Question

Which plant is described by these clues? Held up to the light, every {leaflet} is stippled with translucent pinprick dots, each one a reservoir of volatile oil sunk in the blade. Five white petals spread above exactly ten {stamens} set in an outer and an inner rank of five, and the small green {ovary} stands free on a glistening ring of {nectary} tissue. The genus name, published in 1823 in a great Humboldt-era flora of the New World, honours a Swiss botanist who was also professor of philosophy at Geneva and died in 1859. The species epithet is simply Latin for “in threes”, and one glance at a leaf explains the choice. Leaves are carried in opposing pairs, each cut to the base into three broad {leaflets} 1 to 3 inches (2.5 to 7.5 cm) long that radiate from a single point. It belongs to a small genus of about five species scattered from the mountains of central and southern Mexico north into Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. The fruit is an inconspicuous leathery {capsule} that dries brown and splits into two to six sections. In the wild it is a Mexican plant recorded from San Luis Potosi, Puebla and Oaxaca, though nearly every specimen a gardener meets is nursery raised. Flowers about 1 to 1.25 inches (2.5 to 3 cm) across open in small {corymbs} of three to six from the leaf {axils}, mainly in late spring and often again in autumn. Crush a leaf and the scent is pungent and orange-peel sharp, a smell some gardeners enjoy and others compare to furniture polish. Chemists working on its essential oil isolated an anthranilate they named after the plant itself, and it damped both pain responses and inflammation in laboratory rodents. Gardeners buy this dense {evergreen} for white spring blossom that smells like an orange grove, and its common name credits the Latin American country it came from.

Accepted Answer

Choisya ternata 'Sundance'

Name That Plant #124