Taxonomy
Solandra Sw., Kongl. Vetensk. Acad. Nya Handl. 8: 300 (1787); named for Daniel Carl Sonder (1733-1782), Swedish botanist, student of Linnaeus and botanist with Joseph Banks on James Cook's first voyage to the Pacific.
Type species: S. grandiflora Sw.
Scandent shrubs or woody lianes, glabrous or pubescent. Leaves alternate, simple, entire, petiolate, somewhat leathery. Flowers solitary, terminal, bisexual, more or less regular. Calyx with (3)- 5 unequal lobes, not enlarging in fruit. Corolla cup-shaped, yellow; limb 5–lobed, lobes eventually reflexed, imbricate in bud. Stamens 5, sub-equal, inserted on corolla-tube; anthers bilocular, not cohering, basifixed, dehiscing by longitudinal slits. Ovary 4-locular, partly inferior; nectary annular; stigma sub-bilobed. Fruit a conical berry. Seeds disc-shaped or reniform, flattened.
[Description adapted from Green, P.S. (1994). Flora of Australia 49: 303 and Hunziker (2001), The Genera of Solanaceae 354.]
A genus of c. 10 species native to South America. One species originally cultivated and now naturalised in southern Australia.
Changes since the Flora of Australia treatment
This genus was not included in the 1982 Flora of Australia treatment and it has still to be recorded as naturalised in Australia, despite the fact that it is relatively commonly encountered in gardens; it was treated as naturalised on Norfolk Island in the 1994 Flora of Australia treatment of that island's vegetation.
Key to species
Only Solandra maxima is recorded from Australia to this time.