanceolate, 3-8 cm long, 1.5-3.5 cm wide, sparsely larger, short or acuminate at the top, and broadly wedge-shaped or nearly at the base. Their leaf margin is round and wavy, with blunt or round cracked teeth, 1 oil spot at the tooth gap, sporadic spots or none in the rest, visible only under a

magnifying glass A magnifying glass is a convex lens that is used to produce a magnified image of an object. The lens is usually mounted in a frame with a handle. A magnifying glass can be used to focus light, such as to concentrate the sun's radiation to crea ...

. The midrib is flat on the leaf surface, and the side veins are 6–10 on each side. The leaf is slender and branched near the leaf margin and extended to the crack tooth gap to join the oil spots. The back of the leaf is glabrous, while the leaf surface has loose puberulent hairs. The leaflet at the top of the leaf shaft is the largest and has a length of 6-10 mm. The small leaf stalks, the other leaf shafts on the two sides of the leaflets are sessile, the leaflets are opposite, reddish brown after drying. The

cymes An inflorescence is a group or cluster of flowers arranged on a stem that is composed of a main branch or a complicated arrangement of branches. Morphologically, it is the modified part of the shoot of seed plants where flowers are formed on ...

are terminal corymbose with 5-8 tepals. Its fruit stalks and lobes are reddish-brown, stalks are 7-14 mm long, 3-5 stalks are clustered on the top of the same total stalk; the diameter of a single stalk is about 5 mm, the top is almost without awns, the oil spot is large, and it is concave. The seed diameter is about 4 mm. The flowering period is from April to May, and the fruiting period from August to October.

Habitat

It can be found in mountain forests or vegetation shrubs at an altitude of 1600-2300 meters.

References

{{Rutaceae-stub undulatifolium Articles with 'species' microformats