Patabea was described fby Aublet or one Rubiaceae species from French Guiana, and diagnosed by somewhat general conditions in Rubiaceae. Of these, the most diagnostic are four-merous flowers, acute corolla lobes, acute stipules, capitate inflorescences with small bracts, a red corolla, and two stigmas. The fruit was unknown to Aublet, but later his species was determined at some point to have drupaceous fruits. Aublet's species, Patabea coccinea, in our taxonomy belongs to Ixora, which has convolute corolla lobes and lacks raphides in the tissues.
The drupaceous fruits with one seed per pyrenes put Patabea in a group of Rubiaceae genera with such fruits that were variously differentiated and circumscribed by later authors, and which in many cases comprised a heterogeneous group of species for much of the 19th century. Later authors in the first part of the 19th century then expanded the circumscription of Patabea to include species with five-merous flowers, valvate corolla lobes, and raphides in the tissues.Patabea was recognized and expanded in particular by Candolle (1830), with several species, and he considered it related to Geophila and some other genera of Palicoureeae, not Ixora. Patabea appears not to have been treated by Richard in his Rubiaceae monograph. He did not have complete material of some of these species, so he did not see flowers or fruits of some of them. Several of his Patabea species were included in this genus only provisionally.
By the mid-19th century most of the species included in Patabea were not closely related to Ixora, but belonged to Palicourea. This was then generally considered the identity of this genus by Hooker (1973), who synonymized Patabea with his Psychotria ser. Capitatae, which corresponds to an as-yet unstudied section of today's Palicourea (Taylor, in prep.). Mueller (1881) differed from Hooker and synonymized Patabea with his Mapouria, which corresponds to today's Psychotria s. str., even though the species of Patabea from Brazil were all included in his "Psychotria", which corresponds to today's Palicourea.
Author: C.M. Taylor
The content of this web page was last revised on 22 July 2020.
Taylor web page: http://www.mobot.org/MOBOT/Research/curators/taylor.shtml