The following blog was written by Linde Hess a digitiser in the Herbarium.
Since 2021 we have increased our digitisation capacity with the goal of getting to 1 million specimens imaged by Autumn 2024. Each digitiser is assigned a family of plants to work through. This series of blogs will spotlight the families that have been completed by a member of the team.
Ochnaceae
Ochnaceae is a family of flowering plants in the order Malpighiales and encompasses what some taxonomists have treated as the separate families Medusagynaceae and Quiinaceae. In the herbarium at Edinburgh we currently still recognise these as three seperate families.
In recent classification systems the Quiinaceae and Medusagynaceae families have been included in the Ochnaceae family. World Flora Online treats Medusagynoideae Reveal, Ochnoideae Burnett and Quiinoideae Luerss as subfamilies within Ochnaceae.
There are plant families that take up several aisles in our herbarium; but Ochnaceae only takes up five cabinets while the other two families described in this blog take up only half a shelf each.
Some uses of this family include the leaves of Cespedesia being used for roofing, as they are sometimes to 1 m (3.3 ft) in length and there is a herbal tea made from the pantropical weed Sauvagesia erecta.
Ochnaceae is a pantropical family with 30 genera and c.500 species. It is common in the Americas, Africa and Asia, rarely extending to sup-tropical regions and almost absent from temperate regions.
Our collections
Prior to the digitisation of the family we had 472 specimens of Ochnaceae in the collection, after digitisation this increased to 1,002. There are 64 type specimens in the collection.
Specimens of Ochnaceae can be viewed in our online catalogue here.
Top 5 Genera
| No. of Specimens | Genus |
| 242 | Ochna |
| 216 | Ouratea |
| 161 | Campylospermum |
| 128 | Sauvagesia |
| 80 | Gomphia |
Top 5 regions
| No. of Specimens | Herbarium Filing Region |
| 6,977 | East Tropical South America |
| 3,997 | Tropical Africa |
| 3,513 | Malay Islands |
| 3,022 | India, Bangladesh & Pakistan |
| 2,675 | South Africa |
Quiinaceae
The Quiinaceae comprise four genera (Froesia, Lacunaria, Quiina, Touroulia) and 46 species of trees and shrubs native to the Neotropics, mainly of the humid Amazon lowland rainforests. Recent classification systems have included Quiinaceae in the Ochnaceae family.
Our holdings of Quiinaceae are small, with only 22 specimens in the collection. These are all from Central and Southern America.
Specimens of Quiinaceae can be viewed here.
Medusagynaceae
The Medusagynaceae family is monogeneric, containing only the genus Medusagyne (Baker). The native range of this genus is the Seychelles. In current classification systems Medusagynaceae is include in the Ochnaceae family.
Our holdings of Medusagynaceae are also small, with only 7 specimens in the collection.
Specimens of Medusagynaceae can be viewed here.
