The open plant encyclopedia
Snap a photo or search by any name to see how to care for it, where it comes from, whether it's safe, and a 3D model you can turn.
The plants people record most in your country, and ones that grow there wild.
Filter by what you want to do, shape, origin, country, care and safety.
Esenbeckia runyonii is a species of flowering tree in the citrus family, Rutaceae, that is native to northeastern Mexico, with a small, disjunct population in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas in the United States. Common names include Limoncillo and Runyon's Esenbeckia. The specific epithet honors Robert Runyon, a botanist and photographer from Brownsville, Texas, who collected the type specimen from a stand of four trees discovered by Harvey Stiles on the banks of Resaca del Rancho Viejo, Texas, in 1929. Conrad Vernon Morton of the Smithsonian Institution received the plant material and formally described the species in 1930. Some consider it a synonym of E. berlandieri Baill. ex Hemsl..
The vast majority of E. runyonii trees occur in Nuevo León, Tamaulipas, San Luis Potosí and northwestern Hidalgo in northeastern Mexico. It is relatively common on scree slopes in deep, protected canyons at elevations of 2,000–3,000 ft (610–910 m) in the Sierra Madre Oriental, but can also be found in the ecotones between Tamaulipan matorral and forested canyons. A few individuals exist in the Tamaulipan mezquital along resacas in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas in the United States. It is possible that this disjunct population arose from seeds dispersed by flooding of the Rio Grande's drainage basin in the Sierra Madre Oriental.
Post-sized branch cuttings from Limoncillo are planted in the ground during the dry season by farmers in Mexico. Eventually these will take root, forming living fences. Showy foliage and blooms make it an attractive ornamental.
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Esenbeckia runyonii by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts are shared under the same licence.
Life form, climate and native range: World Checklist of Vascular Plants, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (CC BY 3.0), reformatted; see Plants of the World Online.
