Canna edulis

''Canna indica'', commonly known as Indian shot, African arrowroot, edible canna, purple arrowroot, Sierra Leone arrowroot, is a plant species in the family Cannaceae. It is native to much of South America, Central America, the West Indies, and Mexico. It is also naturalized in the southeastern United States (Florida, Texas, Louisiana, and South Carolina), and much of Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and Oceania. ''Canna indica'' (achira in Hispanic America, cana-da-índia in Brazil) has been a minor food crop cultivated by indigenous peoples of the Americas for thousands of years.

Description

''Canna indica'' is a perennial growing to between , depending on the variety. It is hardy to zone 10 and is frost tender. The flowers are hermaphrodite.Chaté, E. (1867) Le Canna, son histoire, son culture. Libraire Centrale d'Agriculture et de Jardinage. Khoshoo, T.N. & Guha, I. - Origin and Evolution of Cultivated Cannas. Vikas Publishing House.Cooke, Ian, 2001. The Gardener's Guide to Growing cannas, Timber Press.

It forms branched rhizomes long that are divided into bulbous segments and covered in two lines by pale green or purple flaky leaves. The very large grains of starch stored there can supposedly be seen with the naked eye. The plants form an upright, unbranched stem or the overlapping leaf sheaths form a pseudo trunk.

The alternate and spiral or two-line arranged, very large, simple leaves are divided into leaf sheaths, short petioles and leaf blades. The leaf blade has a length of and a width of . The parallel leaf veins arise from the midrib (not typical of monocots). The leaves are broad, green or violet green, with petiolesshort and elliptical sheets, which can measure 30 to 60 cm long and 10 to 25 cm wide, with the base obtuse or narrowly cuneate and the apex is shortly acuminate or sharp. The surface of the rhizome is carved by transverse grooves, which mark the base of scales that cover it; from the lower part white and apex rootlets emerge, where there are numerous buds, the leaves sprout, the floral stem and the stems.

The hermaphrodite, mostly large flowers are zygomorphic and threefold. On pedicels, they are long, red or yellow-orange, except in some cultivars, long, with the sepals being closely triangular, long and the petals erect, 4–6.5 cm long. The tube is 1.5–2 cm long. The bracts are designed differently. The three free sepals are usually green. The three petals are green or have depending on the variety shades of yellow about orange and red to pink. The base of the petals is fused with the staminodien to a stamen column. There are two circles, each with originally three stamens present. The petals and staminodes are usually yellow to red. The three carpels are at a constant under (syncarp) ovary adherent which has a soft-spiky surface and many central angle constant ovules contains. The pollen is deposited on the abaxial (off-axis) surface of the stylus.

The pollination mechanism is very specialised and the pollination is done by insects. The insects pick up the pollen from the flattened style. In their homeland, the bloom by humming pollinated. There they bloom in the months of August to October. The fruits are ellipsoid capsules to globose, warty, 1.5 to 3 cm long, chestnut coloured, with a large amount of black and very hard seeds.

The seeds are small, globular, black pellets, hard and dense enough to sink in water. They resemble shotgun pellets giving rise to the plant's common name of Indian shot.Seeds fired from a shotgun
BBC, 9 February 2012. Retrieved 27 August 2012. The seeds are hard enough to shoot through wood and still survive and later germinate. According to the BBC
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